Getting Played - Emma Chase Page 0,40

and I alone on the deck.

I look out across the lake and take a long drag on my beer.

“I’m just not sure if I can do this, D,” I tell him softly. “What the fuck do I know about being anyone’s dad? I don’t know if I have it in me, you know?”

Garrett nods slowly.

“Yeah, I get that. I really do.”

Even back in high school, Garrett always had his shit together. He was the quarterback—steady, solid, consistent—and I was the risk-taking wide receiver who liked to push the limits and go for the big plays. It’s why we made a good team, why we still do. I could kick his ass on an IQ test, but between the two of us—he’s the wise one.

“But the question you have to ask yourself, Dean, is a year from now . . . five, ten, fifteen years from now—how are you ever going to look at yourself in the mirror again, if you don’t do it?”

~ ~ ~

The next afternoon, I’m in the living room, pulling old dusty photo albums out of Gram’s antique bureau. Looking at pictures I haven’t even thought about, let alone seen, in decades.

There’s a Polaroid of my mother on the day I was born, propped up on pillows, holding me wrapped in a light blue blanket—looking like the baby-faced, dark-haired, sixteen year old girl she was when she had me.

Afterward she dropped out of high school, got her GED, then left me with Grams and took off when I was three. She bounced around the country for a while—I only saw her a handful of times—before she finally settled in Vegas about ten years ago.

I turn the page and it’s the standard toddler fare of messy highchair eating and bare-assed bathtub shots. A few pages after that is a picture of me on my first day of kindergarten. I remember Grams taking this one—next to the tree outside Lakeside Elementary. I grin with a gap-toothed smile, and square glasses and a white button down shirt with a Superman backpack slung across my shoulder.

I was a handsome, nerdy little bastard.

Grams shuffles into the living room, holding Lucy in her arms, rubbing a towel on the beast’s damp black fur. On a good day, the cat hates the world, but on bath days she’s especially vengeful. Grams sits on the couch beside me, and Lucy does a little shimmy in her lap. Then she turns around, lifts her tail and shows me her asshole before flouncing away.

Subtle.

“Look at you—such a sweet boy.” Grams leans over, tracing the kindergarten picture with her shaky hand.

I flip through the rest of the pages and there, at the end, not actually in the album, but stuck in the back is a picture of my father.

It’s weird to think of him as my father, because the only image I have of him is this one—when he was younger than most of my students—at the skate park at sunset, smirking into the camera with a sticker-covered skateboard tucked under his arm. Just a boy.

I flick the picture with my finger. “He looks like a punk. A total smartass.”

The kind of kid who’d be parked outside McCarthy’s office every other day. Guaranteed.

Grams confirms my suspicions. “From what I remember, he was quite the little shithead.” But then her voice softens as she looks up at me. “Though he had a part in making you, so he couldn’t have been all bad.”

He was tall for sixteen, and broad, with familiar thick blond hair—but that’s where the likeness ends. Our features are different, the jawline, the nose. I don’t think I look like either of my parents . . . or maybe they just weren’t around long enough for me to pick up on the similarities.

“Did he ever see me?”

“No.” Grams shakes her head. “He was already a dropout when your mother told him she was pregnant. And he hightailed it out of town months before you were born. Left in a van with those friends of his, said they were going surfing in Hawaii or some nonsense.”

I never resented my mother for leaving, not really. On some level, I knew it was the nicest thing she ever did for me. That she just didn’t have it in her to be a real mother. And she knew Grams would take care of me, love me, raise me right.

This dickhead is another story.

“How do you do that? I guess I can understand taking off when he was younger, but when