“Don’t Bubba me, boy. Your mama and mine would skin me alive if anything happened to you on my watch. Personally, I think my mama likes you better, anyway.”
His dad laughed. “Completely not true. I was once mopping the kitchen floor when Mikey came running through the house for no good reason—like someone was trying to kill him—and fell. Now a normal woman would be mad at the kid for tracking mud on my freshly mopped floor. Let me reiterate normal woman … I didn’t marry normal. I married Bobbi Jean Clinton-Burdette. Ain’t no normal in that family tree, I’m telling you. So faster than I could blink, his mama took that mop handle to me ’cause that boy done skinned his knee on my fresh clean floor. I’m telling you, she got ahold of me so viciously over it that I thought one of them Greek furies had done descended on me from Mount Olympus. You’d have thought that boy lost his leg the way she carried on. But he barely bruised it. Didn’t even bleed, but boy howdy, I surely did.”
“You did not.” Bubba snorted. “And I was four when it happened.”
“Four, nothing, it was last year!”
Bubba laughed and shook his head. “It was not.” Sighing, he met Nick’s gaze. “One thing to know about my daddy, he don’t always tell the truth.”
“Now that ain’t so. I always tell the truth. I just do so creatively. Makes it more entertaining for folks that way.” He draped his arm over Nick’s shoulders and led him to the back where Bubba and Mark worked on computers while Bubba called Nick’s mom to let her know that he’d picked him up and had him “in custody.”
Dr. Burdette had him sit on a stool next to Bubba’s linked computer monitors that had an interesting array of food lined up across them. He smiled as he saw Nick frowning at it. “Excuse my food porn. Bobbi Jean keeps me on so many diets, that’s my sin right there. Anytime I get out of her sight, I start looking up desserts I can’t eat and salivating like Pavlov’s dog. You wouldn’t want to smuggle me one of them beignets later, would you?”
“Don’t you dare, Nick!” Bubba called from the other side of the curtains. “He’s diabetic and he ain’t to have none of that while he’s here.”
His father growled at him. “You and your mama, boy! What good is a conference in the Big Easy when I can’t have none of that food here? You might as well shoot me and put me out of my misery!”
Bubba carried a box of parts to the back to put them on the shelf. “I don’t want to shoot you, Daddy. But I would like to keep you around for a little while longer. So would Mama. Don’t break her heart. You done promised her you’d behave and stay on your diet.”
Nick patted him on the shoulder. “I feel your pain, Dr. Burdette. You should meet my mama. She forces me to eat vegetables.” He shuddered. “And other girl foods. It’s terrible.”
Bubba laughed. “He’s right about that, but Cherise is a great cook. I swear that woman could turn ketchup packets into a gourmet meal.”
His dad got a strange expression on his face at that. “I think he has a fever. You mind if I take him up and get my kit?”
“Sure. I was going to let him rest in my bed anyway ’til his mama gets off work.” Bubba narrowed his gaze on Nick. “I mean that, too. Don’t let me catch you surfing porn on my PC up there, or playing no games. You can watch TV, but I want you resting.”
“Yes, sir. Bubba, sir.” Nick scooted off the stool and headed for the stairs that led up to Bubba’s two-floor condo above his store.
As he walked up, it struck him just how familiar he’d become with Bubba over the last few years. In weird ways, he was like his father.
For that matter, he was the only father Nick had ever really known. Even though his birth father had lived with them for a time, Adarian had never felt fatherly. Never felt like he belonged as part of their family. To the day he died, he’d been a surreal stranger.
From the moment Nick had wandered into Bubba’s store to rent time on a computer for a school project, Bubba had been different.
Like Kyrian and Acheron.
Nick felt as if he’d always known them. As if they were family from aeons ago, and they had spent lifetimes of history together. Acheron would say it was because lives were a tangled tapestry of overlapping threads that spanned centuries. Souls born and reborn, always reconnecting when they were supposed to and that Nick had met them before.
Madaug would call it inherited memory. He’d written an entire paper on it for class. In his mind, the DNA of previous generations left a permanent imprint on each person when they were born, and that when two people whose DNA had interacted in another lifetime came together in their current one, some primal part of their anatomy sparked like dormant neurons in the brain firing awake. That was why Madaug thought humans had that feeling of having met someone before or having known them “forever.”
Nick wasn’t sure what he thought. He only knew what he felt. His father had left him cold. The saddest part about losing his father was that he didn’t grieve over Adarian’s passing. And that made him feel defective. Broken.