She filled the glass nearly to the brim and carried it to the table.
He managed to crack a smile. “You gonna get drunk, Nita?”
“I was going to enjoy a little taste while I watched the news, but I think maybe you could use a bit more than that.” She slid it over.
He shook his head and pushed it back. “I got too much to wrap my head around just now.”
Nita took a sip, swiveling the glass around by the stem. “I take it the news wasn’t good. About you having the dementia gene.”
Hearing her say it aloud, Casey snapped out of his stupor, sitting up straight. Of course that was what mattered most. His entire perception of his childhood and his family was fucked way up, but it wasn’t the most important news. He wasn’t going to go crazy. He had a motherfucking future.
“Fuck it,” he muttered, and stood. He grabbed a second glass from the cabinet and filled it for himself, sat back down across from her. “Fucking cheers,” he said, holding it up.
Looking mystified, she clinked it with hers. “This some kind of gallows humor?”
He took a deep drink, wincing, and shook his head again. “No. No, it was good news. I don’t have the markers for dementia. Mom does. I don’t. Neither does Vince.”
Her shoulders dropped in almighty relief. “Jesus, Casey.” She crossed herself, then immediately reached across the table and slapped his arm. “Why didn’t you say so? And why do you look so rattled? Actually, wait—let’s let the good news sink in first.”
A-fucking-men. He tried to absorb this new state of reality with every cell in his brain. I’m not going crazy. In ten, twenty, thirty years, I’ll be the same person I am now.
What would he have done different, if he’d known this before? He’d first started getting those disturbing episodes when he’d been living in Vegas, counting cards. He’d assumed the visions must be the first indication that he was going nuts, as his mom had. That had been the first sign of her decline, after all—sudden spacey spells, mumbled nonsense.
After that, his priorities had shifted. To make money while having fun had always been his life’s main focus, and while card counting had accomplished that on a small scale, there was one thing he found far, far more compelling than gambling, and indeed more compelling than money. And so he’d pursued it, and in the end banked himself more cash than he ever could have in the casinos, working on a team. And fuck that it was felony-level illegal, because if he got caught, he’d suffer, what? Five, ten years of a sentence, maybe, before his brain floated off into the ether. So fuck consequences, fuck the future. Fuck everything outside of doing what fascinated him, and enjoying every cent it brought in.
Except now . . .
Maybe he’d known all along, it was time to get out of that scene. Time to accept that the future did matter—a terrifying, exhilarating relief, nearly too much to process. He’d spent so long living his life as though it were about to end, the possibilities that this news had opened were overwhelming. He could make commitments now, sure, but he had fuck-all clue if he was capable of keeping them, of offering them.
He slowed his racing thoughts, pictured Abilene and the baby. If they were his future, he couldn’t say, but he was free to find out. Free to fall in love and have a family, if he was ready for it. Big-ass if.
“Motherfucker.” He couldn’t even believe it. Best news of his life. News that he still had a life.
“I ought to smack you for the cussing,” Nita said, “but I’m too relieved to care.”
“Before we get carried away with the celebrating, there was some bad news, along with the good. Unexpected news, at any rate.”
“So spill—” She paused when Dee’s voice drifted in from the den, needing something or other—the channel changed, a glass of water, the ceiling fan switched on or off. When she wasn’t predicting certain doom, her worries were pretty simple. Nita stood and cast Casey a look, one that told him this conversation wasn’t over, merely paused.
He found his hand in his pocket, worrying the edges of his lighter. He took out the Zippo, flicked it open and closed. He’d been doing that since he was a kid. It soothed him when he had shit on his mind. The clink of the lid popping up, the snick of the wheel, the metallic snap as he flipped it shut again. Twice he’d had the thing taken to a jeweler to get the hinge replaced. It had seen a lot of worries in the past twenty-plus years.
Nita returned shortly. “Okay, where were we?” As she picked up her glass, her gaze caught on Casey’s hand. She frowned. “Let me see that lighter.”
Casey hesitated, and she stuck out her open palm. He felt his face heating but passed it to her anyway.
“I remember this. This was your dad’s.” She turned it around, studying the old-school Harley-Davidson badge on the front. There was a date etched above it by the manufacturer, the same year Casey had been born. “You miss him, still?”
He shrugged and took the lighter back. “I barely remember him—he left two days before my fifth birthday.” He’d found that lighter a couple of weeks later, wedged between the cushion and arm of his old man’s recliner. His mom hadn’t even gotten angry when he’d killed one of the only trees in their yard, trying to set it on fire. She’d just looked at that lighter and held his face to her hip, and she’d cried. She’d said, “I’m mad at him, too.” Casey had rediscovered the lighter in the junk drawer not long after, and kept it to himself ever since.
“For what it’s worth, I was surprised when he left town,” Nita said. “He loved you boys.”
Casey frowned. “You think?”
“Oh yes. He bragged about you both. Never within your earshot, but he used to come by to fix my old Pacer—Tom Grossier was the best mechanic in this town,” she added, and sipped her wine. “Was and still would be. Anyway, I’d bring him a coffee or a beer, and I’d mention whatever I’d seen you and your brother getting up to in the yard that day, and his face just lit up, every time.”
“What’d he say?”
“He always told me exactly how tall Vince was, right down to the half inch—like I didn’t see the boy every day with my own eyes. And he was always going on about how smart you were.”
“Smart?”
“Oh yes. About how you’d invented a new game, or taken something apart to see how it worked.”
“Jeez. All I remember is getting yelled at, for breaking stuff.”
Her smile turned sad. “Well, fathers can be like that with their sons. They can equate praise with coddling, I think—my own father was like that with my brothers. And Fortuity’s not the kind of town a man wants to subject a softhearted child to.”
“No, I guess not.”
“But come on, Casey. The suspense is killing me. What was the bad news?”
“I, um . . .” He lowered his voice, even knowing his mom would be tuned in one thousand percent to whatever crap was on the TV. “I found out that Vince and I . . . That we don’t have the same mother. Our mom isn’t his mom.”
Nita’s expression changed, but not as Casey might have expected. There was no puzzlement there, no shock. The realization hit him in an instant. “You knew?”
She nodded. “I did, yes.”
“Jesus.” He’d said it too loud, and she shot him a cautious look. He said it again, more quietly. “You fucking knew, all these years? Since when?”
“Since after I’d known Dee maybe a year or so. She and your dad moved here when Vince was tiny—just a few months old. No one had any reason to suspect she wasn’t his natural mother. But then when she was pregnant with you, she told me. You were her first and only biological child, after all. I think she needed to tell someone. Everyone assumed she’d already been through childbirth once before. That couldn’t have been much fun.”
“So who in the fuck is Vince’s real mom?”