Safe Keeping. Barbara Taylor Sissel

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СКАЧАТЬ it open for her. “Guess you came looking for your brother and thought you’d just skip on by if he wasn’t here.”

      “No, Daddy, I was coming in.”

      “The hell you were.”

      “You look like hell,” she said. Up close, she could see his face was sweaty and pale under his iron-gray buzz cut. His leg was bothering him again, or she should say the lack of his leg. The pain was worse, Lissa guessed. Ordinarily, he was never bothered by it. In fact, people who knew him often forgot he was missing a limb. According to her mother, though, the ill effects of her dad’s amputation, the aching and tenderness, had resurfaced recently. Probably the result of stress, Lissa thought. He wasn’t handling retirement very well, and there was Tucker, always Tucker. Lissa loved him—they all loved him—but the joke, the painful family joke, was that he could drive God to drink.

      She followed her dad into his office. When she and Tucker were young, her dad kept it locked because of his gun collection. Of course, the precaution only heightened their curiosity; they had looked for ways to be in here, to handle the weapons, and their wish was granted. Over their mother’s protests, Daddy schooled them—the same as their mom—in their use. He taught them to hunt and claimed Lissa had a dead eye.

      She sat in a club chair across from him now, and she was wary. She couldn’t quite sort out his mood. She asked if he was okay.

      No answer. There was only the sound of his breath, the creak of the leather as he shifted his weight in the tall wingback desk chair.

      Dropping her glance, she saw the morning newspaper folded on the desk’s corner, the photo of Jessica Sweet staring out. It looked as if it had been taken from a high school yearbook of roughly the same vintage as Tucker’s. Lissa thought she had read somewhere they were the same age, thirty-four, and it worried her. It made it seem more likely Tucker might have known her. She started to say something, to make some comment, or offer the customary reassurance, but then she saw the ledger—the old-fashioned, leather-bound business ledger that her dad insisted they keep the family company’s, Lebay-Winter’s, financial records in because he didn’t trust computers, the ledger that was supposed to be at the office that she and Evan shared in town, but instead was sitting here, open on the desk blotter.

      “What are you doing with that?” she asked.

      “Not the right question,” her dad answered.

      “So, what is?”

      “Oh, I think you know.”

      They sat, eyes locked, while silence rose, like a rigid wall. Lissa’s dad, the former decorated United States Army drill sergeant, said a guilty man, a soldier in her dad’s case, who had something to hide, couldn’t handle the silence. Pretty soon, he’d break down, say whatever came into his mind just to fill the void. Eventually, he’d hang himself. Her dad was waiting for that now, for Lissa to hang herself.

      She set her teeth together.

      “I’ve been going over the numbers,” he said finally. “You and Evan have been bullshitting me. We’re not in good shape the way you said. In fact, this is looking like the worst year we’ve had in the past five. You want to tell me why you lied?”

      “About the numbers?” When had he gotten the ledger? Lissa tried to put it together even as she said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

      “Come on, Lissa!” Her dad smacked the desktop with the flat of his hand. “I’m retired, not senile.”

      “I understand that, Dad, but I assumed that since you retired and turned over control of the company to me, and to Evan, that meant you trusted us to run the place.”

      “I built that goddamn business from nothing, worked it thirty years. You can’t push me out.”

      “Oh, Daddy, we’re not trying to!” Lissa was nonplussed at the emotion in his voice, the way it slipped and caught.

      He held her gaze, and she saw that his eyes were dark with anguish and, amazingly, filmed with tears. In her entire life, she had never known him to cry; he counted a man’s tears as weakness. It alarmed her; it hurt her heart. He could be gruff, even hard; he might take your head off if you made a foolish mistake. But the very same man had spent hours building her the exact replica of a dollhouse from an illustration in a book she’d fallen in love with, and she could still recall the shapes of the calluses that spanned his palm from all the times he’d taken her hand when he’d walked her to school. He’d taught her to drive and never once raised his voice, not even when she’d driven them into a ditch and he’d had to call a tow truck to get them out again.

      “Look,” she said quickly, “maybe we did overstate a bit. It’s been tough the past several months, you know that, what with the economy, and then ever since—” She stopped before she could say Tucker’s name, say how badly business had been affected by last year’s notoriety, but her dad knew what was in her mind.

      He inclined his head in the direction of the Houston Chronicle and said, “Yeah, well, it looks like the shit’s about to hit the fan again.”

      “You don’t know that, Dad.”

      A silence fell.

      Her father broke it. “Your mother tried to call the cops to report him missing this morning. She would have, if I hadn’t stopped her.”

      “She wants to find him, that’s all.”

      He shook his head. “She’s losing it.”

      Lissa didn’t ask what he meant, whether he thought it was her mother’s faith or her mind that was going. He looked at the newspaper, but she looked at him. She thought he was the one who was losing it. He looked so distraught. But he’d caused this, hadn’t he? He’d put himself in this position.

      As if he felt her gaze, her father looked at her and said, “What?” in that tone he used when he meant to prick a nerve.

      “Momma said you told Tucker to get out and not come back.”

      “So?”

      “So, you got what you wanted.”

      “He called me, his own father, a fucking bastard and said he was a grown man and could take care of himself, which I’d like to see—just once.”

      “Well, he could, if he had a job, if he had a paycheck. You cut him out of the business, Daddy! You basically disowned him. What was he supposed to do, fall all over you with kisses, his heartfelt thanks?”

      “You know he blew another meeting with Carl Pederson.”

      She nodded. She and Evan were as irked at Tucker as her dad, as Carl himself, was. It wasn’t easy to find a good cabinet man.

      “If it was anyone else, screwing up as consistently as your brother has, I’d have fired them a long time ago,” her dad said. “Even you and Evan would have. You know I’m right.”

      Lissa picked at her thumbnail. He wanted her to say he was justified in cutting Tucker from the business. And maybe he was. “Tucker is your son, not just some employee,” she said.

      “I’ve given him every chance, bent over backward. Like I said to your mother this morning, the boy needs to grow СКАЧАТЬ