Chapter 51

Chapter 51
Mandy nodded and smiled sympathetically. “That’s why he came by. Your dad wants to see you again.”

Carl stared at her, as if she’d grown a second head.

Uncomfortable with trying to pretend her boss was just her boss, she reached for his hand and lightly rested her fingers on the arm of his chair, too unsure to reach out and touch him. “Mark said something about your dad wanting to make amends... patch things up.” Really? I had to say, ‘patch things up’? I have no idea what the issue is and I’m making it sound like their problem sounds like a quilt. “I’m sorry.”

“How long has he had cancer?”

Mandy shrugged helplessly. She had no idea. “He’s been receiving chemo treatments for the past three months. That’s what Mark said.”

Carl shook his head. He stared down at her hand on the arm of his chair before he straightened and pressed his lips together in a tight line. A sharp breath pushed through his nose. “It doesn’t matter. It won’t change anything. That bastard can rot in hell for all I care.”

Mandy moved back as if Carl had slapped her hand. She couldn’t believe he meant it. “You don’t mean that.” Mark wanted her to try to talk to him, she’d have to give it a shot. Shoot, she’d come this far now and she knew the emotions that had crossed his face before he tried to bury them behind anger. “Whatever happened isn’t important. Don’t let your anger or your pride keep you from seeing him. You’ll regret it, trust me.”

“Trust you?” Carl scoffed. “Let me tell you this: reconciliation is impossible and my pride has nothing to do with it,” he snarled. “You don’t know what he did, what they did. What they put me through. You have no fuckin’ idea.”

“Then why don’t you tell me?” Mandy asked quietly. “Please. I want to help. Your father’s dying and wants to see you again. Your brother’s trying to make amends as well.” She moved forward on her chair so her knees pressed against his. “I know you’re not happy with things as they are. Maybe I can help figure this out, but I can’t do anything unless you tell me.”

Carl glared at her for a long moment. It took everything in her not to say anything and just let him be. He stared at the wall then, the muscles in his jaw working as he got his thoughts and emotions under control. “It’s a long story,” he said finally.

“I’m not in a rush,” she offered.

Carl stood and held out his hand to help Mandy up. “Let’s get out of here. I need a drink.”

“Sure.” She was terrified that once they got in a car he would change his mind. “You want to head back to your place?”

He shook his head. “There’s a bar not far from here.”

THEY ENDED UP AT A bar about halfway between work and home. An off the road place that Mandy would never have pictured Carl going in to. It was a local tavern kind of place with deer heads and other stuffed animals staring blatantly at you from the wall. Carl pointed at a table under a moose head with massive antlers and walked to the bar to grab drinks.

Cautiously, Mandy slid on the bench under the elk, eying it with mistrust. There was a reason nobody was sitting by this area, hopefully it wasn’t because of the beast above them.

Carl came over to her a few moments later, carrying two pint glasses. “I don’t...” His words drifted off as he glanced above her and then back down to her face. He smirked but didn’t say anything as he cautiously leaned over and set a pale amber-yellow bubbling looking pint in front of her before sitting down on the chair across the table. He eyed the moose once more. “It’s cider. I wasn’t sure if you liked beer. I actually don’t really know what you drink, except expensive whisky.” He grinned. “And if memory serves me correctly, you don’t drink a lot of it.”

She blushed as she picked up her glass and tried a tentative sip. It was bubbly but light, almost fruity. “Cider? A girl’s version of beer?” She kind of liked the aftertaste and took another sip.

He chuckled. “Sort of.” He took a long swig of his dark amber glass.

They sat quietly for a few moments, both angled so they could watch the other customers talking and laughing where they sat.

“My dad always favored Mark over me,” Carl began as Mandy sipped her drink and then set it down to lean closer so she could hear him. “Mark’s a couple years younger than me. Dad was in the Navy and ran our house like he ran his ship. Mark was the golden boy. The captain of the football team and baseball team. Straight A’s. Student body president. The works.”

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. “Ma
ybe a demon of a businessman, but that doesn’t make you a monster.”