“You lied to protect her from something?”
“You lied ’cuz you’re afraid to share the real you?”
“You lied because you’re a chickenshit?”
That last one is Jake, and Kaleb’s the one who sounds like a self-help shrink.
The answer’s the same for all three. “Sure,” I mumble. “That’s still no excuse.”
“It isn’t,” Mason agrees. “But it helps if your heart’s in the right place.”
“Not with Hazel, it doesn’t.” I take another long sip of sarsaparilla. Did my old man really like this shit? It tastes like a cross between toothpaste and tar. “Lying’s a deal-breaker for her.”
“I can see that.” Jake grunts. “Her dad fucked her up real good when he fucked over the rest of us.”
“She sided with him,” Kaleb adds. “When we first started raising a stink about Owen trying to screw us out of the land? She insisted her dad was just doing what Pops wanted. That our grandfather meant for Owen to claim all two-hundred acres and sell it off to the highest bidder.”
“Hazel probably regrets it now,” Mason muses. “Couldn’t have been easy being cut off from the rest of the family.”
“You guys shunned her?” I never heard that part. “Like, you stopped inviting her to family dinners and stuff?”
“More like she just stopped coming.” Jake frowns. “The details are fuzzy. I’ve kinda forgotten how it went down.”
But I’ll bet Hazel hasn’t. Family matters to her. Being cut off from the cousins she loves must’ve cut deeply.
“It’s water under the bridge now,” Mason offers. “We kissed and made up and all that.”
I’m not so sure of that. “So she trusted her dad, and it bit her in the ass. Backed the wrong horse, so to speak.” And that decision nearly cost her everything. “This is making more sense.”
“We barely spoke at all for a couple years.” Kaleb sounds vaguely embarrassed. “That kinda sucked.”
“Probably for her more than us,” Mason muses. “At least we had each other.”
But Hazel had no one. Not her grandparents, who had passed away sometime before that. Not her distant mother. Not her beloved Aunt Sarah, who was off playing dead at the request of her dad.
And not the cousins she thought of as siblings.
She just had her dad, and we all know how that one turned out.
I swill some more sarsaparilla, trying to dislodge the lump in my throat. “Guh.” Squeezing my eyes shut, I slam down the bottle. “Sorry, man. I don’t think this is my drink.”
“It’s okay.” Mason chuckles and whisks it away. “Can I get you something else? Soda or beer or?—”
“Actually, could I get the food to go?” I push off my barstool, suddenly itchy to get out of here. “Sorry, guys. I thought I felt up for company, but I think I’m gonna go home and wallow.”
“I feel ya.” Jake nods. “That’s how I tend to do things.”
“Or fishing,” Mason says. “Peter learned to fly fish when he fucked up with Lucy.”
“Or therapy,” Kaleb adds. “That’s worked for a bunch of us.”
“And tater tots.” Mason turns as my order pops up behind him. “Those always help.”
“Thanks.” Between fried potatoes, fishing, and spilling my guts to a shrink, I’ve got all the helpful input I could want from these guys. “I’ll give it some thought.”
Mason finishes stuffing my food into boxes. Tucking them into a bag, he hands it over the bar. “Good luck, man.”
“Thank you. I mean it.” I survey the guys I’d started to think of as family. “I might not be seeing you for a while.”
