spend the evening, or do you have to leave?” she asked.
“Of course I’m staying the night. I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you, too. Did you call your dad yet? You said you wanted to take care of that.”
He merged with traffic, going in the direction of her office building.
“Yeah. He said he thought about what I and my sister, Maria, were sayin’ to him about his wife. Especially since Maria never talks shit about anyone. He already knew.” He shrugged. “My father is just afraid of bein’ alone, Yasmine. When I was a kid, he would isolate himself when he’d get drunk, but when sober he doesn’t like that. It freaks him out. Then he realized, ‘Shit. I’m already isolated and alone. She’s never here.’ He sometimes has unrealistic expectations. I’m not going to Sophie, that’s my stepmother, never loved my father; I think at one point she did, but once she saw all the issues he had, she detached herself from him. It broke him. That’s what happens sometimes when you try to love someone who refuses to love you back.”
“So, she wasn’t cheating the entire time? Let me tell you, Nixon. Your sister, Tonya, filled my ear with stuff about your stepmother that made my head spin.”
He chuckled at that. “How’d she get on that topic? Especially with Dad sitting right there.”
“She was asking me about work and told me she’d wanted to go into law at one point, like you, but she’d aspired to specialize in domestic matters. She said she’d decided against it, but let me tell you, that’s when she started whispering to me, going off about that woman, it was all she wrote! She spilled all the beans and I was sitting there trying to not laugh! Tonya is a firecracker!” She laughed.
“Tonya is like me, but she hates our stepmother’s fuckin’ guts. She never acted crazy around her or anything though, just tolerated her. We had no proof she was cheating on him, but we didn’t need it. It was obvious. And then, come to find out, my Dad actually did find proof; he just never told us until recently. My dad’s gripe, too, was that she was living in my grandmother’s big house on the shore with him. That really started to rub him the wrong way. He’d been her caretaker. He was supposed to sell it or rent it out after she died, and come back to Chicago, but he never did. Then, before ya knew it, he’d gotten married. Do you know how much houses like that go for now, Yasmine? My grandmother’s house is huge, too. It’s a great house, right on the water. That old house is worth millions of dollars now. New York is expensive; you know how that works. Anyway, he said he woke up one morning and was just over it. Done. He said he’s filing for divorce soon.”
“Good for him. Your father was quite nice to me, and funny. He seems like a good person, Nix.”
“He is a good person, just has some issues is all. I gave him some attorney names in his area so she wouldn’t be able to grab his money, at least not the bulk of it. He needs to get a really good one, or she’ll be able to walk away with a lot. Anyway, I’m tellin’ ya though, this is really hard for him. My father needs a woman, he is just that kind of guy. But she’s not it.” Yasmine nodded in agreement. “He has gotten cranky over the years. Talking to him was like watching someone punch holes in a wall, hour after hour. He’s loud, says crazy shit.”
“Why do you think he’s like that? Or is that just his personality?”
“I think it was a culmination of things that got my father that way, I think he’s got some PTSD from the war, too, which he absolutely refuses to talk about with me, Leo, my mother, anybody.”
“That’s right. You told me he fought in Vietnam.”
“He was very young at the time, only there in the final two years, ’74 and ’75, but it really fucked him up, my mother says. My grandmother told her everything because my mom didn’t know my dad back then. Anyway, he’s mentioned the mundane things, the regular stuff, I guess you could say, but he refuses to talk about the killing. I am just taking an educated guess, but I think my father probably had to kill quite a few people. He’s