Forehead resting on his fists, tension palpable, he shook his head.
“Okay. You don’t have to.” She ran a finger over one of those fists, felt it loosen, took it in her hand, and waited him out.
“I don’t know where to start,” he finally said.
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-four.”
“Where are you from?”
“Baltimore.” He paused, head tilted to the side, and focused on her. “How old are you, Doc?”
“Thirty-three.”
He gave a satisfied harrumph and wrapped one of those solid arms around her. “So, the Clay Navarro story. Short version.”
“Long version’s fine too.”
“How about the medium version?”
“Okay.”
“I grew up kinda lower middle class, I guess you could say.”
“Working class,” she corrected in her know-it-all way, before tamping that down.
“Right. Blue collar, or whatever.”
“I’ll stop interrupting. Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” said Clay with a small smile in her direction. He squeezed her hand. “So, we did okay, with both my parents working. Then my mom died when we were little.”
“Who’s we?”
“Oh. Sorry, I thought I’d told you. Carly.” There was a moment of silence, and George could feel the importance of the name.
“Your sister.”
He nodded. “My little sister.”
“Okay. Go on.”
“So, anyway, Mom got breast cancer, and…well, she died, and without health insurance, we ended up living in the projects.” George swallowed past the lump swelling in her throat. “Christ. I didn’t mean to go back this far.” Clay swiped a hand over his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, and went on. “I was pretty close with her.” He paused before saying the name again. It came out strangely slow and foreign-sounding. “Carly. After Mom died, we got pretty close. The place where we lived sucked, and Dad…Dad didn’t do so well. You know, Baltimore. Not the easiest place in the world, especially for a Latin American whose English was still rough. So, anyway, Dad died when—”
“Your father too? What of?”
“Untreated pneumonia.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Shitty job, no savings, no insurance. And he wasn’t all that fond of hospitals, so… Yeah. Anyway, I wanted to…I wanted to be a history teacher, of all things. I’d had a good one in high school. Inspiring, you know? And so the plan was, community college first and then…Too much detail.” He urged her to shift to one side and stood up, running his hands through his hair, and George watched him cross the room, flick aside her bedroom curtain, which she didn’t remember closing, and look outside. Paranoid or just cautious—she suddenly wasn’t so sure.
He told the next part from his spot by the window, voice muffled. “Carly was a wild child. She was impatient and needy and… Man, she was a handful. I tried to help her, tried to keep her in line, but I had my own things I wanted to do, so by the time I realized shit wasn’t what it was supposed to be, she was…” He turned, met her eyes, and she thought she’d never seen a face so filled with pain—so marked by regret. “She was too far gone. Hooked on smack, crank, whatever the hell she could get her hands on. And she’d gotten into this Aryan brotherhood thing, which was fucking ironic, considering our dad was South American, so… I tried to get her out. I swear I tried, George.” He was pleading with her now, and George’s eyes burned with a new veil of unshed tears. “I tried, but it was too late. Too late for my baby sister and…” The hand that ran through his hair shook with emotion, and she wanted to get up and hold him. “Carly got involved with those fucking creeps, and eventually—or actually, pretty fucking quickly—she died.”
His eyes when they met George’s were naked, raw, open, sad…but not dead at least. No, so alive with pain that she could feel it, a gaping wound in the middle of her bedroom. She did get up then, crossed to him, and wrapped her arms around him, trying her best to hold his broken pieces together.
“And you joined the ATF after that?”
