Now, half an hour later, Clayton took a deep breath as he stood on the sagging front porch of the dilapidated cabin just outside Heartache. What the hell was he doing at his dad’s place given the way they’d parted the last time? Clayton had sworn he’d never see him again after the bender that had landed his dad in jail for public indecency and put an end to a year’s sobriety. He hadn’t posted bail for his father. Had been unmoved later when Pete came to see him and told him he’d gone off the wagon because of Eddy’s death. That had ripped it for Clay—that his father would go back to booze because of Ed’s death when having alcoholic parents was half the reason Ed had a messed-up life.
When Clay told Gabriella that his brother was gone, she’d said all the right things. Reminding him what a warmhearted, compassionate person she remained in spite of the hardships of her own early years. Despite the hellish day she’d had sitting behind her attacker in the cold and impersonal courtroom. She hadn’t wanted to talk about the trial on the way to Pete’s even though he had tried to ask her about it. Once she’d pulled into Pete’s driveway in the rain, she’d offered to pick him up afterward, but he assured her he would find his own way back to the motel. She’d left him there for his reunion with his father while she sped off to see Mia. But not even Gabriella’s kindness could erase the resentment he felt toward Pete—all the more so because his father had hurt Eddy in the brief years that Clayton’s brother had been with them.
Bastard.
He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead, while the rain splatted against the aluminum porch roof. He willed the thudding ache to go away before he knocked on the front door. To no avail.
His temples throbbed harder.
By the time he raised his knuckles to the thin plank of wood that served as a front entrance, Clayton itched with the old restlessness that had plagued his youth. He’d spent a lot of years being ready to run at any given moment.
When no one answered the door, he tried the lock, the rain spitting sideways against his back even though the porch had a small roof. There was no car in the narrow gravel driveway out front, but that didn’t mean much. If money got tight for Pete, the repo men took whatever he had, starting with his car.
“Anyone home?” Clayton called into the dimly lit interior, his back chilled from the rain and wind.
A whiff of bleach and burnt toast greeted him from inside the house, the former surprising him since Pete never cleaned. Clay’s voice echoed back to him after rolling around the vacant walls of a drafty living room furnished with a threadbare love seat and a wooden dining room chair across from an old-fashioned tube television on a milk crate. Behind that a hospital bed sat surrounded by equipment. An oxygen tank and mask hung on a hook over the metal headboard. A blood pressure cuff and heart monitor were slung over a side rail, a small bedside machine blinking with the latest reading of each.
Pete had only bought this house a few years ago, after Eddy’s death, so Clayton had never seen it. When he’d been growing up, they lived closer to Franklin, making the Hasting home in Heartache a real refuge for him. Vaguely, he wondered what had brought Pete to this area.
“Back here,” a thin voice called from deeper in the house.
The sound of his father’s voice tightened the knot of tension bunching up his shoulders. Clayton stepped onto the welcome mat and wiped his feet before stalking down the short hall. He flipped a light switch on as he arrived at the kitchen and dining area in the far end of the house.
The scent of something burning was stronger here. A white slot toaster still smoked on the warped laminate countertop in the L-shaped kitchen. Pete Yancy, monster of his youth, sat on the linoleum floor in a well-worn flannel bathrobe, one house slipper on his right foot and the other nowhere in sight. Shrunken and thin, his father had a yellow cast to his pale skin. And even though it had only been three years since Clayton had seen him, it felt like thirty given how much Pete had aged.
“It’s my long-lost son. Just in time to have a good laughat my expense.” He spread his emaciated arms wide and the movement opened his robe enough to reveal a concave chest and prominent clavicles through a stained T-shirt. “See what old age does to a body?”
“Makes you forget how to toast a slice of bread?” Clayton asked drily, not in the mood for a sentimental reunion with a man he hadn’t wanted to see in the first place.
Still, he strode to the center of the kitchen and offered a hand up.
“It only burned because I fell on my ass and couldn’t get up.” Frustrated anger threaded the words and he didn’t bother taking Clayton’s hand. Instead he flipped to all fours to try and get to his feet another way.
The old man would be angry and stubborn to the bitter end.
“I can make you another slice.” Clayton debated how much to help him, unwilling to let a bout of Pete’s temper derail whatever heart-to-heart they were supposed to be having today. “And if you’d like a hand getting back to bed?—”
“The home care worker is supposed to be here now, but she probably quit since I’ve had the same one for two whole weeks. The turnover is so high with those people, I get a new one every month,” he groused, using a blue-veined hand to grab onto the beige countertop and pull himself up to his knees.
“Well, there’s no one here but me.” Clayton hauled his father to his feet and slung an arm around his waist to help him down the hallway lined with record album covers hung like artwork. They were all sixties and seventies rock albums, but the effort to decorate couldn’t havepossibly come from Pete. “I don’t have all day to watch you battle gravity.”
His father was shockingly light. Even more surprising? He didn’t smell like alcohol. There was usually a chemical scent Clay associated with his father—the smell of alcohol sweated out through his veins or something—that was noticeably absent today.
“You always were a busy man,” Pete accused, a bitter edge to the words even as he clutched at Clayton like a drowning man holding a life preserver. “Too busy to see your father. Too busy to help your brother.”
The hurt of that statement threatened to bring him to his knees.
“And you always were quick to deliver a backhanded blow when I least expected it. Nice to know some things never change.” He regretted the words as soon as he said them. Not that they weren’t true. But he hated letting his father’s bitterness affect him.
Clay huffed out a breath as he settled Pete onto the hospital bed and regarded his father warily.
The old man looked like hell. Pete lifted his foot without the slipper onto the mattress and took his time—a long time—lifting the other to join it. How long did he have left in this world with that yellow hue to his skin and the weakness of a much older person?
“Don’t look at me like that,” Pete said with a sigh as he laid his head against the white pillows and closed his eyes. “I don’t need your pity.”
“Last I knew, you needed toast that wasn’t charbroiled.” Without waiting for commentary on his intention, Clayton shot to his feet and moved into the kitchen. The act of putting bread in the toaster and waiting for it to heat would calm him, damn it.
He took his time finding the multigrain loaf and dropping a slice in the slot, calling on deep-breathing exercises to take his pulse rate down a few notches. He hadn’t expected some kind of heartfelt reunion with his old man, so today’s greeting was no surprise. He just needed to find out why Pete wanted to see him and get out of here.
