“Then what am I going to drive for this stakeout?”
“Your mom’s car.”
“She drives a 1992 Volvo station wagon. I wouldn’t be caught dead driving that thing.”
“Exactly. No one would expect you to be driving around in it. No one will even look twice at you.”
“No, of course not. Because they’ll all be averting their eyes in shame.”
She crosses her arms and gives me a knowing look. “Blaze, we have two courses of action here. One of us needs to go stake out these thugs and find out who is pulling their strings. And one of us needs to take your mom to a lawyer and have a lengthy discussion about her financial situation and what legal path forward we can take to buy more time. You decide: do you want to spend the rest of your afternoon doing paperwork with your mom, or do you want to take her car and stake out those thugs?”
I cross my arms and scowl. “I’m a fucking grown man, I sure as shit ain’t spending my afternoon doing homework, so you’re right. I’ll go see if my mom will let me borrow her car.”
Chapter Thirteen
Tiffany
“If you want, I can hang around in the neighborhood and give you a ride back home,” says our Uber driver, Tyler, as we pull in front of the Law offices of David Archibald.
Just seeing that name on the plaque out front stirs a twinge of jealousy in my heart.
“No, thanks. We might be a while.”
“Legal problems, huh? I hear you.”
Eleanor leans forward from the back seat. “How exactly do you hear her, young man?”
“I mean, I know what it’s like. Lawyers suck. They cost a lot of money. But, when it comes to putting you on the right side of the line between ‘possession’ and ‘possession with intent to distribute’, they can be worth it. One bad day at Coachella shouldn’t ruin you for the rest of your life, you know?” He says, putting the car in park and hitting a button on his phone to close out the ride. “Anyway, don’t forget to rate me — five stars, please — and tips are always good karma.”
Eleanor and I exit the car and start a slow walk to the front doors of the law office.
“Are all Uber’s like that?” she says.
“You’ve never ridden?”
“No. I have a cell phone for emergencies only. Anything else is just excessive. I don’t do ‘apps’. Don’t even like the word. Or most abbreviations, really. Brevity might be the soul of wit, but if you can’t string together a full word, you’re pretty witless. And the name? Uber? How self-absorbed.”
“You sure have feelings about all of that.”
“Today seems to be all about feelings. Disappointment. Surprise. Suspicion. First Declan comes back out of nowhere to impose himself on my very personal problems, and now you’re dragging me to some scaly lawyer’s den to tell a total stranger my private business. How do you know this charlatan?”
Her question and her sharp tongue both take me by surprise, but I keep it off my face.
“David and I knew each other back at Stanford.”
“Knew each other? I let you drag me out of my home on this fool’s errand, not to mention letting Declan borrow my car, the least you can do is tell me the truth.”
“We dated. For a couple years.”
There’s regret in my voice. Things between David and me ended suddenly after what happened to me, and there’s a part of me that can’t help but think back on our time together and wonder what might have been; the high-powered woman in finance and the career-climbing lawyer. What a power couple we could have been. Successful, prominent, the world at our feet.
Instead, I’m an unemployed banker.
“So, you went from dating a lawyer to being with my Declan? Does sinking that low give you a feeling of vertigo?”
My eyes flare, my knuckles clench and pop as I make a fist. “Your son is better than you give him credit for. He doesn’t have to help you, he’s choosing to.”
She snorts. “Penance for all the pain he’s caused me, maybe,” she says. Then she holds up her hands defensively. “But there’s no need to get yourself all twisted up, Tiffany. I accept his help because there are no other options. And maybe it’ll give Declan the chance to finally do something good for once.”
“With your poisonous attitude, it is a wonder that he still loves you.”
“I scrimped and saved for years, supporting us on a single community college salary, and I gave him a decent life. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. I had so much hope for him because, even though I knew he wasn’t academically inclined, he had so much passion and drive. There are no words to describe how proud of him I was when he found a meaningful career saving people’s lives. And there are no words to express just how disappointed I was when he threw it all away in an act of vicious violence.”
I stop. In the lobby of David Archibald’s law office, under the suspicious gaze of his secretary, I turn on Declan’s mother.
“You can either hold on to that pain and die homeless and alone, or you can accept that your son loves you and that the both of us are doing everything we can to protect your bitter old ass. Move on. Grow up.”
Her eyes go icy cold, but she nods all the same. “Fine.”
With her frigid gaze still upon me, I head to the secretary’s desk.
“Hello. I’m here to see David Archibald. We have a case that requires his help.”
The secretary — a blond woman with hair down past her shoulders, wearing
