“I remember this. This was your dad’s.” She turned it around, studying the old-school Harley-Davidson badge on the front. There was a date etched above it by the manufacturer, the same year Casey had been born. “You miss him, still?”
He shrugged and took the lighter back. “I barely remember him—he left two days before my fifth birthday.” He’d found that lighter a couple of weeks later, wedged between the cushion and arm of his old man’s recliner. His mom hadn’t even gotten angry when he’d killed one of the only trees in their yard, trying to set it on fire. She’d just looked at that lighter and held his face to her hip, and she’d cried. She’d said, “I’m mad at him, too.” Casey had rediscovered the lighter in the junk drawer not long after, and kept it to himself ever since.
“For what it’s worth, I was surprised when he left town,” Nita said. “He loved you boys.”
Casey frowned. “You think?”
“Oh yes. He bragged about you both. Never within your earshot, but he used to come by to fix my old Pacer—Tom Grossier was the best mechanic in this town,” she added, and sipped her wine. “Was and still would be. Anyway, I’d bring him a coffee or a beer, and I’d mention whatever I’d seen you and your brother getting up to in the yard that day, and his face just lit up, every time.”
“What’d he say?”
“He always told me exactly how tall Vince was, right down to the half inch—like I didn’t see the boy every day with my own eyes. And he was always going on about how smart you were.”
“Smart?”
“Oh yes. About how you’d invented a new game, or taken something apart to see how it worked.”
“Jeez. All I remember is getting yelled at, for breaking stuff.”
Her smile turned sad. “Well, fathers can be like that with their sons. They can equate praise with coddling, I think—my own father was like that with my brothers. And Fortuity’s not the kind of town a man wants to subject a softhearted child to.”
“No, I guess not.”
“But come on, Casey. The suspense is killing me. What was the bad news?”
“I, um . . .” He lowered his voice, even knowing his mom would be tuned in one thousand percent to whatever crap was on the TV. “I found out that Vince and I . . . That we don’t have the same mother. Our mom isn’t his mom.”
Nita’s expression changed, but not as Casey might have expected. There was no puzzlement there, no shock. The realization hit him in an instant. “You knew?”
She nodded. “I did, yes.”
“Jesus.” He’d said it too loud, and she shot him a cautious look. He said it again, more quietly. “You fucking knew, all these years? Since when?”
“Since after I’d known Dee maybe a year or so. She and your dad moved here when Vince was tiny—just a few months old. No one had any reason to suspect she wasn’t his natural mother. But then when she was pregnant with you, she told me. You were her first and only biological child, after all. I think she needed to tell someone. Everyone assumed she’d already been through childbirth once before. That couldn’t have been much fun.”
“So who in the fuck is Vince’s real mom?”
She shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. Dee never talked about her much, except to say she was your father’s ex-girlfriend. And she didn’t think too highly of her—that’s for sure. Though how could she? She loved your brother like a son. He was her son. Imagining how another woman could ever give him up was beyond her.”
“How the fuck am I supposed to break this to Vince?”
Nita looked cagey, fiddling with the stem of her glass. “Do you think it’s even wise to?”
“You think I can just know this, just sit on this news, and not tell him?”