Hell. Why would he assume I know a damn thing about Mack? Mack was a party boy, quick to please himself. The guy I remember didn’t just leave me in his dust. All he knew how to do was to skip town. He could be six feet fucking under for all I know.
I tighten my fists. First Red tells me he’s leaving; then this kid comes and dredges up Mack, of all people.
“The thing is,” he says, “Mack—”
“Listen,” I bark, frustrated. Luckily, my car pulls up right then, and I walk away as I talk. “I’m not interested in rehashing the past, okay? Sorry to disappoint you, but you’ll have to dig somewhere else for the memories, got it?” I open the door and look toward him. “Have a good night,” I grunt.
“But he was—”
I slam the door shut before he finishes the sentence. As the car pulls away, I realize how tense my shoulders are. We drive toward my neighborhood, some shitty new pop band on the radio, and I try to relax, but guilt starts eating at me, too.
Yelling at the kid wasn’t right, I know that. And damn if the expression on his face doesn’t twist my gut. Those wide hazel eyes could do me in.
But there’s something else about him, too. Something I just can’t place my finger on. It’s unnerving, and I thumb my chain necklace as I try to figure out why in the hell his face is burned into my memory.
Finally, as I’m walking in the door, Grace barking at my feet, it hits me.
“Son of a bitch,” I grumble. “He looks just like Mack.”
* * *
Drew
I drove all the way to Chicago just to have Caesar Marin slam a car door in my face.
He leaves me standing there on the side of the street, mouth hanging open. As the car drives away, I lift my voice. “Father!” I yell out. “He was my father!”
Not that he apparently cares.
I sigh and grab my phone. It’s a lovely night, and I’d be perfectly happy to walk the hour or two it would take to reach my hotel, if I actually knew this city. Instead, feeling entirely like a country mouse tourist, I wait patiently at the corner until my ride arrives.
I’m not sure what I expected from Caesar, anyway. He’s a celebrity in the tattoo world, so it wasn’t hard to do a little googling and learn the 101 about him. In the few interviews he’s done, he answers in short, brusque sentences. And over a couple of decades of photos, he always seems to have the same knitted brow, which fades from dark black to silver over the years.
But I also know that my father ran a tattoo shop with that man. And since I don’t really know anything else about my father but that…
What’s the expression? All roads lead to Rome, or in this case, to Caesar?
Back at the hotel, I stretch out on top of the blankets. My first full day in Chicago is a failure, but I half-expected as much.
Just a few months ago, I had no clue I’d go on this journey. I was back home, saying goodbye to Mom after her long illness. I thought I would stay in Indiana for a while and look after her shop, but then, going through her things, I found something that shocked me.
I found out who my father was.
She’d always claimed not to know, and my mother wasn’t the kind of woman who talked about anything she didn’t want to talk about. I accepted a long time ago that I’d just never know the man, but in a letter she’d saved from a friend, I read the truth.
Mack Novack, a tattoo artist.
Just those two facts and I became obsessed. Suddenly, this man existed. He could be found. It all felt so complicated, especially the wave of anger toward my mother that she had lied for years and kept secret what I deserved to know.
That anger rose with despair when I finally tracked him down and learned that Mack Novack had died four years earlier.
I missed my chance to truly know my father, and that means I can’t just accept Caesar’s answer. He’s the only lead I have to know more about this man, and he’s going to have to slam some more doors in my face if he wants me to truly drop the subject.
I kick my legs out on the hotel bed, my thoughts lingering on the weathered tattoo artist. He must be fifty or so, about my father’s age, if he were alive. He’s intense, from his silver brow, crow’s feet, and chiseled jaw to his tanned, heavily inked skin. Caesar is easily over six feet tall, with hairy, muscular arms and strong hands. He’s a big guy. That means there’s lots of space for his tattoos, which are all surprisingly bright, like the yellow flowers on the backs of his hands and the cartoonish bears on his forearm, snarling and wrestling each other.
My cock stirs. I try to ignore it, but I keep thinking about Caesar and the way he furrowed his brow at me, and blood rushes through my body.
As though things weren’t complicated enough already, Caesar is basically my dream man.
