Mike wasn?t going to ask. Let the kid talk when he was ready. ?Is this story going to take over five minutes??
?Probably.?
?Hold on.? Mike went to the kitchen, came back with another beer. ?Okay.?
Andrew told it all. He didn?t rush or embellish. He started with Vincent and Anthony in the warehouse and the Arab guy in the container and the warning phone call from Vincent that Juice Luciano had been blown to bits. He?d paused only once to take a swig of beer.
?Dad told me to call you,? Andrew said. ?If it was life-and-death, call Uncle Mike. I honestly never thought?Well, anyway, here I am.? He drained the beer, fiddled with the empty bottle.
Mike leaned back in his chair, sighed, drummed his fingers. He pushed back from the table. ?I have to piss. Be right back.?
In the bathroom he unzipped, rocked heel to toe, and waited for the flow. Pissing wasn?t as effortless as it used to be. He grunted, passed gas. Then the urine.
He stood there, thought about his brother. The brother who?d taken a bullet for him, who?d always been there. Then Mike had that breakdown, put his guns away, wouldn?t touch or look at them. This hadn?t been a moral decision. Ethics didn?t enter into it, at least not in some conscious political way.
His gut had heaved whenever he went into a firefight. The guns got heavy, cold sweat under his arms and on his neck. He went clammy, nauseous. When Mike Foley picked up a pistol his arms and legs turned to water. He was ashamed, scared he?d get his brother killed. Dan would need him, and Mike wouldn?t be there when things got hot.
So Mike ran. He ran, and he didn?t look back. Ten or twenty or thirty years later, he?d still been too ashamed to look up Dan, to reconnect with the only family he had.
Now he had family again, a nephew sitting lost and scared at his dining room table. But did he want that now? Was it too late? All family did was remind Mike how he?d come up short. He?d started over, started a new life. It wasn?t fair. Mike resented it, resented the kid for needing him.
His piss dribbled down to nothing. He shook, zipped up.
He washed his hands slowly at the sink, still thinking and stalling. Maybe he was blowing this out of proportion. What were the chances anyone back East would think of looking for Andrew here? Most of the guys from his old neighborhood didn?t know Oklahoma from Ohio from the dark side of the moon.
Maybe the kid would sleep on his couch for a month, get bored with the boondocks, go home, and that would be all there was to it.
Mike wiped his hands on his pants, went back to the table. He rubbed the back of his neck, tried to think of something to say to the kid. What could they possibly have in common? The phone rang and saved him.
He grabbed it. ?Hello??
?Where did you go?? Linda asked.
?Sorry, something came up. You called? I didn?t see a message on the machine.?
?I called, didn?t leave a message. You going to fix my mower or are you busy now? I can wait a day or two.?
?No, no,? Mike said. ?Give me twenty minutes.? He hung up.
?I have to do a favor for a neighbor,? he told Andrew.
?Okay.?
?Anything you want in the fridge is fine. Bathroom?s over there. Watch TV if you want.?
?Okay.?
?The machine will answer if anybody calls. If you see an Indian kid messing around in the yard, that?s Keone. Leave him alone. He knows what he?s doing.?
?Okay.?
?Yeah, okay. Back soon.? He scooped up his keys and left.
