"You know what I mean."
Yeah, I did know what he meant. He thought I looked even worse than usual. Dick face. "Yeah, yeah. Whatever you say."
He didn't say anything else but he did shake his head in response. "I got two good eyes, Ritz. You’re fine. You should already know I don't mean half the shit that comes outta my mouth."
He had. At least half a dozen times, so I should know better than to take too much of his verbal crap to heart. Plus, why should I care? It wasn't like I was planning on being best friends with him. Right?
"I know," I sighed, turning my attention to look out the window.
Neither one of us said anything else for the longest. I sat there and thought about telling Dex that I was quitting and the guilt swamped me. God, I felt like a jackass when I had no reason to. It wasn't like I was a special employee. The work was pretty easy, he could find a hundred other people to fill the position.
Still, it sucked.
I felt like my father. A coward.
A coward that had come into town and asked his long-lost son for money.
And a coward that had disappeared as quickly as he'd popped up. Which speaking of, I hadn't brought up to Sonny again after he'd been so pissed off over the situation. Dex might know more and he'd be a more reasonable person to talk to since he wasn't emotionally attached to the situation.
"Hey, Dex?"
The smartass that had somehow popped up over the course of the last three days replied, "Hey, Ritz."
Oh lord.
"By any chance, did you see Sonny's dad when he was here?" I asked him as casually as possible.
Keeping his eyes straight ahead, his mouth twitched. "Nope."
Nope? That was all I was going to get out of him?
"But I did hear about it," he thankfully kept going. His eyes flickered over in my direction. "Why?"
"I'm just curious." Extremely curious but he didn't need to know that.
"I know he asked for a loan," he offered in a gentle voice that made me wary. "And I know Luther didn't give it to him."
"Oh." I paused, redirecting my eyes to the window. "Huh."
I wanted to know what the money was for. And even though I didn't want to, I wanted to know what he'd been doing the last eight years. Why he hadn't bothered coming to see Will—to see me.
The questions sank to the pit of my stomach like lead, dragging my mood down with it. Until I thought about what it was like to go through a million and a half things without my father.
I didn't need him.
I didn't. Not today. Not tomorrow. Never.
"Trip told me the shit he pulled on you and your ma," Dex spoke suddenly.
My muscles tensed up.
"I remember hearin' about him movin' away when I was a kid," he explained. "I didn't know he left y'all though."
The urge to blabber out that he'd left a year before I got sick was right on my tongue but I fought it back.
"He never came back after your ma died?" Dex asked in a low, gentle voice.
I had to swallow back the bitter sting in my throat. "Nope. I mean, he came right at the end. Right before she died. Then he left again the day afterward." My voice cracked just a little but it was enough to shame me for being so emotional about something that had happened forever ago.
And it was enough for Dex to notice.
He reached over and tapped the side of my leg with the back of his tattooed index finger. "That shit's not worth your tears, babe."
It wasn't exactly comfort in yia-yia's arms but his light nudge was enough to center me. To make me remember that man wasn't worth my tears or even my thoughts. My mind was all for it but my body felt otherwise.
I sniffed.
"I'm serious, don’t go cryin'," Dex added in that same even tone he'd used a moment before.
I nodded. Whether it was to his words or myself, I'm not sure, but I sucked in a deep breath and thought of my mom. My sweet mom who had loved a man, lost him, and never fully recovered. I never wanted to be like that. I never wanted to end up in the same shoes. I'd lost enough in my life to risk losing even more.
"I remember when your dad came back once a long time ago. He came by to see Sonny but Son didn't a give a shit by then, ya know. Told him to fuck off because Son was pissed at something."
Something.
The memory of Sonny's call a few weeks after my mom had passed away was an easy memory. One of us always called the other at least every month back then, my half-brother had always been super easygoing. But that call, when I'd told him that our dad had left again, Sonny had lost it.
Absolutely lost it.
It might have been because the older Taylor had only stuck around a few years in his life, and even when he was in Austin while Sonny was a kid, he was a distant figure. Our dad had never committed himself in any way to Sonny's mom, though I'd learn years later that the word commitment meant nothing when he broke three hearts in Florida.
Regardless, it didn't hit me until I was a teenager and Sonny had gone out of his way to have a relationship with Will and me. At least we'd gotten Curt Taylor longer than he had.
So when Sonny found out that our birth father had left—again—right after Mom died... he'd been furious.
And I think that Sonny swallowed up all the anger that Will and I had, for us.
"Your old man is a fuckin' prick."
That wasn't the first time I'd heard those words. I shrugged. "You should have heard the Greek names my grandma had for him. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had a voodoo doll in his image under her bed.”
He pursed his lips together. "She's gone?"
Almost immediately after I went into remission but I wasn't that specific with him. "She had a heart attack in her sleep a couple years ago." What I also didn't explain to him was that she'd sold her house a few months before she passed away to pay my medical bills.
"Goddamn." Dex's long, masculine fingers tapped against the steering wheel. Lifting a hand, he pressed the back of it to his face. "That...that fuckin’ sucks, honey.”
I blew out a breath and laughed just a little, more nervous and resigned than anything. “It could have been worse. He could have been abusive, or...I’m not sure. I just know that it could have been a lot worse, I guess.”
Dex glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, jaw shifting in the brief silence that followed what I said before he spoke again. "My pa was a piece of shit, too. Always yellin' at my sisters, talkin' smack to my ma, tryin’ to beat my ass when he could. Constantly drunk, stealin' money from Ma or whoever was stupid enough to hang around him so he could hit up the bar and get so shit-faced he'd fall asleep on the floor most days. Worthless waste of life especially after they kicked him outta the Widows when they got tired of his shit.”
By about halfway through him speaking, I'd been so stunned that I'd shifted in my seat to look at him. Where the heck his honesty had come from, I had no clue but I was sucked in completely.
When there was an awkward break in the conversation, I blurted out a question. "What happened to him?"
He sighed so painfully, I wouldn't have imagined a man like Dex could harbor so much resentment in him. He'd never seemed like the type to be disappointed in others. He usually went from normal to straight up pissed off.
"He got arrested for distributin' when I was eighteen. Haven't seen his face or spoken to him since."
"Not once?" I asked him in a low voice.
Dex shook his head roughly. Anger and frustration seeped from his pores, stinging my chest with his unease over the past. "Not since he blamed me and Ma for his mess. Told us it was our fault for lettin' him get away with his shit for so long. Said we should’ve gotten him help. Can you believe that shit? I spent years tryin’ to get him to spend time with me and my sisters instead of with his vodka and he blames us for bein' a drunk motherfucker?