Page 13 of Guitars and Cages

“You made the mess, you clean it up,” I told him, moving to close the door again.

“It’s not fair!” he declared. “I didn’t mean to break the faucet. I wanted to wash a bowl. You didn’t do dishes and you didn’t make breakfast and all I wanted was a bowl of cereal. Mom always made me breakfast. You don’t ever wanna do anything with me! You just leave me with your smelly girlfriend, and then yell at me when I wake you up!”

I groaned and shoved my fingers through my hair.

“If I don’t work then neither one of us has a place to stay,” I tried to tell him calmly.

“But you don’t gotta work all the time,” he pointed out.

“No, but I gotta sleep.”

“But not all the time.”

“No, not all the time, but some of the time would be nice!” I told him, getting mad now.

“I just wish you’d do something fun with me, like checkers the first day,” he said, pouting and looking sad.

“I take you to the gym.”

“Yeah, but you don’t do anything with me at the gym.”

I groaned, because he had a point, as much as I hated to admit it.

“All right, all right,” I said. “Clean up the mess, let me fix the faucet, and then we’ll find something to do together.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah, I promise, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, picking up the mop.

I closed the bathroom door and rested my head against it. Nothing in the world could have prepared me for dealing with a kid who got mad ’cause he wanted to hang out with me. Seemed like things got more complicated by the minute; go figure.

He was hard at work spreading the mess around the floor when I finished my shower and left to find the fixtures. Let the little demon spawn figure it out, I thought as I walked down the steps, flipping open my new phone and trying to remember how to use it. Okay, maybe that was a little extreme. I could think of a million and one worse things my brothers and I had done when we were that age. I thanked the gods for an understanding mother, and a father who was on the road more than he was home, or standing up at dinner might have been a nightly thing the way he’d take that belt to our asses when we’d done wrong.

For a second upstairs I’d been tempted to take my own belt to the kid for whatever the hell he’d done to the faucet, but I remembered my brother saying that was something he’d never do to his son, and out of respect for his memory, I supposed I couldn’t either, despite how tempting it might be.

Damn, but I did not want to remember that conversation and how it had come about while he was pacing the floor of the hospital waiting for Kimber to be done giving birth to the kid. There’d been so many things he’d talked about doing with his son that our father had never taken the time to do with us, and thinking about that made me wonder if he’d ever had the chance to take the kid fishing or teach him how to set a snare. Maybe while I had him I could take him out of town to go camping or something.

Who the hell was I fooling? I was waiting for a voice on the other end of my phone so I could beg Michael to come back from Japan and take Rory to stay with him.

No voice, just the damned answering machine. So I tried Cole next, and his drunken, rambling response made me both laugh and miss the hell out of him. Kimber was right, no way was he sobering up to do anything helpful. God, I hoped he was being somewhat safe down there. I toyed with the thought of calling Alex, but snapped the phone shut with a groan. Kimber had been right; I was the only one willing to be roped into the responsibility, just as I’d been the only one to show up at the hospital to wait with Chase the night Rory was born. I’d been there, looking through the glass when they wheeled him into the nursery, something I’d not even done the night my own child was born.

So maybe I was trying to make up for it a little, and maybe that’s why I didn’t try as hard as I knew I could to find someone to come take the little pest off my hands. Maybe I saw it as my redemption, as my salvation...as my penance for never once acknowledging the bastard I’d begotten and then left behind. I had no clue where he was now, no way to find him or his mother. I’d never even tried. I’d walked away from that responsibility the same way I’d walked away from so many others over the years. I hadn’t even said goodbye, just got on my bike and roared out of town the same way I’d been doing for years.

I’d wanted freedom, so I’d stolen it at the price of my son. As I walked, I looked at my freedom. I looked at the litter-strewn streets, the run-down tenements, the busted neon Café Loveless sign, and I chuckled as I remembered the way Janis used to sing about freedom. I could see it now. I mean, hell, I got it, because there I was, in the middle of a worthless shithole, with nothing left to lose that actually meant anything and a sign that said Come in empty and leave alone. Like me, empty, and I was the only one who knew why; the only one who knew my secret shame, the lie I clung to with every drop of blood in my veins.

The more I saw it for what it was, the more I was willing to admit that this chance to turn things around was quite likely the very last chance I was going to get. Edgy and eager, I looked forward to that opportunity to step back on stage the same way a drunk looked forward to his next bar. If it worked, if I could find what it was that I’d lost—the passion, the motivation, the excitement that had once driven me to toss everything else aside—then in some strange, sick, and twisted way, I was going to owe it all to an eight-year-old child whose father had once stood grinning like a sweat-coated madman and proclaimed himself the best there had ever been.

The best...

The best teacher, best session partner, bestest big brother, as I’d called him when I was a kid...and when I was older, well, he’d been my very best friend. There was so much to be said for that, so much I owed that I’d never had time to show. If I stood in the lights one more time, would he stand there with me? Was it possible? Was it too much to hope? Was there even a chance in hell that someday, somehow, the wreck of a man, rotting and collecting dust, could stand side by side with a ghost...and live again?

Chapter Six

It’s nice to know that sometimes the gods can actually be kind. In this case the kindness had come in the form of a poster on the bulletin board of the hardware store advertising a demolition derby at the racetrack on the edge of town. It was a bit more than I had left after paying the bills, but at this point I was desperate enough to stop by Morgan’s on the way back home and beg for an advance on my pay.

He gave it to me, but then, I’d figured he would when I told him what it was for, just like I’d been expecting the threat he’d issued as I left, telling me in no uncertain terms that if he found out I’d spent the cash on anything other than taking Rory to see the derby he’d personally make it look like I’d been the one in a car wreck. Hell, I was shocked that he didn’t invite himself along, though I half-ass expected we’d see him there anyway.

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