Ugh. Why did I have to walk into the record shop today? I was fine until Fen lured me in with his companionable music banter—oh, la-la-la, I’m the music buyer. Look at me and my elegant alien hands, I know all about the Double Deuce.What was he? Some kind of siren? Eddie didn’t even know what punk was—how was his horrible brother better musically educated?
At that moment I felt as if I’d saved up money to buy tickets for a once-in-a-lifetime concert and another band came out onstage and played. This was not what I expected, and nothing could make it better. This boy, with all his wild, dark hair and hislaser beam eyes, and all the shouting—my God! If I acted like that at work, I’d be out on my ass.
Then again, I guess there was a reason Fen wasn’t living at home anymore. Bad seed. More than bad. Rotten.
But.Then, at the end of our argument, there were the unshed tears in Fen’s eyes. He was upset. Wounded. And I didn’t understand that at all. The men in the Larsen house didn’t show emotions. My dad barely did. Anger, I understood, but not tears.
All I’d wanted was to daydream about finding an apartment with Eddie. Now I couldn’t even do that without seeing Fen’s face.
I shouldn’t be letting him get to me like this.
Dad was exactly where he said he’d be, sitting in the perfectly polished blacker-than-black Fintail with the driver’s side window rolled down. But my mind was looping around Fen, so I couldn’t comprehend that he was waving me into the backseat instead of next to him in the front—my usual seat when I caught a lift in this car. It didn’t compute, not until the door to the backseat popped open, and Mad Dog’s face stared back at me.
Shit. The last thing I needed right now.
Squinting at me through a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, Mad Dog tugged a graying ginger beard that covered the tattoos peeking from a blousy white meditation shirt, snarling mythic beasts and Viking wolves woven in Scandinavian patterns with runes.
The backseat of the Mercedes cowered beneath his colossal frame.
“Hop in,kattekat,” he said in a low voice tinged with a Danish accent.
Nothing to do but enter the vermillion-red leather interior of the Mercedes. Like sitting in the mouth of a whale. “H-hey, Mad Dog. Didn’t expect a rideshare with you, sir.”
“I can walk, if you want the car to yourself,” he joked. “Now that you’ve got that big high school diploma, I guess it’s gone to your head. Congratulations, by the way.”
I laughed nervously. “Thanks. And I guess weareheading to the same place. Might as well carpool,” I replied, hoping I sounded as breezy as he did. “Hey, Dad.”
“Hey, cub. How’s day number one of being Velvet’s assistant? Got what she sent you out for?”
“Success,” I said, shutting the door. It wasn’t the first time I’d ridden in the car with Mad Dog, but I didn’t do it every week or anything. He took up so much room, physically and spiritually, and it felt weird to be sitting back here. Where I didn’t belong.
Frida didn’t mind. She leapt over Velvet’s shampoo bag to greet him, all wags.
“Hello, little one. How’s my other daughter?” he teased.
My dad glanced at him in the rearview mirror. A look so brief. But I caught it.
“The hairless wonder,” Mad Dog clarified.
Of course he meantFrida. But the fact that he had to explain spoke volumes.
I mean, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t heard what people said about me. My mother was a junior housekeeper. She and Dad fell hard for each other. One thing led to another, and she got pregnant. Nine months later, I was born… and when I was five, she died.That should be the end of the story. Only, it wasn’t, because someone in the house—one of the dozens of housekeepers or gardeners orwhoevers in service over the years—started a rumor.
The rumor went like this:
My mother was hooking up with Mad Dog at the same time as Dad. Or right before Dad. Or there was a wild night with the three of them. Pick one. It all amounted to the same outcome.
I could be Mad Dog’s kid.
First time I heard about this, it was from Velvet’s former nanny who sometimes took care of me right after my mom died, and I didn’t understand. In one ear, out the other. The second time, I was ten, and it was at school. My dad had to sit me down and assure me that the rumor wasn’t true. And that if it could ever be even theslightestbit fractionally possible, he would never agree to a paternity test, because he didn’t want to know. That he was my father, and I was his kid, and that was the end of it.
Period.
We didn’t discuss it. That was the Marlow way: if you didn’t talk about something, it went away. But I did think about it sometimes. Because I don’t look like my blond lion of a father. I don’t look like ginger-headed Mad Dog, either, though. I look like my mom. And that’s all I knew. So I tried not to worry about it too much.
“Where’s Rosa?” I asked. His wife—Velvet’s mom—was a good buffer. Plus, she was nice and was always offering to let me borrow books from her library.
“At the lodge,” he said. “Leo and I dropped her off earlierbecause she had a little back pain. She walked too much today. Needs to rest plenty before Velvet’s party.”
