Chapter Nineteen
Stunned, his body so tight it felt like one slight nudge could shatter him, Sloan didn’t even try to hide his fury. “My mother’s brother? How come no one ever told me I have an uncle?”
“Because him and your old man didn’t see eye to eye. Look there’s a lot about your mother you don’t know.” Les refused to look at him.
“A lot? Fuck, man. I don’t know anything. None of you musketeers were forthcoming about her. I learned early on to stop asking questions and just accept that you three were my family.”
“We did the best we could, Sloan.”
Sloan reached out to Roy and squeezed his arm. “Don’t take that the wrong way, man. No kid had a better upbringing than I did. How many other brats had three dads hovering around, and you playing the mom role when you sensed I needed it, or the buddy role when it seemed appropriate? All my friends thought I was the luckiest bastard in the world.”
“And you? What did you think?” Les had a shrewd look in his eye and Sloan knew he expected the truth.
“I was a kid. What the hell did I know?”
Roy broke in. “We saw the poster you always had hanging in your room of the Hawaiian princess, leis around her neck, long hair streaming in the wind and her muumuu flowing. Every time I saw that picture, it stunned me just how much it looked like Wai. When you were little, you told me the girl was your mom, and we never argued with you. If it made you happy – it was fine with us.”
“The day I spotted the poster, Dad stopped next to it, stunned and shaky; he said the girl looked just like Wai. I made him buy it for me so I had an image of her. That night when he hung it up, he finally talked about her, the one and only time. He stared at the image, said she’d been a loving girl who’d had so much to give, but she couldn’t be tied down to only one man. I was too young to understand what he meant then. But as I got older, it always stayed with me. I guess because there wasn’t any censure in his voice, only love, I never held it against her that she’d left. The three of you more than made up for her absence.”
Roy wrapped his arm around Sloan’s shoulders and squeezed, a loving gesture he made often. “She was lovely, son, inside and out.”
Sloan caught Les’s eye and saw how Roy’s words had touched him. Staring, unable to look away, he dared Les to finally admit the truth about their family. About the strange life of three men and one boy living together in a rambling place attached to the garage where they worked.
Secrets had always simmered underneath their everyday normal routine, but Sloan had been brought up to respect everyone’s rights to their own memories and to stay out of where he wasn’t invited.
So questions hadn’t been asked and no one had volunteered any information. When a sensitive kid perceived that the people in his life wouldn’t take kindly to demands, he stopped making them.
Les began slowly, inching his way forward. “Your mother was as beautiful as your poster. Everyone loved her.”
Sloan knew his voice came out rough but he had to know. “Roy did. How about you, Les? Did you love her too?”
A long silence followed with Les leaning down, clutching his hands between his knees; hands that shook visibly.
Roy broke in. “Tell him, Les. It’s past time.”
“Look, kid, we all loved her.” He waved at Roy and then at himself. “I met her at night school where I used my drawing talent to learn how to actually paint. She took classes too because she worked with fabrics, designs on materials, had a dream of starting her own line of clothing. In those days, Wai wasn’t ready to settle down, she was wild and free. She dazzled me, and I brought her here to meet my two friends, Tom and Roy.”
Roy took over. “The three of us had worked our passage across from ‘Frisco and had been shoved in the same stateroom. After Les and Tommy stopped the squabbling, we settled in and became kind of attached. Decided that once we arrived, we’d open a garage in Honolulu and go into business together.”
“That’s how you three startedBooker’s. I often wondered.”
Les answered. “Hell, we fit together as if it was meant to be. With Roy’s mechanic skills, he could handle the repairs. Tom could do the body work and eventually became skilled at the drawings, and I could do the finishing and detailing. Worked like a hot damn. Tom had the only bankroll, so he invested in the property and we started building up the business, gaining a reputation, and we became known for not cheating or bullshitting our clientele.”
Sloan had grown up knowing aboutBookers’reputation. “Tell me about my mother. What happened?”
Les stood and began striding from one end of the room to the other. “We all happened, is what happened. Your mom was a free spirit, she couldn’t be tied down. She loved people and took to Roy because of his gentle spirit – her words, not mine.”
Roy added. “She loved to ride the waves and talked Les into surfing with her. Even though she’d surfed all her life, he taught her a lot.”
“Guess she liked doing more than riding the waves—”
Roy came back at Sloan like a tornado touching down. “You don’t get to talk about her that way, son. She wouldn’t hurt a fly; she caught them and released them outside. She never meant to break our hearts. She just loved everyone. But in the end, when she found she was pregnant, she chose your dad as the father and wrote his name on your birth certificate. Once you were six months old, she disappeared and we never heard from her again.”
Les added, “She’d seen the way we all fawned over you. Hell, the three of us were like fucking love-sick idiots all over one tiny baby.”
Roy nodded. “It’s true. She knew we’d never let you go. In the end, after she disappeared, Tommy always blamed Tadeo for her desertion. He’d found out that Tadeo had given her the money to move to San Francisco, to start her own business. Tommy went to Tadeo for her address, laid a beating on him, but the man wasn’t sharing. Tom went after Wai but he never found her. Came back to his new baby and we all carried on.”
“So… which one of you bastards is my father?”