Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [34]
“You think I’m doing that with tennis?”
“Doubtful. Would you say you’re from a troubled family?”
“No. I wouldn’t say that at all. So how did you become a firefighter?”
“I graduated high school with pretty good grades, went to community college for part of a year, and then, when there was no more money for school, got a job painting houses. It wasn’t bad work, and the people in the company I worked for treated us great, but one day one of the other painters got on with the fire department. I visited him at his station and thought it looked like a pretty good gig.”
“What about the rest of your family?”
“After Charlene’s death, my father spent fifteen years drinking. He had a pretty good job for the first few years and paid child support, but after a while the money stopped coming and he disappeared. We thought he might be dead. Later he told me he’d worked a succession of small-time jobs, mostly physical labor, making a fraction of what he was used to and barely keeping his head above water. The household was different after my mom became the sole breadwinner. We’d been living high on the hog until the divorce, but afterward a lot of my well-off friends didn’t feel comfortable around a kid who didn’t even have money for a movie ticket. Then, when I was seventeen, Mom got cancer. She fought through it, took the treatments, and declared bankruptcy two years later. The cancer went away, but a year and a half later it reappeared, except that this time she didn’t tell anybody. It was just about two years after that when she died.”
“That’s so sad.”
“She died a couple of days after my twenty-first birthday. She just didn’t know how to fight the good fight a second time. Not without money or friends, and she’d alienated most of her friends with the drugs.”
“I’m sorry. And your father? What’s he doing? I mean, besides rebuilding our pool house.”
“He lives with me. He’s doing okay. He’s a nice guy. Everybody likes him. He goes off on a bender about twice a year, very quietly, disappears for a few days, and then he’s back. I don’t really understand the psychology of it, because the rest of the time he won’t touch a drop.”
“I like him. He’s nice.”
“He is a nice man. He used to be a lot more outgoing, but somewhere along the line his confidence wore thin.”
“And your sister? She told me she was on the swim team in high school.”
“Placed in the districts and third at the state meet her senior year.”
“She went missing for a number of years?”
“You heard this from your brother?”
“Some of it.”
“What else did he say?”
“Not much. I mean, we don’t talk much these days,” Nadine said, hoping he wouldn’t sniff out her white lie. Out of allegiance to her brother and embarrassment for Zak’s sister, she didn’t want to tell Zak that Kasey had deemed Stacy poor white trash and a slut.
“I love her, but she’s extremely independent and resents it when anybody gives her advice.”
“She lives with you and your father?”
“I find it strange that we couldn’t be a family when we were supposed to be, but now that we’re adults we’re all under one roof. I sometimes wonder what Mom would have said.”
Nadine tried to figure out whose father was the more eccentric, hers, who slept in an oxygen sleeping chamber like Michael Jackson and who’d had seven remodels done on their house in the past seven years—or Zak’s, who had once been a corporate attorney and now pounded nails for a living.
Zak drove north along Twenty-third toward Madison, which was well over a mile from the station. On Madison, the only street in Seattle to touch water at both ends, they would travel northeast until they hit Broadmoor, where the sumptuous houses were built around a golf course that included the Broadmoor Country Club.
“I bet you were always a good girl,” Zak said.
“I