Loved Either Way, page 5
“It doesn’t smell like him.”
Over his shoulder, Jacob’s eyes shifted suspiciously around the room. “Maybe it’s just me, but—”
“It doesn’t smell like him,” Lucas insisted again.
Stronger the second time.
Jacob nodded once. “Who are you trying to convince?”
Chapter 5
The mayor’s twelve thousand square foot residence sat on an acreage just outside of the city’s limits with private access from the road to both the house and a lake that wasn’t big enough for a good boat run. Despite calling the yearly bash—with ten thousand dollar a plate expectation per guest—a ball, there wasn’t ever any dancing. Just catered food by a chef whose name Lucas could never remember and rich people who wanted an excuse to dress up and get drunk.
Rarely could Lucas remember a time when wealthy people came together for a private party and didn’t have a reason for doing so outside of talking about something they did to elevate their image, or to show off one thing or another. It could have just been the circles he had been made familiar with, but Lucas never cared too much for the performative activism and silent condemnation of people who had privilege and money.
The charity bit tacked on at the end of this particular evening was purely for brownie points, in his opinion. It gave the attendees the ability to say they were doing something, as if their CPAs weren’t already allocating donations at the end of the year, anyway. Apparently, it was different when one went to a dinner alongside the wealthiest and most powerful in their part of the land and had their name added to a little plaque the mayor added to his growing wall year after year.
It gave someone status. While all they did was gossip and drink to get it.
He’d never cared for that.
His lack of concern for the lifestyles of the wealthy was never more apparent than when Lucas parked his Bronco SUV between a Bentley and a Mercedes that didn’t look as if the winter months had bothered the cars at all. The way their rims shined said they’d been washed and the paint had a wax, likely in a heated garage shortly before arrival at the mayor’s family mansion. Everyone had to look their best; be at their greatest. It didn’t leave much time or space for a man like him who couldn’t quite fit in despite his proximity to the inner circle. He could not say the same, visually, of his two-year-old Bronco with its dirt-spattered sides that spoke of the factory’s open-air parking lot compared to the rest of the vehicles lining the drive.
The white twinkle lights from Christmas remained lit around the eaves of the roof’s high peaks all along the front, but there wasn’t a Christmas tree or garland in sight. That season had long passed for the Alcott home, it seemed. The white lights overhead matched the ones wrapped around the trunk of the birch trees lining the drive and helped to illuminate the front of the property.
The wide, winding drive, cleared of ice and snow, so one could see the hand laid brickwork leading around the circular entry rounding a large water feature that was only lit, currently, but not running with water.
“You know,” said a redhead wrapped in white mink a few cars down to the car dealership heir helping her along the drive, “I really could have done without these boots tonight, Benny. It ruins the look.”
The thirty-seven-year-old, whom Lucas had brushed shoulders with on the ice in his private high school during hockey season, uttered frustratedly, “It’s Brennan. Cut the Benny shit, Sheela.”
“Only mommy gets to use that, right?”
“Your mouth is not worth a thirteen-thousand-dollar night, but you know, if you think open-toed stilettos are better for this, next year you’re welcome to wear them and walk yourself, sweetheart.”
Ouch.
The escort—Brennan already had two nasty divorces under his belt over his penchant for paid pussy—only heard one thing in the man’s remark. “Who’s bringing me next year?”
Brennan laughed at the expense of a woman more interested in her money than her dignity. Nothing about the situation felt right.
“Exactly,” Brennan said, closing in on the front entrance of the lit up house.
Lucas, still cringing a couple of dozen paces behind the couple, slowed even more so the man up ahead had less of a chance of noticing him. If he could avoid conversations with a handful of people tonight—perfect.
Brennan was high on that list.
The mayor’s personal assistant, a young, eager man, welcomed guests at the double doors before directing people inside by way of the bottom entry or the top of the house at the end of a zigzagging wooden ramp.
Lucas took the ramp option because regardless of the chilly temperature, he’d rather be outside watching the guests’ children take on the snow-covered rolling hills on sleds and three-skis than inside making rounds with people he barely spoke to on any other given day of the year. He wasn’t one for pretenses, but he also couldn’t be a no-show when the mayor had personally made a call to him the week before confirming his father had passed along the invitation when Lucas didn’t immediately RSVP.
He shot himself in the foot here.
Badly.
Few adults milled about on the upper deck that continued all the way around the house, monitoring the children. Lucas, polite to the one or two he did recognize, only nodded at the ones he didn’t. Not even the sight of his own breaths making plumes of gray in front of his face could convince him to hide from the cold air outside.
Instead, he walked the deck and listened to the children squeal down below.
“Excuse us, sir,” a young boy said as he and a girl of about the same age pushed beyond where Lucas blocked the stairs at the side of the house leading down. The two couldn’t be more than ten or so.
Under his arm, the kid held a red rolled up silly carpet that would really let the two fly down the rolling hills. Typically, Lucas loomed over kids and some didn’t take that well, so despite his quiet mood, he forced on a friendly smile to the cheeky two more interested in sliding than him.
“Sorry, mister!” called the girl on her way down the stairs.
“No worries,” Lucas replied in a chuckle.
The girl, with ski pants pulled up high under the skirt of a pink dress that peeked out from under her parka jacket, beamed over her shoulder as she raced after the dark-haired boy. “You should slide, too!”
On another night with different people, maybe Lucas would. In fact, as a younger man he had. Having a younger brother ten years his junior kept Lucas’ heart young … in the ways that counted, he supposed. When he had been twenty and should have been enjoying the college life of a bachelor, he had a ten-year-old brother with a penchant for getting into trouble because he had zero parental guidance and needed a male figure to look up to. Someone to give him a reason to toe the line.
Lucas took the role seriously when he was old enough to grasp how growing up like he had with careless parents affected him. He’d wanted to make the outlook better for his brother somehow. Jacob, on the other hand, never let his older brother forget how to have fun when it mattered. Things worked out.
Tonight wasn’t that night, unfortunately. His tweed coat and thermal-lined leather gloves might keep him partially warm, but the same couldn’t be said for his Oxford loafers. Those weren’t made to wade snow. The idea of freezing his nuts off and exhausting himself climbing back up the hill with the kids looked like a far better option than what waited behind him even if there wasn’t a single adult out there enjoying the snowy hills with the kiddos. He didn’t even turn to face the wide, tall windows overlooking the dining room inside, but he didn’t have to, either.
Lucas could hear the party perfectly well.
He already regretted doing yet another thing to somehow please his father when in the end, the effort would be pointless.
Fruitless.
For absolutely nothing.
The fact Lucas showed up to something he couldn’t and wouldn’t enjoy for nothing more than to fulfill his father’s request would continue to add to Ronald’s constant how high mentality. How high could he make his oldest son jump before the man’s knees finally gave out? Lucas didn’t have many options when it came to Ronald. He could bend over backwards to avoid the man altogether, or make magic happen to give Ronald everything he wanted to keep the peace otherwise.
Regardless, only Lucas really suffered.
Luke, dude, he told himself to get out of his damn head, you’re being a bit dramatic here.
Or wallowing.
It didn’t matter. Neither of the two things would help and really only served to avoid the real problem facing Lucas at that moment. That he’d rather stand outside with his face freezing in the minus fifteen Celsius breeze than chance going inside where he might have to have a conversation with his father.
His gaze swung to beyond the corner of the house where he’d previously come up from the front. In the backdrop, he could see where Ronald had parked his Escalade. Only the front of the white vehicle was visible to him but the fact that it was there at all proved someone else had arrived, too.
The night, already fallen high in the sky, darkened around Lucas for an entirely different reason. Strange how that bullshit worked.
“Dalton! Lucas! I thought that was you, friend!”
Leaning over the railing to find the voice down below, Lucas genuinely grinned at who waved back. Standing next to the table where the children could get hot chocolate in foam cups, a familiar man laughed. The youngest of the three Alcott brothers, and a friend of Jacob’s as they were the same age, Griffin wagged a finger in Lucas’ direction.
“I’ll be right up—don’t move, man.”
Lucas laughed. “Yeah, sure.”
He’d always thought Jacob and Griffin got along well because the two had a lot in common besides just their age. Both being the babies of their families—with generational gaps between them and their brothers—made for an experience only they would truly understand.
He had personal reasons beyond just his father’s expectations for not refusing this evening. Their families had brushed shoulders over the years, mostly aided by Jacob and Griffin’s friendship. Of course, the boys’ fathers ran in the same circles of prominent men in the city, too.
A smiling Griffin welcomed Lucas with a hard smack to his back after a tight hug. “I suppose I don’t need to ask where Jacob is, huh?”
Lucas nodded off that comment. “Anywhere but here, you know?”
Griffin waved the news away, unfazed, as he stepped back from Lucas. “Yeah, well …”
What could a person say?
Some family secrets were actually raw, open wounds that people just refused to treat. The obvious estrangement between the remaining Dalton relatives, his father had been an only child and most of Ronald’s extended family were dead, was clear to the people who knew the family. At least beyond their family’s name stamped on popular beer bottles and emblazoned on the trailers of eighteen-wheelers all across the country.
A company of values, they toted on job listings. Family values, in fact. It worked because their fifteen-hundred employees across the province and country held strong. The core values of the Dalton Brewery’s work culture tried to reflect that by ensuring every employee felt appreciated and respected, like one might do for a family member, but the experience didn’t carry on at the top of the tier.
There, they were just broken.
A living, breathing lie.
Lucas had gotten a little tired of it.
“How’ve you been?” Griffin asked, leaning sideways against the deck rail.
“Do you want an honest answer?”
Griffin’s shoulder bobbed enthusiastically. “If it helps, go for it.”
Lucas chuckled. “Nothing does, that’s the point. I’ve tried everything to make myself give a shit about anything and not a bit of it has worked.”
Boxing on the weekend for his anger. Church on Sundays because he thought God might be able to teach him about patience and forgiveness. None of it made much of a difference, and he was worried that his detachment from it all meant he was turning into the spitting image of his father—and not just physically, like he already did. The face in the mirror every morning reminded him of Ronald’s lingering genes, but Lucas had stopped letting that affect more than just an annoyance he had to deal with being the bastard’s son.
Well …
Lucas ran a hand through his new haircut.
Mostly.
No, inside in heart, he was turning into someone who didn’t care. That hit different.
“Oh, it’s that kind of mood, huh?” Griffin asked after a moment of awkward silence.
“It’s been a rough couple of years,” Lucas admitted, glancing out over the rolling hills that were perfectly manicured lawns in the warmer months. “Dad’s left me with a lot, and Jacob’s finishing his last bit of college, so—”
“He told me you pay for his tuition and give him an allowance,” Griffin blurted out. “Last time we talked, I mean. I didn’t think things had gotten that bad with him and your guys’ dad. I didn’t even bother to ask him if he was coming tonight, or not.”
“Already knew,” he muttered.
“Yeah, sorry.”
“Listen …” Lucas shoved his hands into the pockets of his tweed coat to hide the way he had to flex the tension out of his fists. “Don’t take what he told you to anybody—we’re handling the family stuff in the family, you know what I mean?”
How would that affect the employees of their company to know the family-owned business responsible for their weekly pay and future retirement funds was a shouting match away from crumbling in the worst way?
They didn’t deserve that, either.
Griffin scoffed under his breath. “I know what you mean. I get how that kind of stuff starts in families like ours, though. Dad told Sloane if he didn’t give up the painting shit and get a wife before he turned forty that he’d be out of the estate entirely.”
The man’s green eyes darted fast to Lucas before he added lower, “You’re not going to see him tonight, either. He’s moved to Halifax with his boyfriend. Another hard line for Mom and Dad.”
Jesus.
Lucas was so tired.
“He told me to get a therapist before he left last month,” Griffin added. “I’m starting to think everybody should have one. Like a mandatory thing we can pull up when needed and say, hey, these things are fucked and they’re fucking with me.”
A laugh passed between the two.
“You started therapy?” Lucas asked after, honestly surprised.
“Yep—why, you thinking about it?”
“I hadn’t,” he admitted.
Therapy probably wasn’t the miracle key to fix his life, but it made sense why Griffin would put the suggestion on the table. Some things needed help to get worked out. He wanted happiness, and that kept being sucked away from him by a toxic family dynamic he had yet to manage. Avoiding and people-pleasing didn’t put Lucas in a place that served himself first. He just happened to be in a shitty position where he couldn’t talk to just anyone about these things. He’d not been raised that way, for one.
“You should try it,” Griffin said, slapping Lucas on the shoulder as he passed by his friend to take the stairs down again. “I gotta get back to watching out for these damn kids. Can’t have somebody burning themselves and threatening to sue.”
Lucas didn’t reply, but Griffin did something important for him at that moment. A silent friend to friend understanding that it was okay not to be okay sometimes.
He might try therapy. Like boxing and church, even though he’d not found what he really wanted or needed in those things. Then, nobody could say Lucas didn’t try.
He simply needed to make it through the winter with his father before the man headed back out west to their second brewery and bottling plant, and dispatch in the country. The spot where he’d moved his new office and worked, when he felt like it, Ronald only came back home for an extended stay in Saint John for Christmas and the winter since his divorce.
The distance between Alberta and New Brunswick—basically a whole country—made things easier in the strained family. In some ways.
“Oh, and mind the den downstairs,” Griffin called up to Lucas. “Everybody’s smoking cigars with Dad down there, and playing pool. Pretending to like drinking his shitty scotch.”
“Scotch isn’t shitty, you just have no decent tast—”
“Your father is also down there,” Griffin interjected, dead staring Lucas from below.
“Avoid the shitty scotch, don’t see my father. Got it,” Lucas said.
That’s what mattered to him.
Might as well make this night bearable—for himself—even it was just pushing back the inevitable to a later date. Some things couldn’t be helped.
*
Avoid the den.
Famous last words.
Lucas didn’t get to avoid the downstairs den, the shitty scotch, or his father, after all. The second he entered the Alcott home, Tanner—the middle son and closest to Lucas’ age, though the two weren’t particularly close or friends—spotted him from across the room.
So much for a quick warm up of his fingers with the hopes of slipping back outside unnoticed. Lucas couldn’t be so lucky.
“Teams!” Tanner shouted at him from the other side of the dining room like Lucas should immediately know what he meant. “You’re here—I told your father we were doing teams for billiards at least once tonight, man. Right now, let’s go … I just got Dad up and playing again, so he’s in the right mood.”
By the time Tanner finished his explanation, he had crossed the room to throw an arm around Lucas’ shoulder with a hug that pulled him toward the rear hallway connecting to the room that led to the private den downstairs. He didn’t know how to shove off the man’s arm, or intentions, without seeming like a total asshole, so he sucked it up and let Tanner pull him along.
“Work kept you busy this year?” Tanner asked, making polite small talk on the way.
Lucas wished he wouldn’t bother. “Something like that—I heard you were running for city council coming up, eh?”
Over his shoulder, Jacob’s eyes shifted suspiciously around the room. “Maybe it’s just me, but—”
“It doesn’t smell like him,” Lucas insisted again.
Stronger the second time.
Jacob nodded once. “Who are you trying to convince?”
Chapter 5
The mayor’s twelve thousand square foot residence sat on an acreage just outside of the city’s limits with private access from the road to both the house and a lake that wasn’t big enough for a good boat run. Despite calling the yearly bash—with ten thousand dollar a plate expectation per guest—a ball, there wasn’t ever any dancing. Just catered food by a chef whose name Lucas could never remember and rich people who wanted an excuse to dress up and get drunk.
Rarely could Lucas remember a time when wealthy people came together for a private party and didn’t have a reason for doing so outside of talking about something they did to elevate their image, or to show off one thing or another. It could have just been the circles he had been made familiar with, but Lucas never cared too much for the performative activism and silent condemnation of people who had privilege and money.
The charity bit tacked on at the end of this particular evening was purely for brownie points, in his opinion. It gave the attendees the ability to say they were doing something, as if their CPAs weren’t already allocating donations at the end of the year, anyway. Apparently, it was different when one went to a dinner alongside the wealthiest and most powerful in their part of the land and had their name added to a little plaque the mayor added to his growing wall year after year.
It gave someone status. While all they did was gossip and drink to get it.
He’d never cared for that.
His lack of concern for the lifestyles of the wealthy was never more apparent than when Lucas parked his Bronco SUV between a Bentley and a Mercedes that didn’t look as if the winter months had bothered the cars at all. The way their rims shined said they’d been washed and the paint had a wax, likely in a heated garage shortly before arrival at the mayor’s family mansion. Everyone had to look their best; be at their greatest. It didn’t leave much time or space for a man like him who couldn’t quite fit in despite his proximity to the inner circle. He could not say the same, visually, of his two-year-old Bronco with its dirt-spattered sides that spoke of the factory’s open-air parking lot compared to the rest of the vehicles lining the drive.
The white twinkle lights from Christmas remained lit around the eaves of the roof’s high peaks all along the front, but there wasn’t a Christmas tree or garland in sight. That season had long passed for the Alcott home, it seemed. The white lights overhead matched the ones wrapped around the trunk of the birch trees lining the drive and helped to illuminate the front of the property.
The wide, winding drive, cleared of ice and snow, so one could see the hand laid brickwork leading around the circular entry rounding a large water feature that was only lit, currently, but not running with water.
“You know,” said a redhead wrapped in white mink a few cars down to the car dealership heir helping her along the drive, “I really could have done without these boots tonight, Benny. It ruins the look.”
The thirty-seven-year-old, whom Lucas had brushed shoulders with on the ice in his private high school during hockey season, uttered frustratedly, “It’s Brennan. Cut the Benny shit, Sheela.”
“Only mommy gets to use that, right?”
“Your mouth is not worth a thirteen-thousand-dollar night, but you know, if you think open-toed stilettos are better for this, next year you’re welcome to wear them and walk yourself, sweetheart.”
Ouch.
The escort—Brennan already had two nasty divorces under his belt over his penchant for paid pussy—only heard one thing in the man’s remark. “Who’s bringing me next year?”
Brennan laughed at the expense of a woman more interested in her money than her dignity. Nothing about the situation felt right.
“Exactly,” Brennan said, closing in on the front entrance of the lit up house.
Lucas, still cringing a couple of dozen paces behind the couple, slowed even more so the man up ahead had less of a chance of noticing him. If he could avoid conversations with a handful of people tonight—perfect.
Brennan was high on that list.
The mayor’s personal assistant, a young, eager man, welcomed guests at the double doors before directing people inside by way of the bottom entry or the top of the house at the end of a zigzagging wooden ramp.
Lucas took the ramp option because regardless of the chilly temperature, he’d rather be outside watching the guests’ children take on the snow-covered rolling hills on sleds and three-skis than inside making rounds with people he barely spoke to on any other given day of the year. He wasn’t one for pretenses, but he also couldn’t be a no-show when the mayor had personally made a call to him the week before confirming his father had passed along the invitation when Lucas didn’t immediately RSVP.
He shot himself in the foot here.
Badly.
Few adults milled about on the upper deck that continued all the way around the house, monitoring the children. Lucas, polite to the one or two he did recognize, only nodded at the ones he didn’t. Not even the sight of his own breaths making plumes of gray in front of his face could convince him to hide from the cold air outside.
Instead, he walked the deck and listened to the children squeal down below.
“Excuse us, sir,” a young boy said as he and a girl of about the same age pushed beyond where Lucas blocked the stairs at the side of the house leading down. The two couldn’t be more than ten or so.
Under his arm, the kid held a red rolled up silly carpet that would really let the two fly down the rolling hills. Typically, Lucas loomed over kids and some didn’t take that well, so despite his quiet mood, he forced on a friendly smile to the cheeky two more interested in sliding than him.
“Sorry, mister!” called the girl on her way down the stairs.
“No worries,” Lucas replied in a chuckle.
The girl, with ski pants pulled up high under the skirt of a pink dress that peeked out from under her parka jacket, beamed over her shoulder as she raced after the dark-haired boy. “You should slide, too!”
On another night with different people, maybe Lucas would. In fact, as a younger man he had. Having a younger brother ten years his junior kept Lucas’ heart young … in the ways that counted, he supposed. When he had been twenty and should have been enjoying the college life of a bachelor, he had a ten-year-old brother with a penchant for getting into trouble because he had zero parental guidance and needed a male figure to look up to. Someone to give him a reason to toe the line.
Lucas took the role seriously when he was old enough to grasp how growing up like he had with careless parents affected him. He’d wanted to make the outlook better for his brother somehow. Jacob, on the other hand, never let his older brother forget how to have fun when it mattered. Things worked out.
Tonight wasn’t that night, unfortunately. His tweed coat and thermal-lined leather gloves might keep him partially warm, but the same couldn’t be said for his Oxford loafers. Those weren’t made to wade snow. The idea of freezing his nuts off and exhausting himself climbing back up the hill with the kids looked like a far better option than what waited behind him even if there wasn’t a single adult out there enjoying the snowy hills with the kiddos. He didn’t even turn to face the wide, tall windows overlooking the dining room inside, but he didn’t have to, either.
Lucas could hear the party perfectly well.
He already regretted doing yet another thing to somehow please his father when in the end, the effort would be pointless.
Fruitless.
For absolutely nothing.
The fact Lucas showed up to something he couldn’t and wouldn’t enjoy for nothing more than to fulfill his father’s request would continue to add to Ronald’s constant how high mentality. How high could he make his oldest son jump before the man’s knees finally gave out? Lucas didn’t have many options when it came to Ronald. He could bend over backwards to avoid the man altogether, or make magic happen to give Ronald everything he wanted to keep the peace otherwise.
Regardless, only Lucas really suffered.
Luke, dude, he told himself to get out of his damn head, you’re being a bit dramatic here.
Or wallowing.
It didn’t matter. Neither of the two things would help and really only served to avoid the real problem facing Lucas at that moment. That he’d rather stand outside with his face freezing in the minus fifteen Celsius breeze than chance going inside where he might have to have a conversation with his father.
His gaze swung to beyond the corner of the house where he’d previously come up from the front. In the backdrop, he could see where Ronald had parked his Escalade. Only the front of the white vehicle was visible to him but the fact that it was there at all proved someone else had arrived, too.
The night, already fallen high in the sky, darkened around Lucas for an entirely different reason. Strange how that bullshit worked.
“Dalton! Lucas! I thought that was you, friend!”
Leaning over the railing to find the voice down below, Lucas genuinely grinned at who waved back. Standing next to the table where the children could get hot chocolate in foam cups, a familiar man laughed. The youngest of the three Alcott brothers, and a friend of Jacob’s as they were the same age, Griffin wagged a finger in Lucas’ direction.
“I’ll be right up—don’t move, man.”
Lucas laughed. “Yeah, sure.”
He’d always thought Jacob and Griffin got along well because the two had a lot in common besides just their age. Both being the babies of their families—with generational gaps between them and their brothers—made for an experience only they would truly understand.
He had personal reasons beyond just his father’s expectations for not refusing this evening. Their families had brushed shoulders over the years, mostly aided by Jacob and Griffin’s friendship. Of course, the boys’ fathers ran in the same circles of prominent men in the city, too.
A smiling Griffin welcomed Lucas with a hard smack to his back after a tight hug. “I suppose I don’t need to ask where Jacob is, huh?”
Lucas nodded off that comment. “Anywhere but here, you know?”
Griffin waved the news away, unfazed, as he stepped back from Lucas. “Yeah, well …”
What could a person say?
Some family secrets were actually raw, open wounds that people just refused to treat. The obvious estrangement between the remaining Dalton relatives, his father had been an only child and most of Ronald’s extended family were dead, was clear to the people who knew the family. At least beyond their family’s name stamped on popular beer bottles and emblazoned on the trailers of eighteen-wheelers all across the country.
A company of values, they toted on job listings. Family values, in fact. It worked because their fifteen-hundred employees across the province and country held strong. The core values of the Dalton Brewery’s work culture tried to reflect that by ensuring every employee felt appreciated and respected, like one might do for a family member, but the experience didn’t carry on at the top of the tier.
There, they were just broken.
A living, breathing lie.
Lucas had gotten a little tired of it.
“How’ve you been?” Griffin asked, leaning sideways against the deck rail.
“Do you want an honest answer?”
Griffin’s shoulder bobbed enthusiastically. “If it helps, go for it.”
Lucas chuckled. “Nothing does, that’s the point. I’ve tried everything to make myself give a shit about anything and not a bit of it has worked.”
Boxing on the weekend for his anger. Church on Sundays because he thought God might be able to teach him about patience and forgiveness. None of it made much of a difference, and he was worried that his detachment from it all meant he was turning into the spitting image of his father—and not just physically, like he already did. The face in the mirror every morning reminded him of Ronald’s lingering genes, but Lucas had stopped letting that affect more than just an annoyance he had to deal with being the bastard’s son.
Well …
Lucas ran a hand through his new haircut.
Mostly.
No, inside in heart, he was turning into someone who didn’t care. That hit different.
“Oh, it’s that kind of mood, huh?” Griffin asked after a moment of awkward silence.
“It’s been a rough couple of years,” Lucas admitted, glancing out over the rolling hills that were perfectly manicured lawns in the warmer months. “Dad’s left me with a lot, and Jacob’s finishing his last bit of college, so—”
“He told me you pay for his tuition and give him an allowance,” Griffin blurted out. “Last time we talked, I mean. I didn’t think things had gotten that bad with him and your guys’ dad. I didn’t even bother to ask him if he was coming tonight, or not.”
“Already knew,” he muttered.
“Yeah, sorry.”
“Listen …” Lucas shoved his hands into the pockets of his tweed coat to hide the way he had to flex the tension out of his fists. “Don’t take what he told you to anybody—we’re handling the family stuff in the family, you know what I mean?”
How would that affect the employees of their company to know the family-owned business responsible for their weekly pay and future retirement funds was a shouting match away from crumbling in the worst way?
They didn’t deserve that, either.
Griffin scoffed under his breath. “I know what you mean. I get how that kind of stuff starts in families like ours, though. Dad told Sloane if he didn’t give up the painting shit and get a wife before he turned forty that he’d be out of the estate entirely.”
The man’s green eyes darted fast to Lucas before he added lower, “You’re not going to see him tonight, either. He’s moved to Halifax with his boyfriend. Another hard line for Mom and Dad.”
Jesus.
Lucas was so tired.
“He told me to get a therapist before he left last month,” Griffin added. “I’m starting to think everybody should have one. Like a mandatory thing we can pull up when needed and say, hey, these things are fucked and they’re fucking with me.”
A laugh passed between the two.
“You started therapy?” Lucas asked after, honestly surprised.
“Yep—why, you thinking about it?”
“I hadn’t,” he admitted.
Therapy probably wasn’t the miracle key to fix his life, but it made sense why Griffin would put the suggestion on the table. Some things needed help to get worked out. He wanted happiness, and that kept being sucked away from him by a toxic family dynamic he had yet to manage. Avoiding and people-pleasing didn’t put Lucas in a place that served himself first. He just happened to be in a shitty position where he couldn’t talk to just anyone about these things. He’d not been raised that way, for one.
“You should try it,” Griffin said, slapping Lucas on the shoulder as he passed by his friend to take the stairs down again. “I gotta get back to watching out for these damn kids. Can’t have somebody burning themselves and threatening to sue.”
Lucas didn’t reply, but Griffin did something important for him at that moment. A silent friend to friend understanding that it was okay not to be okay sometimes.
He might try therapy. Like boxing and church, even though he’d not found what he really wanted or needed in those things. Then, nobody could say Lucas didn’t try.
He simply needed to make it through the winter with his father before the man headed back out west to their second brewery and bottling plant, and dispatch in the country. The spot where he’d moved his new office and worked, when he felt like it, Ronald only came back home for an extended stay in Saint John for Christmas and the winter since his divorce.
The distance between Alberta and New Brunswick—basically a whole country—made things easier in the strained family. In some ways.
“Oh, and mind the den downstairs,” Griffin called up to Lucas. “Everybody’s smoking cigars with Dad down there, and playing pool. Pretending to like drinking his shitty scotch.”
“Scotch isn’t shitty, you just have no decent tast—”
“Your father is also down there,” Griffin interjected, dead staring Lucas from below.
“Avoid the shitty scotch, don’t see my father. Got it,” Lucas said.
That’s what mattered to him.
Might as well make this night bearable—for himself—even it was just pushing back the inevitable to a later date. Some things couldn’t be helped.
*
Avoid the den.
Famous last words.
Lucas didn’t get to avoid the downstairs den, the shitty scotch, or his father, after all. The second he entered the Alcott home, Tanner—the middle son and closest to Lucas’ age, though the two weren’t particularly close or friends—spotted him from across the room.
So much for a quick warm up of his fingers with the hopes of slipping back outside unnoticed. Lucas couldn’t be so lucky.
“Teams!” Tanner shouted at him from the other side of the dining room like Lucas should immediately know what he meant. “You’re here—I told your father we were doing teams for billiards at least once tonight, man. Right now, let’s go … I just got Dad up and playing again, so he’s in the right mood.”
By the time Tanner finished his explanation, he had crossed the room to throw an arm around Lucas’ shoulder with a hug that pulled him toward the rear hallway connecting to the room that led to the private den downstairs. He didn’t know how to shove off the man’s arm, or intentions, without seeming like a total asshole, so he sucked it up and let Tanner pull him along.
“Work kept you busy this year?” Tanner asked, making polite small talk on the way.
Lucas wished he wouldn’t bother. “Something like that—I heard you were running for city council coming up, eh?”
