I nod slowly, triggering low laughter from him. But for the first time since I was a fifteen-year-old kid, my uncle’s obvious enjoyment of my failure doesn’t make me angry. It only makes me…confused.
“Why do you hate me so damned much?” I ask.
“What?” Some of the humor goes out of his eyes, but his smile stays in place.
“Why do you hate me?” I ask again, genuinely curious. “I’m your only relative left in Bliss River, and I was a star when I was a kid.”
He snorts. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do,” I say, refusing to let him off the hook. “Most uncles would have been proud to have their nephew playing first string on the basketball team, and graduating at the top of their class. Why not you?”
His smile curls, becoming something closer to a snarl. “You really think you’re something, don’t you?”
“A lot of people thought I was something. But not you, not Don Parker. Why not? Were you jealous?”
Uncle Parker’s eyebrows lift. “Of you?”
“Of me.” I stare him dead in his cold, flat eyes.
“I ain’t jealous of jack shit. I was you, boy,” he says, his smile returning. “I had a scholarship to play ball, but I gave it up to stay here and keep your mama out of trouble. God knows our mama couldn’t be bothered.” He laughs a bitter laugh. “If it were up to her, we’d have been out on the streets by the time I was seventeen. I worked my ass off after school to get the things me and Tanya needed, while Mama sat on her ass in front of the T.V. I paid for.”
“Did my mom ask you to give up college?” I try not to seem too interested. In all the time I lived with my uncle, he never talked this much about his childhood.
Or my mother.
He scowls. “Of course not. She didn’t have to. A real man doesn’t have to be asked. I gave up my chance at a better life to stay here and protect her, but she managed to get herself pregnant anyway.” He turns to his beer. “I saved up the money to help her get rid of it, but she said she was in love,” he continues with a sneer. “She and Mike Stewart convinced Mama to sign the papers they needed to get married underage. That lasted about six months before your daddy ran off and Tanya moved back in with us, bringing you with her. And then I had two more mouths to feed again and one ass to keep in diapers.”
His hands tighten around his glass as he looks back at me. “I could have been something. I could have played professional ball or been a doctor or whatever I wanted to be. Instead I got you, and your little nose in the air and that look in your eye that made it clear how much better you thought you were than the rest of us. Truth told, I think that’s why your mama ran off. She couldn’t stand to stay here and be looked down on by her own damn kid anymore.”
I blink. That should hurt. All of it. Everything he’d just said.
But it doesn’t. Not a word. I don’t feel hurt or angry, only numb and sad, and surprisingly, a little sorry for him.
“I’m sorry,” I say, taking another long drink of beer.
“What?” His face pinches, all his features bunching closer to the center.
“I’m sorry I fucked up your life,” I repeat. “Wasn’t my intention. Doubt it was my mom’s, either. She was only fifteen.”
He scowls. “I don’t want your apology.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I don’t want shit from you. Never have, never will.”
I lean in closer to my uncle. “Now you’re lying, Parker. You’ve been dying to watch me fail the way you did ever since I was a kid. But guess what? I’m not going to roll over and play dead. Never. No matter what you do to me, no matter how you gloat when I fall short of what I reach for. Never.”
Never, I think again to myself, resolve banishing the whiskey haze.
I’m never going to be like my uncle.
And I don’t belong in this bar.
Parker starts cussing, but I barely hear him. I reach in my wallet and toss a couple of twenties on the bar for the drinks, then step off my stool.
“Thank you,” I say, cutting through the stream of obscenity. “If you hadn’t come in here, I would have spent a lot more time feeling sorry for myself.”
“Go fuck yourself,” he growls.
“You’re going to need a new hobby,” I say, clapping him on the back in the same chummy way he’d greeted me on the way in. “You can’t touch me anymore.”
He has a few more choice words to say to that, but they drift in one ear and out the other, becoming a nonsensical hum that buzzes harmlessly around my head as I walk to the door and push out into the sunshine.