The Son Who Returned to Expose Their Shame novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Porch

Bryce offers me money to vanish, and in the lobby of the family company I ask my father, in front of his staff, if he saw blood on Bryce's shirt that night. He did.

I went down in bare feet and stepped out onto the porch.

The screen door's system was a brick.

I moved the brick and let it bang behind me.

Bryce was sitting on the porch swing.

"Nice place," he said. "Smells like mildew and old lady."

"What do you want?"

"Can't a man welcome his brother home?"

"You did that at lunch."

He laughed and pushed the swing with one loafer.

He'd been drinking. Bourbon, the good kind, Dad's kind.

"You know what I did while you were gone?" he said. "I went to every one of Annie's surgeries. Seven. I sat in the waiting room with her mother. I learned how to do the exercises with her leg. I carried her up the stairs to her apartment for a year."

"Good for you."

"You know what she calls me?"

I didn't answer.

"The one who stayed." He smiled. "She says it at dinner parties. It's sweet."

"You stayed because you were the reason."

The swing stopped.

He looked at me in the porch light, and the smile went somewhere else.

Under it his face was flat. Bored, almost.

I'd seen that face when I was ten and he was nine, the week he moved in.

The week my dog went missing.

"Let me tell you how this goes," he said. "She's mine. The company's mine Saturday. Mom picked me before you were out of the courtroom. Dad picked me before that."

"Then why are you here at midnight?"

He reached into his jacket and took out a check.

He held it up between two fingers so I could read it.

Two hundred fifty thousand dollars. His own account, not the company's.

"That's on top of Dad's twenty," he said. "Go to Ohio. Go to Mexico. Go to the moon. Just be gone by Saturday."

"No."

"You can't even rent an apartment, Roark. You're a felon. Nobody's going to hire you to do anything but stack boxes."

"I'm good at stacking boxes."

He tucked the check into the chain of the porch swing.

"In case you get smart."

He stood and walked down the steps.

At the bottom I said one thing.

"Did you look at her?"

He stopped with his back to me.

"When she was in the road," I said. "Did you look at her?"

He turned around slowly.

For a second there was nothing on his face at all.

Then he smiled with all his teeth.

"Get some sleep, brother. You look tired."

The Range Rover backed over Gran's azalea on the way out.

I took the check off the swing and tore it into strips and dropped it in the coffee can Gran uses for an ashtray.

The next morning I put on the only shirt I had with a collar and took the bus downtown.

Keene Development was on the top three floors of a glass building on East Bay.

I used to work on the ninth floor. Junior project manager. I had a plant.

The lobby had been redone. White marble, a wall of water, a giant photo of my father and Bryce shaking hands on a dock.

I walked to the elevators.

"Sir." The guard at the desk stood up. "Sir, I need you to sign in."

"I'm here to see Leland Keene."

He looked at his screen.

Then at me.

His face changed.

He picked up his phone.

I waited.

The elevator opened, and my father walked out with two men in suits behind him.

He didn't look surprised. He looked like a man who'd been told a pipe had burst.

Staff were crossing the lobby with coffee. They slowed down.

"This man is a convicted felon," my father said to the guard, loud enough for all of them. "He is not an employee of this company. He is not to come above the lobby."

"Hi, Dad."

"I'm not having this conversation here."

"You don't have to. You only have to answer one question."

He took my elbow and tried to turn me toward the doors.

I didn't turn.

I'm bigger than him now. I wasn't, before.

He let go.

"The night of the party," I said, not loud, but the lobby was marble and everything carried. "Bryce came in through the kitchen door around midnight. Did you see him?"

"Roark."

"Did you see the blood on his shirt?"

A woman with a coffee tray stopped walking.

The two men in suits looked at the floor.

My father's red face went a strange color.

He looked at me for a long time.

Then he leaned in, close enough that only I could hear him, and his breath smelled like coffee and mint.

"I saw," he said quietly. "And I'd do it again."

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