Chapter 22 - Daxon

“That must have been Dane’s girlfriend,” Mom said as she finally broke the silence.

“Who?” I said, half-awake after the long stint I had in the jazz club last night. I couldn’t remember the last time I decided to take a chance with my music. It was a smooth mix between old and new, the crowd loved it. Big man, the boss, said I should do it again. It would mean a big payout for me, and an even bigger one for him. As soon as I got in, Mom said we needed to go to the mall, which meant we needed to talk.

“Shit!” Mom hated when we cursed, and I covered my mouth. Sure, she knew we weren’t saints, but there were certain things that she couldn’t tolerate, and one was cursing.

I scratched my head. “That was why she kissed me and looked as if she was about to cry when we walked away.”

It was Lisa, sure I’d seen her before and spoken to her. But I wasn’t on campus and the moment I left campus, I stopped pretending to be Dane. I had to get out of his head space and away from his world.

His friends were cool, but there was only so much football, and women I could talk about in a day. I wasn’t a nerd like David, but I needed my music even more than usual to keep up with this insane life we were living.

Mom knew?

“How do you know about Dane’s girlfriend?” She laughed as she flicked her hair to the side. It was when I noticed her bangs were overgrown, her nails weren’t painted, and she’d gone out without make-up. A deadly sin she would cry out for anyone over forty to be seen without make-up. I rarely saw her without it. I wondered if she’d went to bed with it on. It seemed crazy for her to be worried about her vanity, especially seeing as we were her sons.

“You boys are not the best at keeping secrets, besides I heard David and Dane argue about her one day. Don’t you think that you boys should stop playing games? Anyway, let’s sit down and talk, then when we get home, I’ll talk to the guys, too. Okay?” she said with her eyes half-open. It was as if the little joke, which I’d accidentally given her had been pushed to the side, as her once bright hazel eyes were now dull. I could tell that something was bugging her, but whenever we asked her, she would close up. She wanted to talk and the only thing that I was craving was sleep.

She was right. There had been enough tension to cut the atmosphere since Dane said he had a girlfriend. So much so that he’d taken to living in the dorm of one of his football jocks last week. I assumed David fucked Lisa, and this wound Dane up big time, especially when he told us not to touch her. I’d had no trouble doing that because it was wrong in so many ways. She thought we were one person. Imagine her surprise if she found out we were not one, but three.

I avoided any text she sent me and made sure I was never alone with her. That was until now. What were the odds of bumping into her at the mall?

Anyway, after Mom said whatever she had to say, then I would tell the guys that we had to come clean or Dane had to break up with her. Knowing my brother, the latter wasn’t an option. He wouldn’t want to break up with her. Then again, I wasn’t sure we thought it all through because he was a senior and she was a freshman, and we all knew footballers didn’t have the best reputation for keeping a relationship, let alone a long-distance one.

“Where should we go?” I asked, losing patience. This was too much for me. I was the type that avoided emotion and drama. Yet, I’d managed to involve myself in both in such a short space of time.

She shrugged. “Starbucks?”

I nodded, and all I could hope was that the girls didn’t have the same idea. Bumping into Lisa once was bad enough, twice was just too much to handle in one afternoon, and there would be nothing else I could do but to come clean. I wasn’t the best at keeping secrets and I was even worse at lying.

We headed to Starbucks, and I was acting as if I was walking naked through the mall by looking in every direction, making sure no eyes were on us. Mom trudged ahead, as if she whatever it was, was weighing her down. As soon as we reached Starbucks, she found a table and sat down.

She was a creature of habit, then again, we all were. I didn’t need to ask her what she wanted, it was always the same thing, cappuccino with a splash of chocolate. I decided that maybe I would go for the mango Frappuccino for a change, but as soon as I reached the counter, I ended up ordering the same thing as Mom. The same thing that I always did and part of it annoyed me, not trying something new, but the other part knew that today wasn’t the day for trying new things, especially when I ignored Dane’s new girlfriend, who really should be my girl.

As I waited for our orders to be ready, I noticed that both Tanya and Lisa were heading back out of the mall. Whatever it was that made them change their mind, I was happy about not having to bump into her over again.

My phone rang, and I automatically turned it off while I waited for our drinks. I didn’t care who was calling, I wasn’t supposed to be Dane, so I knew that the only two people who could have been calling me were either David or the man himself.

I grabbed our drinks and headed to our table. Mom’s head was buried in her hands, it was only after I got closer that I noticed she was crying.

“Mom?”

She shook her head, “Sorry. This is just too much. We shouldn’t have come here.”

I slumped down in the chair and passed the coffee to her, along with her favorite chocolate muffin. The main reason why she loved having coffee here was because of the muffin.

“This always puts a smile on your face,” I said as I shoved the muffin in her direction.

She smiled. “No, you always put a smile on my face. It’s just that with David arguing and the issues with Dane, what felt like a good idea at first feels like a really horrible one.”

I shrugged. “What do you mean?”

She sipped on her cappuccino with both hands and then nibbled on her muffin. I stopped watching her and did the same as I became nervous about what she was about to tell me.

“I know playing Dane was fun at first. Back at high school, you would tease and play around. I remember when you signed Dane up for a singing competition.”

I pointed as the memory flashed in my mind. “I remember that, but then Dane got out of it because he said he had a sore throat on the day.”

Mom giggled. “After he sang, everyone questioned why he had a voice of an angel one day, and the voice of a devil the next.”

We both sipped our coffees, sniggering as we remembered how Dane came home from school claiming he would kill David one day.

“Then, freshman year, I remember that you guys all used to laugh about it,” she said.

Memories flashed in my head as I shifted my eyes from staring at her. She was eating her muffin and staring into the distance as if the memories that were in my mind were being shared with her as she smiled.

“Then, by sophomore year, I could tell that you had your bad days, but still good days, too. You loved working as a team, and everyone was playing their part. But it started to fall apart last year. You with your music, and David with his studies, and Dane with his football, and not let’s forget about your twenty-first birthday…”

“Yeah, that was hard. I mean, it was great. You cooked a great meal and all that.”

“But it was crap. Dane was out celebrating with his football buddies and you guys were stuck indoors with your mom. Because when all was said and done, I realized for the first time that you guys were not allowed to have friends. I think that’s when you started playing in the club.”

I nodded. “Yeah, because I realized for the first time since we’ve been here that I didn’t have friends and I hadn’t been me. Like, not at all. Turning twenty-one and being able to perform in the club and even write my own shit…” I paused, thinking that cursing and Mom didn’t go together.

She laughed and encouraged me to keep talking by waving her hands. “Go on.”

“Well, it just helped deal with it all.”

I didn’t have anything more to say about the subject; I wasn’t great at expressing myself vocally unless it was through music. It was one of my frustrations, especially with my dyslexia, but music helped me focus and balance out what I needed to say and when, which is why I divulged in it so much—maybe a little too much at times.

“I’m scared that all this sacrifice is going to go in vain. Dane’s so close to graduating and signing up with the 49ers. All we need for him to do is sign-up and then…”

“Then what, Mom? He all of a sudden has brothers that magically appear from London with no school certificates, nothing to show that they’ve been in school all this time? Believe me, I’ve thought about the end goal, and it wasn’t the best plan back then, but we all went along with it. What choice did we have?”

She shook her head. “You can do whatever you guys want with the money he will make, and that’s what we agreed.”

I shrugged, thinking she’d ignored some part of what I was saying. “It’s okay for me. I mean, I’ll just keep trying with my music… I don’t need a degree for that. But David’s the academic. He’s the one who wanted to be a professor.”

“And he can do that. He can apply here or Canada or anywhere in the world to study as a mature student. There’s nothing stopping anyone from following their dreams. This is what we all agreed.”

I hated to break it to her, but I had to tell her the truth.

“You asked us when were fifteen. Mom, we were horny teenagers who didn’t know any better. We just went along with it. It was a game at first, and we loved it ‘cause we could see that you were hurting. Dad left you. Not only did he break your heart, but he cleaned out your bank accounts and left you penniless. A bitter divorce, one that we witnessed, and the only thing was for you to come here, get a job, and for us all to pretend to be one person. That worked, but then we grew. Living in that apartment, with only two bedrooms and no privacy. Never being able to invite friends over. Never having any real friends started to get to us. You know how many times I’ve been to campus. Seen guys messing around, singing, watching them play the piano and wishing I was one of them? Too many times. But as you said, it’ll be over in the summer. It’ll be over.”

I drank my cappuccino as the idea of listening to my reality in every single word started to hit home. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know about my fate, but hearing it said out loud just made me feel even more depressed than I already felt and somehow, I needed something a lot stronger than a cappuccino—and I wasn’t much of a drinker, not like Dane.

“I had this stupid idea… a crazy one. I would come here to tell you the news and then we would talk to the guys, but now this feels so wrong. The boys are arguing, you’re mad at me…”

She was rambling, and I was losing patience.

“So, just spit it out.”

She took a deep breath, held not only one of my hands, but both of them on the table. She looked at me directly and said, “Your dad is dead. Apparently, he died in some car crash or something.”

“Oh.” I felt as if something was stuck in my throat for a quick second, not knowing how to feel or even react. A man who was my dad had died six years ago when he left us. When he left her and didn’t even bat an eye about our fate. He had never been in contact, and I didn’t know what to say to her. Did she know how angry we were when we were told we couldn’t go to high school and had to leave our friends and move out here from New Jersey. She clearly didn’t have a clue; she was depressed and we’d spent the first few years just getting her out of her depression. We packed the house before the bank came to do the foreclosure on it, because he took out a loan and forged her signature. He’d not only lied and cheated on her, but he could have easily left her and us for dead on the street. I didn’t care that he’d died, I hated him back then and even more now because I could never tell him exactly how I felt. Not that he cared. I moved my hand from hers and finished my muffin.

When I finished it, I looked at her and I could tell she was in shock. “Oh, is that all you have to say?”

I didn’t look at her as I closed my eyes, savoring the final chocolate chip of my muffin still lingering in my mouth. My favorite ritual of eating it.

“I thought that he would think of you boys, maybe leave you something to make up for the shit he did.”

I raised an eyebrow and stared at her as she started to sob. Did she really think during six years of silence that he was thinking of us?

“Why would he leave us something?”

She smiled at me. “Because you’re his sons. I mean, after all that was said and done…”

I wondered if she was delusional or something.

I stood and bent down to give her a piece of my mind. “When did he remember we were his sons? When he left you penniless? When he walked out on us? Or when we tried calling him during the first couple of years? When we did get a chance to speak to him, he would tell us now wasn’t a good time. The man never even bothered to come see us, not once in over six years. Nor did he even pick up the phone on his own accord. Why would he leave us something in his will? Why would he think of us as his sons?”

I was getting heated and angry about the way she was reacting, crying and pleading for me to sit back down. As I walked away from the prying ears and my emotional mom, I didn’t know who I was more upset with.

Her for thinking that he gave a damn, because in our eyes, I knew my brothers felt exactly the same way I did—he’d died a long time ago. The idea he’d actually done it made me angry. It confirmed what we already knew. He didn’t care about us. We were too blind to see it back then, but as we recalled the amount of concerts I performed in and he never showed up, spelling bees and debates David had participated in and he never came, and even Dane, Dad had never seen a single one of his games. His excuses when we lived together were always one in the same, too busy at work. When really, he was fucking the secretary, wishing he never had to see us again. He was happy leaving, and I was even happier knowing he was dead.