I shivered. “Where is he?”
Toni nodded his head toward a booth in the back of the bar, right next to the jukebox. I padded the hard bottoms of my shoes across the wooden floors, not so anxious to reach my middle brother. Yet, I knew I couldn’t ignore this shit either as much as I wanted to.
“This seat taken?” I asked Ace when I came up beside him, seated in the booth.
He raised his head, and his eyes widened for a second before he dipped his head back down and shrugged.
Feeling defeated and at a loss for words, I sighed. “I have half a mind to call Micah to bring his ass up here and deal with you,” I grumbled as I took my seat across from him. “Or worse, Joel.”
That got Ace’s attention, and he lifted his head again. My stomach knotted at the pain I saw in his grey eyes. I always found it ironic that he was born with grey eyes, but I was the one our parents named “Grey Wolf.”
I focused on the irony of my middle name because looking my brother’s pain square in the eye was too damn uncomfortable.
“He’d just tell me to get over it.” Ace’s voice, which was always so full of life and laughter, sounded distressed and broken. As if the words had to travel through shattered glass just to make it out of his mouth.
I clenched my fist to keep from telling him that Joel’s advice didn’t sound half bad. He needed to get over it.
“Don’t fucking touch that,” he barked at another patron of the bar, who walked toward the jukebox.
The woman looked between the both of us, stunned before she scampered off.
“You’re fucking insane. And it’s costing me money,” I griped, reminding my brother as a partial owner of The Rustic that he was scaring off my customers.
“So?” he said before rising from his seat.
I looked over my shoulder to see him make his way to the jukebox. Luckily, it was only a handful of steps away because the way he tripped over his feet notified me that he’d pushed his alcohol consumption beyond his normal limits.
My conclusion was further confirmed when he plopped down in the booth across from me and blew out a heavy breath. The stench of alcohol filled my nostrils.
“You better not be flying in the morning.”
His eyes narrowed. “I’m on a five-day leave.”
I nodded, knowing he always took leave around this date. “Good. The last thing we all need is you killing yourself because you were too hungover to remember which was the eject button and the brake in one of those planes.”
“You can take your ass out of here. I know how to get home,” Ace insisted, waving me off with his hand.
“Yeah, right. You’re three sheets to the wind, as Joel would say.”
Glaring, he slammed the bottle of beer down on the wooden table between us. “He never fucking liked her.”
I sighed and shook my head. “Ace, don’t do this. Look, you can crash at my place tonight.”
“No, fuck that. Joel never liked her. Fuck him.”
I cringed, knowing my brother would never say anything like that to our father’s face. Joel might be a bit much sometimes, but we all loved him deeply.
“You don’t mean that,” I said.
“The hell I don’t.” He slung his head backward, gulping down the remaining half of his beer.
After pushing the bottle aside, he parked his elbows on the table again, staring down into his lap.
Not for the first time, I wondered how my competent and highly accomplished Air Force pilot brother could always fall to pieces like this on this date every year.
“He’d be a teenager by now. Our son.” Ace’s voice was so heavy that I could barely make out the words.
Once I did, I wished I hadn’t.
