were going to be tied… we’d be okay with that, wouldn’t we?” Eddie asked.
Sean answered him with a wide smile.
As the conversation continued into the night, mostly consisting of Parker’s ideas for his wedding and whether or not Iris approved of them, my thoughts trailed back to the mysterious man seated a few chairs away from me.
“You never asked me about your father.”
“What?” I looked up at Jack in a daze, a cold beer resting in my grip. I’d come out onto the back porch after dinner, just wanting a little fresh air to go with the end of my meal. It was something I’d picked up back when I’d worked in the city, a necessity to find a quiet spot at the end of the day just to think.
“You never asked me about your father,” Jack repeated, sitting down in the chair beside me on the porch. “You said you wanted to talk about him? Over dinner?”
“Right…” I thought back to what I’d said when I was showing Jack to his room. “Sorry about that. It’s just… kind of hard to broach that topic at a table like that, a table where it seems like most people there don’t have anything nice to say.”
“Is that what you want to hear? Something nice?” Jack asked. “Or did you want to hear the truth?”
“It’s possible for things to be both,” I answered. “Truthful and nice.”
“That’s true.” Jack nodded with a smile. “Let’s start there, then. Somewhere nice and truthful.” Jack went quiet for a moment before he spoke again. “Your father loved Vegas. I’m sure you know that part already, though. But what you probably don’t know is that I let him plan a birthday party for me once and left it up to him to pick the time and location. And of course, Edward picked Vegas at midnight.”
Jack chuckled to himself as he went on. “Anyway, I was just finishing with this huge shoot of models who were accusing this big Hollywood player of harassment and assault. It was going to be the kind of story that shook the world when it finally broke. I was close enough to Vegas that catching a flight wasn’t going to be a problem, but I was dead tired from a shoot I’d been working on in Denmark the night before. I didn’t even realize how tired I was, until I woke up on the plane, about five minutes from landing in NYC.”
“NYC?” I asked, shaking my head in confusion. “I thought your party was in Vegas—”
“Right. This story is also a lesson about how a sleep-deprived person should never book their own plane ticket.” Jack laughed. “I knew I was supposed to be in Vegas that night, but my brain was so scrambled, all I could think about was getting back to NYC and taking a good, long nap. I got what I wanted, by the way. I landed in NYC. Apologized to your father about missing my own party in Vegas. Let him know that I’d be sleeping for the next, oh, let’s say, sixteen hours. But around three in the afternoon, I heard someone knocking on my door.”
“Edward?” I guessed.
“One and the same.” Jack grinned. “He wasn’t alone either. He’d brought what looked like half of Vegas with him, right to my doorstep. Of course, we couldn’t fit inside my apartment without breaking a building code violation, so we ended up spilling onto the street, going out to grab a few slices of pizza, bringing that same huge crowd to a Broadway show. It was… magical in a way because it seemed so impossible and unrealistic. And yet, it was happening. Your dad brought the birthday party I missed right to me, and it was one of the best days of my life.”
“That sounds… whimsical,” I replied with a small smile. “Did he do stuff like that often?”
“Edward? All the time.” Jack lightly chuckled. “I swear, it was like he didn’t live in the same world as the rest of us. He just… did whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted to do it. Of course, that came with consequences, too. A man like that… well, let’s just say he never really had a chance in hell of being a good father. Because good fathers don’t leave messes for their kids to clean up.”
The way Jack’s grin disappeared from his expression let me know that he’d gone from thinking about my father to his own, a subtle change that I was still