“Okay,” Fallon said, waving over toward one of the bar stools.
“Look like you need a drink,” my Uncle Pagan said, giving me a soft look from behind the bar.
“I wouldn’t turn one down,” I admitted.
I swiveled to watch him throw some concoction together, mostly so I wasn’t caught staring at Perish as everyone filed inside to hear whatever this meeting was about.
“What’s the matter,” Pagan asked, pushing me something in a very bright blue color that smelled the kind of sickly-sweet like I liked, “we didn’t have any fucking horse blankets down there for you to wear?”
“I know, right?” I asked, laughing off my ridiculously oversized outfit. “This is good,” I told him after a tentative sip. “What is it?”
“You know how Laz has that ‘Kitchen Sink Soup’ recipe where he just throws everything in the pot?”
“Yeah.”
“This is my ‘Speed Rail Cocktail,’” he said, gesturing toward the shelf under the bar. “Little bit of everything in it. Figured you might need it.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, exhaling hard, though not for the reasons he was thinking.
“Need me to knock anyone’s heads together?” he asked, making a little smile pull at my lips.
If there was one thing you could count on Uncle Pagan for, it was wanting a fight.
“Not at the moment, but when I do, I know who to come to.”
“Yeah, you do,” he said.
“Hey,” my father said, pushing my cousin off the stool next to me so he could sit down instead.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Before this meeting starts, I want to check in without anyone listening.”
“I’m fine. I promise.”
“The thing is, sweetheart, you’re always fine.”
“What?”
“You’re always fine. Even when you’re falling apart, you’re gonna insist you’re fine. Dunno why you feel like not being fine isn’t an option, but it is. So, if you’re not fine, that’s okay.”
He wasn’t wrong.
I didn’t like to feel like a burden to anyone, even though I knew my family would never feel that way. So I did always insist I was okay, even if I wasn’t.
But in this case, I really did mean it.
“I appreciate that, Dad. But I really am okay. It was barely anything. It wasn’t even the scariest thing that’s happened to me this month.”
“The shooting,” he agreed.
“And the drunk guys,” I mumbled before I remembered that, yeah, I’d left that little nugget out of conversations with my family.
“The who now?” my dad asked, stiffening.
“Where are they? What do they look like?” Uncle Pagan, a shameless eavesdropper from way back, asked.
Oh, geez.
