“All right. I’m sorry,” Drake said, his wheezy voice milder, maybe even…gentler. “I would like to see you, Bellini. Please come.”
“I don’t have good memories of our conversations, Drake, because of your difficult, venomous personality, so I’m going to skip seeing you in favor of trying to find spiders.”
“I’m dying, Bellini. Do this for me. Please.”
I closed my eyes for a second, as one emotion after another threatened to overwhelm me. “No. I don’t owe you anything.” I had already given him everything. He had won. I had lost. What was the point?
“She doesn’t want to come, Dad. So that’s a no.”
“Why do you want to see me, Drake?” I asked.
“I want to talk to you.”
“About what?”
He paused. “Please, Bellini. I am an old man. I have a lot of regrets in my life, and the way I treated you is one of them.” He coughed. It was a bad cough. “I don’t deserve your company, Bellini. Laina, she was good to you. I should have been like Laina. I’d like to see you.” He paused again. “Please. I will behave. I’m begging you.”
Begging me? Drake Hamilton was begging. That was a first. “I’ll come, Drake,” I said. “But if you’re rude to me, even once, one word, I’m leaving.”
“I will not be rude. I promise.” He coughed again, deep and ugly. “Thank you, Bellini. Thank you.”
That Drake was sayingthank youwas surprising.
“You don’t have to go,” Logan said after hanging up.
“It’s okay. I’ll go.” Maybe if I saw Drake, it would give me closure. Or maybe Drake would change his mind and give Logan his mother’s land no matter what. I could hope for a Christmas miracle.
I put my hand out, Logan put his hand in mind, and our fingers, as usual, intertwined as if they’d been together for decades. It brought a few hot tears to my eyes.
“So, you’re back in town, Bellini,” Drake said to me.
“Yes, it appears that I am. I’m here for Christmas.”
Drake sat hunched in his wheelchair, looking like a defeated gnome, in front of the fire, a red blanket over his skinny legs. He had been a tall man, almost as tall as Logan, and robust. Now I saw a small, wrinkled, defeated man who knew his time was up.
The log cabin exuded warmth because Logan had paid to have it fixed up. When he was younger, after his mom died, it started falling apart. It was like all the love she had put into her family was in the home, and when she died, the love left.
But Logan told me that he had fixed the log walls so air wouldn’t blow through them anymore, tore the decks off and built new, and added a new roof and a new heating and cooling system. He had put in an electric fireplace so that Drake only had to flick a switch and wouldn’t have to chop or haul wood.
But Drake was a dark and dreary man, and he kept the curtains shut so it was dark and dreary inside. The home was inhabited by a man who had spent most of his life making others scared and intimidated. He was a controlling and demanding person, which was why he had to spend the end of his life mostly alone—except for a moral son named Logan who would not look away and felt obligated to help him because he had the heart of his mother and not the tar pit of hate of his father.
Logan and I sat together on an old leather couch across from Drake, who was hooked up to an oxygen tank.
“It’s nice to see you, Bellini,” Drake said, his voice coming in gasps.
I nodded. “Thank you. I’m sorry you’re ill.” I wasn’t sorry.
“Me, too. I was hoping to live to be a hundred. Drinking and cigarettes made sure I won’t.” The flames from the fireplace created shadows on his thin, hollowed-out face.
I couldn’t help thinking that meanness, anger, resentment, revenge, and vindictiveness helped to make him sick, too. All those seething emotions wears a body down.
“Logan,” Drake rasped out. “Go on out to the barn. I have a gift for Bellini out there. It’s on the wood table in the center.”
“What do you mean a gift?” Logan said, suspicious. He was outwardly calm around his father, but I could feel how on edge he was, waiting for his father to pop off, to criticize, to attack. The years of being a helpless child under this roof, with this unhinged man, had been filled with fear and anger.
“A gift?” I asked.
“Yes.” Drake nodded at Logan.
