Not One Clue_ A Mystery - Lois Greiman [49]
“Did I?” There was tight anger in his tone.
“Yes.”
“Then why was it my first instinct to shoot?” he asked.
“Is that why you went to Glendale? To kill Jackson?”
“I went to see my son,” he said, and rose jerkily to his feet. “Shooting that asshole was just a bonus.”
I watched him pace. “If it was so much fun, why the guilt?”
He shut his eyes. A muscle danced taut and jittery in his jaw. “She never cried,” he said, and stared out the window, fists deep in his front pockets.
I waited for him to continue, but Micky always had more patience than I.
“Lavonn or—”
“Kaneasha. When I …” His jaw jumped again. “When I raped her,” he said. “She just looked at me. Like Jamel does sometimes. Like they expect more. Like they expect better.”
I let those words steep in the air for a moment. Seconds ticked away, thick with regret, sticky with self-loathing.
“Then give them better,” I said finally.
“I can’t!” He turned on me like a snarling Rottweiler. “Don’t you see that? This is what I am.” He thumped his chest with stiff fingertips and took a terse step toward me. “You can’t change what you are.”
Rottweilers are scary as hell, and I didn’t like being intimidated in my office by wild dogs, so I raised my chin and gave him my best bad-ass glare. “Not if you stand there and whine about it, you can’t,” I said.
He glowered at me for half of forever, then snorted his disdain. “Where did you grow up? Disneyland or something? I bet you had yourself a daddy who thought the world revolved around your pinky finger.”
I gave that a moment’s thought. On my good days, Dad had referred to me as “the girl” and treated me as if I had a chronic case of the pox, but that was hardly the point, was it?
“You deserved better,” I said. “No one’s denying that.”
“Damned right, I did,” he snapped. “I deserved—”
I closed the trap with hardly a tickle of guilt. “And so does Jamel.”
He paused, eyes gleaming, then gritted his teeth and sat down. Seconds ticked away like time bombs. “You think he’s better off with me?”
“Than with Lavonn and Jackson?”
He nodded.
In my own little mind, I thought living with a pack of man-hungry hyenas would be preferable to living with Lavonn and Jackson, but I smugly kept that opinion to myself. “What do you think?”
He glanced toward the window, expression solemn, dark eyes so sad they would have made a weaker woman cry. “A boy needs a mother,” he said.
“Even if she’s a mother on drugs?”
The muscle jumped in his jaw again. “I don’t even have a girlfriend.”
I refrained from asking if he wanted one, even though the sight of him, introspective and broken, weakened some part of me that was generally as hard-assed and grumpy as a curmudgeon. “You have a grandmother.”
He gave me a look from the corner of his dark eyes. “I’m hard up,” he admitted, “but I think Grams is a little old for me. And aren’t incestuous relationships still frowned upon?”
I didn’t honor his facetiousness with a response, though high-sarcasm often garnered awards in a clan as obnoxious as the McMullens. “How did she and Jamel get along?”
“She made him eat All Bran. For roughage,” he said. “All Bran tastes like sidewalk chalk.”
For a moment I almost asked just when he had become aware of the similarities. He’d never mentioned having brothers like mine—inclined to “encourage” siblings to try new delicacies.
“And she smells funny,” he added.
“Is that your opinion or Jamel’s?”
“Both.” He said the word with some feeling, but I contained my laughter. My grandmother had smelled funny, too, but she could still make my mother grovel, and for that I would be eternally amazed.
“I don’t think odor precludes a person from parenting,” I said.
“How about great-grandparenting?”
“Probably not,” I said, but he was already shaking his head, leaning his close-cropped skull against the couch’s cushion, sighing.
“You have any idea how old she is?” he asked.
“How old?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and looked at me with wide, frightened eyes. “Fuck. You don’t think I’m ballsy enough to ask her, do you?”
I liked this woman more every moment. “Maybe