Page 31 of S.O.S. Perk

But since this question sounded tentative, Perk assumed she was speaking from experience, and that Sloane’s family wasn’t a real Beaver-Cleaver situation, either.

“Well,” he began slowly, “My family all live in Maine; my Mom and Dad, my two older, married brothers. I’m the baby in the family, and…” This was harder than he thought since he’d never put his actual hurt into words before. Either his previous acquaintances hadn’t cared, or he hadn’t given those closest to him anything to go on, as was the case with his SOS constituents.

This was all about the bullshit he’d carried around with him since his school years; that had carried over into his stint in the Army,andhis time as a cop before he’d joined SOS.

Perk took a deep breath and went for it this time. “None of my relatives take me seriously.”

“Excuse me?” Sloane came back. “I think I heard you say that your family doesn’t take you seriously?”

“That’s right,” he confirmed. “And I know it sounds ridiculous, but… I’ve always looked far younger than my years, as you well know, and that means I haven’t ever been treated as…an actual adult by those closest to me. I seem to be stuck in teenage-time to them, and I can’t seem to fix it.”

“Seriously, Perk? Wait. Didn’t I hear that you were in the Army at one point? That didn’t convince them you could take care of yourself?”

“Nope. Iwason active duty in the Middle East, but it didn’t change my standing within the fam because the ops I went on were classified, so they had no idea what I was doing. And before you ask, joining the Orono PD when I got out didn’t help, either. They thought it was nothing more than a stop-gap measure, and it still wasn’t enough to convince them that I’m a fully functioning, grown-ass human being.”

“That’s fucked up, Perk.”

Like he didn’t know that.

She probed deeper. “How do they feel about your job with SOS?”

“I, uh, don’t really talk about it. They’d find a way to make it…less than it is because they still believe I’m just messing around with my life. They think that if they can simply get me back to Maine where they can ‘watch over me’, they can make sure I choose the right direction for my future.”

“What is it they do for a living?” Sloane asked.

“They’re all in finance, one way or another. In my father’s firm. Brokers, money managers… That’s what they want for me.”

A quiet sadness came to Sloane’s voice. “So, they don’t really know you at all.”

“Not as anyone other than the clueless youngster I was twelve or fifteen years ago.”

“I’m sorry, Perk. That’s got to suck.”

“Yeah.” He forced a laugh. “Especially at Christmas where they still gift me with calculators or actual toys… Not that I’ll complain about the Lego sets I get,” he added on a playful note. “Those are the bomb.”

Perk purposely downplayed the amount of hurt he felt, not actually being “seen” by his family. It was, and always had been the cause of many of his insecurities which were only now, with SOS, being assuaged. In the Army he’d been treated like a greenhorn. In the OPD he’d been subject to so many verbalhead-pats he couldn’t count them. But with Del’s team, he suddenly found himself taken seriously for the first time in his life, and it had been confidence-changing.

Sloane huffed. “I don’t know which of us have it worse, then. You, sleeping in what I imagine is a far too short childhood bed when you go home for holidays, or me not having an actual home left from my early years to even visit.”

“You want to explain that?” Perk asked gently.

Sloane gave a wry laugh. “Well, my parents went through an acrimonious divorce when I was eight years old, and since neither would budge on their demands of the other, the only home I’d ever known ended up getting sold so they could split the proceeds. Just like they split up our family.”

There was another pause, but Perk remained patiently quiet.

“I ended up living with my mother—who was terrible with money—in a series of stark, rooming houses. She never much cared where I was or what I was getting up to while she went through a wild phase of drinking and partying; not caring how fast she bled through her nest-egg until we ended up in really crappy subsidized housing.

“My two older sisters went with my father, and they didn’t have it much better. They lived in a run-down cottage, one that was always a mess, and had to watch as a string of questionable women passed through the place, gracing my father’s bed. Dear old Dad was a little better at giving my sisters what they needed with a modicum of hands-off attention, but not anywhere near what they should have received.”

“That all sucks, Sloane,” Perk commiserated.

He might still be treated as a wayward teenager by his folks, but at least it was all done with love.

Sloane wasn’t finished with her story. “I think it’s why my sisters and I all chose relationships with inappropriate men; ones who talked the talk, but paid little attention to what wereally needed from them. We just didn’t have the right role models to know what was good and what was bad. My sisters have long since been divorced like me, but they, along with my mother, remain man-haters to this day.”

Which Sloane, Perk knew, was not. But shewasjudicious in who she let into her life. Perk had seen that.

And now he got it.

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