But I wanted it—even if my best friend would drown me in the cove for so much as suggesting that I was aware of his sister as a woman.
Lance wasn’t protective or violent in any spectacular way but he was linear. Friends existed in one box, family in another, and he didn’t manage blurred lines too well. He’d turn into a human error message if he found out his best friend was involved with his sister and he’d stay that way until we stopped being involved.
Which we would, and sooner than later.
My life was not in Friendship, Rhode Island. I’d stay as long as my family needed me, but I was pulling together contingency plans for the oyster company and Parker in the event that I couldn’t find some resolution to this situation before the end of summer. Even if Lance wasn’t part of my mental calculus, flirtation was as far as it could go with Sunny. Flirtation and driving me fuck-all crazy while she walked in front of forklifts and verbally assaulted me while the entire kitchen watched.
This was the way it had to be and it would be fine. It was always fine.
There was no other option.
* * *
“You wouldn’t believe allthe characters I’ve met in here,” Dad said.
Everyone was a character in my father’s world. It was always “that guy’s one helluva character” and “what a funny character that one is!” and “would you get a load of this character over here?” and most people enjoyed being one of his characters. He was good at engaging with people and noticing the little things that made them unique.
So, of course he’d find himself a cast of characters while in jail. Nothing about that should’ve surprised me and yet I hadn’t expected him to face incarceration with this much enthusiasm. It was like I’d shipped him off to summer camp and now he was brimming with stories about his exciting new friends from all over the country.
“Yeah, I bet,” I said, motioning for Adrian to get started.
“I don’t mind it,” Dad went on, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers together over the front of his gray jumpsuit. “I’d rather be back home of course but this isn’t bad as far as adventures go.”
Summer camp. Seriously.
I rubbed my forehead. This was not an adventure. It was not another one of his journeys bred from naïveté and happenstance. We weren’t hitting the open road in the old RV. It was the possibility of decades in prison and—once again—leaving me as the only adult in the room.
“I met a fella who used to be a trail guide through the Appalachians. The stories he can tell! You wouldn’t believe it!”
Adrian tapped a stack of papers on the metal table. “Yeah? What’s he in for?”
Dad gave that familiar shrug, the one that said he was unbothered by such details. “They say he’s a serial killer but he really is the nicest fella I’ve met in here.”
And that, my friends, was why my dad was in jail. Even when the facts stared him in the face, he turned his back to pay closer attention to his shiny, glimmering characters.
It was the reason I’d toilet trained Decker and managed the family finances by the time I was ten.
“We should get started,” Adrian said. “We have a lot to get through.” He spread documents out on the table, each marked with highlights and annotations. He added a few photos and diagrams until every inch of the surface was covered. “This is the core of the prosecution’s case and, at this point, it’s mostly circumstantial. But it’s the kind of circumstantial that could cruise to a conviction.”
“Well, that won’t happen,” Dad said.
I rubbed my temples. I didn’t have a headache but I was certain one would find me before the end of this visit. “Let’s hear what Adrian has to say before jumping to any conclusions.”
Dad shrugged. “If you say so but I know the truth.”
“Listen, Rabbit.” Adrian slipped into hisI’ll charge you extra for wasting my timetone. “I need you to explain some of this evidence from your perspective so I can argue it. I need you to tell me why it doesn’t hold water because a jury won’t care if you’re a friendly guy who swears the charges are bogus. They won’t care that everyone loves you and they all say you’re as honest as they come. They’ll care that the prosecution has a motherfucking mountain of evidence that seems to point directly at you.”
My father—born Roger but baptized Rabbit by the Guns N’ Roses roadies who’d become our extended family in the years we’d traveled with the band and lived on the road—studied the papers for a long moment. Eventually, he said, “As long as we’re finished by lunch. I’m supposed to talk to that Appalachian fella about his favorite trails today.”
Adrian laughed to himself before tapping his finger against a document. “Let’s start here. On this day, the restaurant received a delivery of lobsters and, according to this invoice, paid the vendor in cash on the spot. This is the first time any vendor had been paid in cash with the exception of small purchases using petty cash. From this point forward, the lobsterman was always paid in cash and the amounts increased exponentially without any correlating increase in market prices or volume. The prosecution will argue this was the start of the money laundering activities. My job is to dismantle that argument piece by piece and your job is to give me as much information to do that as possible.”
My father scratched the back of his neck. “I can’t tell you how much lobster we went through. Or what it cost. But that lobsterman is one helluva character.”
For the next two hours, Adrian walked through each document and image, detailing the ways it would be used to implicate my father and the holes he intended to poke in the evidence. Dad didn’t say much. By design, he didn’t know the inner workings of the oyster company. I’d made sure of that right from the start. Where Uncle Buckthorne had seen his nephew as a jack-of-all-trades and my mom as a get-it-done powerhouse, I’d known that putting my parents in charge of a multifaceted business would result in its complete destruction within a year.
But now that meant my father couldn’t answer basic questions about the day-to-day operations of the business he’d inherited. He knew the patrons and their families like they were his own, but he had no idea why several employees were taking their wages in cash or whether bar expenses on certain nights were ten, twenty, even fifty times higher than the same point in time years prior.
“We can work with this,” Adrian assured me, holding out a hand to quell my rising frustration. “We can take depositions from a hundred people who will all attest that Rabbit isn’t the numbers guy, isn’t the logistics guy. He’s the face of Small Point and we’ll build on that. He didn’t know this was going on because why the hell would he know? He’s not in the back office, cranking out numbers and counting cash. He’s the heart and everyone knows it.”
