Page 153 of Mess With Me

He looked genuinely concerned for me.

But I can’t tell what’s real or fake with him anymore.

“You feel like sharing with the class, honey?” Chester asks.

I laugh softly. “Just family stuff.”

Then guilt twists my gut. Chester doesn’t have family. Not anymore.

All the more reason he should go through his grandfather’s things before it’s too late.

I clear my throat, opening my mouth to tell him I saw the open door, when he speaks first.

“I suppose if I’m not long for this world, I ought to make my confessions now.”

I blink at him in the dark. “You want to see a priest, Chester?”

That makes him hoot again, and despite the fact that he’s laughing at me, I love the sound too much to interrupt.

“A priest wouldn’t know what to do with me,” he says finally, knuckling his eyes. “Nah, to you and Griffin. But seeing as he’s not here, it’ll just have to be to you.”

I angle the chair his way. Behind him, the woods are a black mass, the tops of the trees cut against the starry night sky. Behind me, Griffin’s house is quiet and locked up without me. I feel all alone in the world right now with Chester, but just like when it’s only Griffin and me, it doesn’t feel like it used to. I feel like that one other person is all I need.

And even sometimes, that just being me is okay, too.

Chester taps his fingers on the chair. “I never knew my dad.”

I stop my rocking. “What?”

“I glorified the story a bit when I first met you. ’Cause the real one’s too blue for a ray of sunshine like you.”

“I’ve known my share of clouds, Chester,” I say softly.

I remember what Griffin said that day I met Chester. How he took forever to open up to him. I’m so touched I feel my throat grow thick. But I swallow it down. “I’d be honored to know the truth, Chester.”

“There ain’t much to it. I was born in a motel off the freeway in Northern California. I think I told you my mother was a housekeeper—she was, for the motel. But she didn’t pass with my dad.” He looks down. “I’m sorry I lied to you, Sasha.”

I place a hand on his. It’s trembling slightly. “You don’t have to talk, Chester. If it’s too hard.”

He takes his hand out from under mine and pats the top of mine, then grips his knee.

“Well, I guess if it’s the first and last time I tell someone the truth about it, it ought to be you.”

My heart twists. I keep quiet to let him talk.

“Mama got knocked up by an older man she worked for when she was a teenager. A traveling salesman, she always said.”

“Joseph’s son.”

He looks at me with guilt-stricken eyes, though I’m not sure why. “She didn’t know who he was. Didn’t even know his last name, and he was gone before she knew about her little problem.”

Did he grow up thinking about himself this way?

Chester brings his cigar to his mouth, flapping his bottom lip a few times on it before looking at it like a foreign object. He rests it in his hand on the arm of his chair. “She took care of me best she could, but the boyfriends she found—they didn’t much like her having a little kid around.” He looks down at his arm. It’s covered by his shirtsleeve and coat, but I remember the scarring there from that day by the swimming hole.

“Anyway. I wasn’t a welcome addition to the equation.”

My stomach roils at the thought of what must have made those scars.

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