Authors: Jeffrey Allen

Popped Off (14 page)

BOOK: Popped Off

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I stumbled home sometime around midnight and slept on the sofa because I didn’t want to wake Julianne, getting home that late. It was the one night a month we slept apart, and it still felt like one night too many. I knew she wouldn’t mind me coming in that late, but I never liked the idea of stirring her in the middle of the night if I didn’t have to.

The next thing I knew, Carly was pouncing on my stomach.

“Daddy smells like beer!” she said, leaning her head down on my chest.

I cracked my eyes open. It felt like I’d just closed them, but the sun was up, so I knew I was wrong. And I probably did smell like beer.

Julianne joined us on the sofa, clutching her coffee mug. She slipped under my feet.

“Win or lose?” she asked.

“Even. Why are you still home?”

“Took the day off.” She sipped from the mug. “And if you aren’t losing too much money, then I guess we won’t send you back to work full-time just yet.” She winked at me.

“Daddy can’t go to work!” Carly cried. “He takes care of me! I would be lonely!”

“I’m only teasing, kiddo,” Julianne said.

Carly set her chin on my chest, our noses a few inches apart. “Don’t go to work, okay, Daddy?”

“Okay. If you say so.”

She rolled off and danced around the living room. “Yes! Daddy will stay home with me forever!”

Julianne and I laughed. I wanted to bottle those moments, not just for me, but so when Carly was a teenager and telling me to get out of her face—because, whether or not I liked it, that was going to happen—I could play back that video and show her that at one time, I was her favorite person on the planet.

“What about me?” Julianne asked. “Should I stay home?”

Carly froze in place in the middle of the room. “You go to work, though. So we can have food and stuff. Right?”

“Well, yeah,” Julianne said, glancing at me. “But maybe I could do that and be at home a little more, too.”

I saw something unfamiliar in Julianne’s glance, something I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen.

“You serious?” I asked.

“Could you do that?” Carly asked, wide-eyed. “Would we still be able to have chicken nuggets?”

Julianne smiled at her. “We will always have chicken nuggets for you, Carly. I promise.”

Carly put a hand over her heart. “Okay, good. Because I love nuggets!”

She started dancing again.

Julianne looked at me. “Yes, I’m serious.”

“About quitting your job?”

“Quitting the job I have,” she said. “Yes. I’ve been thinking about it.”

I leaned back into the sofa and took her words in. Ever since I’d known Julianne—really known her, not when we were kids and I was too stupid to notice her, but known her since I ran into her on a street in College Station—she’d placed an emphasis on her career. She didn’t want to be a stay-at-home mom. She had too much energy, and she didn’t have a need to stay home and do aerobics and gossip about people and things in town. She was certain that she could be a great mom, as well as a great lawyer.

And she was. She didn’t come home and bury herself in an office full of work. She came home at night and she was a mom. She had far more energy than I’d ever had, and she didn’t cheat Carly out of any of it. She was super lawyer and supermom, not to mention superwife.

When we’d learned she was pregnant with Carly, it had been an easy decision for me to leave my teaching job and for her to continue working. It was actually her idea because she was opposed to day care when we could obviously afford to have one of us stay at home. Her salary was the one we lived on, and I was more wired to stay at home. We made the decision in about nine seconds.

So hearing that she had any notion of staying home was huge breaking news to me.

“What does that mean?” I asked. “Quitting the job you have.”

She snuggled onto the sofa next to me and wrapped her arms around one of mine. “Don’t worry. I’m not thinking about sending you back to the classroom.”

“I’d go back,” I said.

“No!” Carly yelled. “You just promised you’d stay home forever!”

“But I’ve always gotten to stay at home with you,” I said. “Mommy hasn’t gotten to do that, and maybe it’s her turn.” I looked at Julianne. “Might mean fewer nuggets, but I’d go back if that’s what you want.”

And I meant that. As much as I loved being at home, there was a fair amount of guilt that came with seeing Julianne leave every morning and miss out on the days with us. I appreciated that she was sacrificing her time with Carly to give it to me, but there was a part of me that wanted to give it back to her, to let her share in all the things I’d gotten to do with our daughter.

Julianne squeezed my arm tighter. “Thank you for saying that, but no. You are the greatest dad ever, and you belong at home with her.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“I’ve been thinking that maybe I need my own practice,” she said. “Here. In town.”

“In Rose Petal?”

She nodded. “Yep.”

“But you’re a partner. You just wanna leave that?”

“It’s not the leaving,” she said. “It’s the things I’d be going to.”

“Like?”

She pulled away from me and raised an eyebrow. “Do you not want me around more?”

I made a face. “You know I do. But this is all very un-Julianne like.”

She smiled, then nodded. “Yeah, it is.” She shrugged. “I don’t know, Deuce. I really want another baby, and I don’t want to work so hard and be gone so much for this one.” She gestured at Carly, who was now lying on her back on the floor. “I feel like she got to this age in about five minutes, and I don’t want to miss the next five minutes. That make sense?”

I pulled her back to me. “Yeah, it does. So do it.”

“Easier said than done.”

“No, it’s not. If that’s what you want, let’s make it happen.”

“Probably mean less money,” she said. “Might be a little tight getting started.”

“If it means having you around more, I can take it.”

Carly jumped up and came over to us. She slapped one hand on my knee and another on Julianne’s. She moved her eyes back and forth between us, and they were full of seriousness and gravity.

“We cannot tighten up on nuggets,” she said.

The girls went into the kitchen to make pancakes, while I went upstairs to shower and wake up.

I dressed and sat down on the bed with my laptop, waiting for them to call me down. I powered up the computer and punched in the Web address Amber and Suzie had given me.

It didn’t look much different than the tip sheet except that it had an account button. I followed the steps, and in five minutes I’d dropped two hundred bucks into my account and bet a hundred of it on two college football games for that morning. I wanted to get the ball rolling fast, and I figured the sooner I showed them that I was interested in betting, the sooner I might be able to gain their trust and get closer to getting access to Moises.

We ate a quick breakfast, and the girls headed out to do a little grocery shopping and a few other errands. Julianne never specifically asked me to stay home, but I was happy to let them have some Mommy-and-daughter time any time that I could.

I walked outside, thinking it might be a good day to actually do some yard work, and was surprised to see Elliott sitting at the curb in his orange Bug.

He was wearing the horrible mustache and wig again.

I waved at him, and he got out of the car and came up the drive.

“The church money,” he said without saying hello. “Moises doesn’t have it.”

“You know that for sure?”

“He says he doesn’t.” He looked around nervously. “Can we go inside?”

“Think someone is going to recognize you?”

“Those girls freak me out.”

“Let’s go in the backyard.”

We walked around the side of the house, through the gate, and into the yard. We sat down in a couple of lawn chairs near the deck.

“He says he doesn’t have it,” Elliott said.

“Not what I was told,” I said.

“Well, he wouldn’t lie to me.”

“No? Hate to tell you this, but he sorta seems like exactly the kind of guy who would lie to you.”

Elliott shook his head violently. “No. Not over this.”

“Why? How are you so sure?”

“I know my cousin.”

A couple of bees buzzed our way, and I waved them away. I didn’t think Elliott knew his cousin at all, really. I thought he had blinders on and refused to see what was going on with Moises.

“When did he start gambling?” I asked.

Elliott thought for a moment, his mouth twisting. “I don’t know.”

“What does he gamble on?” I asked.

“Sports. And other stuff.”

“Which sports?”

“I don’t really know.”

“How long has he worked at the church?” I asked.

“Awhile.”

“What’s awhile?”

Elliott shifted in the chair. “I’m not sure.”

“But you know your cousin.”

His face flushed, and he looked away, staring at the grass for awhile.

I wasn’t trying to embarrass him, but I was trying to make a point. He seemed to be loyal to a fault, and I couldn’t help but wonder if Moises was taking advantage of that. Family had a way of turning people blind in a hurry.

“Okay, I don’t know everything about my cousin,” Elliott finally said. “You are correct. But I don’t believe he is lying about this.”

“Why not?”

“One thing he showed me was his account,” Elliott said. “For the bets. I know what he owed. If he stole all that money, he could’ve paid the girls off.”

“Maybe he wanted extra.”

“Moises isn’t a bad person, Mr. Winters,” Elliott said, his brows furrowing together. “This may seem bad, but he’s not a bad person.”

“I believe you, but a lot of this doesn’t make sense.”

“I understand that.”

“And I’m just trying to figure it out. Not much about your cousin is making sense to me, and you are the only one taking his side.”

“You are on his side, no?” Elliott asked.

I was starting to answer when I heard my name shouted from the house. “Deuce? Where are you? Dammit, I need your help!”

“Out here, Dad,” I yelled. I looked at Elliott, who was halfway out of the chair, his eyes wide with panic. “Relax. It’s okay. It’s my father.”

My dad stormed out onto the deck, my mother’s netbook in his hand. He started to say something, then fixed his eyes on Elliott.

“Son, that is the worst Halloween costume I’ve ever seen, and it ain’t even October,” he said.

“Dad.”

“I mean, I could draw a mustache on you better than that if you need one.”

“Dad, shut up.”

Elliott’s face took on a look of bewilderment. He didn’t know what to make of my father.

Join the club.

My dad snapped his gaze to me and held out the netbook. “That damn Facebook again.”

“What about it?”

“People keep asking your mother to be their friend,” he barked.

“So?”

“She doesn’t have that many friends,” he said. “What do they really want?”

Elliott stood. “I should go.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Do you know anything about Facebook?” my father asked him. “Doubt you would, given that god-awful costume, but there seem to be a lot of morons on this Facebook and you—”

“Dad, shut
up,
” I said, cutting him off.

He frowned back and waited.

Elliott was already walking to the gate. “I will prove to you that my cousin is not lying.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I feel like I do,” Elliott said, pushing the gate open. “Then maybe you will help him.”

“I’m already helping him,” I said.

Elliott disappeared through the gate without saying anything else.

“Who the hell was that?” my father asked when the gate clanged shut.

“Just a guy I’m trying to help,” I said.

“Well, you could start by telling him not to dress like a fool.”

I convinced my father that Facebook friends weren’t after my mom or his money or his investments or his granddaughter.

It took only an hour.

He left, and I called Victor to give him an update on what I’d done since I’d seen him last.

“Ten bucks says you’ll never see your wife’s money again,” he said after I told him about placing the bets.

“Why’s that?”

“Sorority girls running a betting biz?” he said, skepticism dripping from his words. “Gimme a break. That has
sham
written all over it.”

“I think it’s legit,” I told him. “May not be legal, but I think it’s legit.”

“You aren’t exactly known for your brains.”

“And you aren’t known for being able to reach the drinking glasses.”

“Ha. I’m just saying, if it goes bad, don’t say I didn’t tell you so.”

“I’ll take the risk. You do any digging on them? The girls, I mean.”

He hesitated. “I told you I thought this whole thing was a waste of time.”

“I know. But I also know you can’t help yourself sometimes and probably went home yesterday and did a little poking around. No pun intended.”

He coughed and grumbled a bit. “Maybe I did.”

“And?”

“Guess who the largest consumer group of Viagra buyers is?”

“I literally don’t have any clue as to how to answer that.”

“Male college students.”

“You’re serious?”

“Yeah, unfortunately. They got money, they watch too much porn, and they can’t get it up.”

“So they buy Viagra?”

“Not the real stuff. Too embarrassed, I’d guess. So they buy the cheap, knockoff crap that you can apparently get on any street corner.”

“You seem to know a lot about this.”

“Because I spent an hour on the computer, you big jackass,” he snarled. “My parts are working just fine. Ask the missus. She’d be happy to tell you.”

I imagined what I might hear, then tried to un-imagine that because I didn’t need nightmares.

“So maybe the girls have another business,” I said.

“Their customers are probably into both,” Victor said. “Dumb frat boys making stupid bets and then spending their winnings on boner pills.”

“Is that the medical term on your prescription? Boner pills?”

“I don’t know what the hell ya call them, because I ain’t never tried ’em!”

I doubted that it would ever get old riling Victor up. It always brightened my day.

“I think you’re right,” I said. “That makes sense. And thanks for digging.”

“Well, I didn’t have anything to do, anyway,” he said. “Victor Junior is sleeping so good now, I got a lot of free time again and I don’t feel like a zombie anymore.”

“Yeah? Swaddling is still working?”

“Man, we wrap that little dude up like a sausage every night, and he goes out like a light,” he said. “Yeah, it’s still working.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“Yeah. Me, too. Thanks, I guess.”

“Anytime. Happy to help. Oh, and I’ve got one other thing, too, that might help.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Don’t let him get into your boner pills.”

He was cursing as he hung up.

BOOK: Popped Off

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