Chapter 40

Chapter 40
Mandy watched him, unsure of what to say when he stopped talking. She decided waiting was her best option. Carl would speak when he was ready.

He played with the beer-advertising coaster under his glass, staring intently at it as he spun it. “I did all right academically, but just did what I needed to get by. Classes didn’t interest me and the extra-curricular at the school sure as hell didn’t interest me. I liked sports, but not the kind they played in school.” He shrugged. “Dad hated that I wouldn’t apply myself. He was always telling me I should be more like Mark. That I would end up nowhere if I didn’t shape up.” He glanced at her briefly before looking back down, lost in his own memories. “His words just pissed me off. I tried even less in school, hung out with the kids I knew he would hate. Smoked, did pot. Anything to annoy him. It worked, I guess. He started calling my school weekly to check on my grades, if I was skipping class, see if I had gotten into trouble. I swear, he called every single one of my teachers every Friday to see if there was any missing homework assignments, and if there were, I wasn’t allowed to leave my room until they were done.” Carl swallowed. “And if he thought I was lying, he made sure I did extra work.”

“That sounds rough,” Mandy ventured. “Maybe he was doing it because he loved you. Wanted you to push yourself instead of get into trouble.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what my sixteen-year-old self-thought,” he scoffed. “I did my best to keep my resentment for Mark in check. After all, it wasn’t his fault that he was so damn perfect, right? I could deal with my dad calling me a bum, and making me do Mark’s chores whenever Mark had a game, but I resented it. He fucking had to be so perfect, and had no problem reminding me how awesome he was. He was cocky, like any teenage kid who had everything, along with the school’s most popular girl.” He rolled his eyes, and Mandy had the feeling Mark took Carl’s girl without asking. Or the girl maybe switched brothers because of popularity. “I started getting in trouble at school more often. Fights, cheating on tests, whatever. Then I got expelled and my dad flipped. Of course, it just made my home life even worse, giving me more anger I didn’t know how to deal with. Then one day, it was too much.” Carl paused again and stared into his empty glass.

Mandy watched him, feeling sorry for the teenage boy who never was accepted by his dad for who he was. Had his dad just... what? Sat silently behind a phone while their mother crowed on and on about how perfect one child was and how fat the other one was? She shook her head, understanding his adolescent feelings more than he knew. She had seen Carl angry and remorseful before, but this was different. It was... shame. A lot of it. She took another sip of her cider and waited for him to continue whenever he was ready.

“I got into a bad fight with a kid at school,” Carl said finally. “He had been joking around with his buddies about how his girlfriend finally let him get laid. And I use the word ‘let’ incredibly loosely. I could tell from how he was describing it that things were not completely consensual, and I knew his girlfriend was crying in the girl’s bathroom while he described to everyone in the middle of the hallway the sexual acts she had begged him to do. It set me off, shit like that especially. So, I waited after school for him to come to his car and then I started whaling on him as hard as I could. I took out sixteen years of anger on that poor kid and left him barely conscious next to his car. I told him if he so much as touched that girl again, I was going to come back and finish the job.”

“Oh my goodness,” Mandy whispered.

Carl couldn’t even look at her and Mandy could see his hands tremble as he reached for her drink and gulped it down. “I’m a lot different now,” he said weakly. “I don’t lose my temper like that anymore.”

Mandy realized he actually was pleading with her to agree. He needed her approval and he was scared that she wouldn’t give it now that she knew what he had done. She reached out and touched his hand. “I understand why you did it,” she said simply. “I’m not saying it was okay for you to lose it like that, but your intentions are completely admirable.”

Carl looked up at her, surprised. “You really think so?”

“I do. I mean, I can hardly say it was wrong of you. Nobody else stood up for that poor girl. You did the same for me.”

Carl breathed a sigh of relief and squeezed her fingers. “Thank you,” he said. “I was sure you would think I was a monster.”

“You’re not even close to being a monster,” she chuckled. “Maybe a demon of a businessman, but that doesn’t make you a monster.”

He smiled weakly. “My father would disagree. He was furious when he found out. Except, instead of backing up his son, or even taking the fucking time to ask why I had done it, he just assumed I was guilty. When the weasel-shit called the cops and pressed charges, my father backed him up. The asshole raped his girlfriend and then I was the bad guy for taking action! You’d have thought my father would have been proud. He could be ticked for me beating the asshole up but he should have been proud I defended someone who was weaker and unable to defend themselves. Wasn’t that the whole friggin’ reason he was in the Navy. To serve justice and all that shit?” Carl stared at her, his eyes bright and angry.

“I don’t know.” Mandy tried to smile and felt her eyes sting with tears she didn’t want to fall. “You defended and protected me when Stephen came by drunk. I think that was pretty admirable of you.”

“Well, I spent three months in juvie. With no thanks to Naval Captain Salvo.” Carl played with Mandy’s fingers, unwilling to let go of the comfort of her hand. “I was there three months and not once did my dad, or even fucking Mark, come visit me. It was like they were all embarrassed! My own family couldn’t bear to look at me. When I came home, my father didn’t speak or even make eye contact with me. He sent me off to boarding school as soon as I was out of juvie and then enrolled me in boot camps for the summer.”

Mandy stared at him, horrified at what he had gone through. Why would they do that to him?

“I was seventeen—almost eighteen—when I left. I graduated early, only because I was able to test out. I moved as far away as I could freakin’ get from where I came from. I got a job waiting tables to put myself through college. When I was nineteen I made my first investment and started researching the stock market, and Wall Street. By the time I graduated with a bachelor’s in business, I was already making enough off of my investments to live off of, quite well off, actually. I started my own stockbroker company the week I graduated.”

“That’s incredible.”

“I was determined to make something of myself and prove to that bastard he was wrong every time he called me a lazy-ass bum.”

“That’s why you work so hard?” Mandy asked. “Because you’re angry at your father?”

He shook his head and let go of her hand so he could motion to the bar to bring them another drink. “It started out that way,” he admitted. “Then it became an obsession. The more money I made, the easier it was to pretend I was someone else. Someone who didn’t have a screwed-up past and an asshole father. Or a brother that never once tried to back me up.” He paused when the bartender set two new glasses on the table. Carl took a swig and then cleared his throat. “Don’t get me wrong, I tried to keep a relationship with my brother and mother. After all, they were innocent in this. However, they let him stay mad at me and never tried to defend me. I refused to go home for Christmas, never called on birthdays, nothing. I stayed in touch briefly with Mark, but when he started pressuring me to make up with Dad, I pushed him away. He took my father’s side, of course, and told me to apologize. The last time I saw Mark, it ended in a fistfight with him having a broken nose and me a black eye. That was ten years ago. The next time I s
aw him was when he walked into my office.”