Page 14 of Brando

He gives me a long, curious look, as though assessing my words. “Why not?”

“I just don’t want to.”

“I would’ve thought you’d go running into his arms, Mia.”

His words, the very animosity in them, slices through my heart. I shrug. Little does he know. I can’t tell him why I don’t want to meet one on one with Frank. I can’t tell him why I ended it, and why I swore I’d never sit in a room with the man again. I’ve been carrying my own demons for years, and I know it’s time I unload them, but this is neither the time nor the place.

“We didn’t end on good terms,” I tell him. It’s the truth…somewhat.

“Then tell me why he insists on seeing you. And how the fuck he got your number.”

Brando leavesafter I don’t give him the answers he needs. Because I can’t. I don’t know the reasons why Frank has reached out to me, and I don’t have the answer to how he got my number. I don’t know anything past the fact that my life as I know it is currently falling apart – I feel like I’m in a speeding car going 300 miles an hour and there’s no way of stopping it. One minute, my future is so clear, the next, I’m running from the Maltese mob and trying to find my sisters in a sea of unfamiliar faces.

“You okay, kiddo?” Uncle Mason looms above me as I sit at the small dining table, head in my hands. My tears have all but dried as I look up at him.

“Have you found anything?” I ask, grasping at straws, clinging to the hope that we’ll find my sisters. He gives me a small, sad shake of his head, his lips pursed into a thin line. I think if he gets his hands on my sisters before I do, he’ll kill them himself. Irresponsible bitches.

“Everything’s set for tomorrow. I’ll stay here the night; I’ll take the couch.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I whisper.

“I’m not going to leave you alone, Mia. I’ve already lost two of you, I’m not going to risk you, as well.”

He removes two guns from the back of his pants and sets them down on the counter, ensuring the safety is on. His eyebrows rise in curiosity as he sees me eyeing the pistols.

“You still know how to handle a gun?” he asks. The smile that forms on his lips tells me he’s carried away to a memory from aforgotten time. I snort in response, then return his smile; I know we’re remembering the same memory.

“Are you kidding me? I’ll never forget the hiding I got from mom when I was six and she found out you’d been giving me lessons.”

My mother had been incensed that I had handled a gun. After she’d almost skinned me alive, she’d ripped into Uncle Mason, screaming and lashing out at him. Something about breaking the trust she’d put in him. I didn’t think it pertinent to tell her that I’d been handling a gun for almost a year.

“I think she was secretly pleased that you knew how to handle yourself,” he tells me. The wistful look he gives me tells me he’s lost himself to his memories. I frown and something niggles at the back of my mind as I continue to watch him go back in time. Me at five, learning to shoot a gun with Uncle Mason. At seven, he taught me how to ride a horse. At nine, I lost my mother. From birth to the age of nine, I could count on two hands the number of memories I had with my own father, but I didn’t have enough digits to compile the memory box that was Uncle Mason. I’d never given it much thought, but it feels strange now to think of it – when I think of Uncle Mason, he’s been a stronger presence in my life than my own dad. Yet when I remember my father, the twins are always in those memories. He gave them more of his time than he gave him, and that fact strikes me as odd now when I think about it.

“You were always there with me, teaching me something new.”

He takes the chair opposite me and settles into it with a sigh.

“Your father wasn’t the fatherly type,” he tells me, as though certain of that thought that’s lingering in my mind. “He only changed with the twins after he lost your mother.”

“He changed with the twins.”

“Don’t do that, Mia. He loved you very much. He just thought you were independent enough to take care of yourself. The twins needed him more.”

“How could you have been so selfless that you took those hours to teach me, nurture me, make sure I had a strong male presence in my life? When my own father didn’t.”

The realization hits me like a freight train. It never mattered, though it stings now that I won’t have the chance to make the same memories with him as the ones I have with Uncle Mason. Uncle Mason who never married. Never had children of his own. Gave selflessly of his own time to be a surrogate father to me when my own father wouldn’t step up to the plate for me.

I watch as he swallows past a thick lump in his throat.

“Your father was a very complicated man.”

“Aren’t we all? Life is a complication, but that doesn’t mean we deprive the ones we purport to love of their most basic human needs.”

“You were loved.” His voice is hoarse as he reaches out his hands. I look down at the table where his hands lay on top of mine; an odd spark zaps through me as I finally understand that despite everything that has come to pass and everything yet to come, Uncle Mason has been more a father to me than my own flesh and blood.

8

MIA

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