I hadn’t expected much when Dad had me trail him, sitting across the sidewalk on a wrought iron bench as he waited outside the large building housing a bank of offices, one entire floor belonging to the law offices of Mayeaux and Miles, the latter of which Simone had hired to handle the paternity suit. A little nosing around, a short phone call to Ethan and my father knew who Simone’s lawyer was and when the deposition was happening. He’d also discovered the other girl, a twenty-two-year-old from Arkansas, was Cass’s cousin. Just as greedy, just as manipulative. Ethan had discovered that her child was eighteen months old, with a birth certificate that claimed “Unknown” as the father. That one would be easy to dismiss. It was Simone my father wanted to focus on and to do that he needed his Tom Ford and Oxfords.
If I’d expected him to charge toward the woman when she emerged from the tall stone building—slowing as she navigated the black steps, one hand sliding down the silver steel railing as she went—then I was wrong. Kona was smoother than that. And, it seemed, more perceptive than me. Of course, he’d been with Simone for two years before he and Mom reconnected. He knew her the only way a man knows the woman he’s been with. I could tell you without looking at Aly when she had a headache because she grumbled under breath like she tried talking herself out of the pain. I knew when she was depressed, clinging to memories of her childhood that seemed to creep up on her with no real cause at all. When that happened, she’d sing old Creole songs she only knew half the words to because her grann had a terrible memory.
A man just knows his woman. Even if she isn’t his anymore.
Simone had looked like every other skinny rich bitch trophy wife I’d seen drinking wine at post-game parties or at the charitable events we typically ran in the off season. Simone was in her early forties, at least five years younger than my father, but she hadn’t seemed to age well. She was younger than my mom and looked a good fifteen years older.
I asked him about it later, after Kona had politely—almost gallantly—escorted Simone into a nearby coffee shop and I spent some time with her son, keeping him occupied while we both played pinball on the vintage machine tucked in the back corner. They talked for a good half hour, and I lost what must have been a whole row of quarters, but it worked. Dad found out what he wanted, and I kept her son from getting caught up in it all.
“One look at her, those wrinkles around her eyes and I knew.” Kona shook his head, relaxing an arm on the steering wheel as we drove back to Mandeville.
“Knew what?” I asked, not getting why he wasn’t bouncing off the walls happy. Then Dad looked at me, frowning.
“She’s sick.” He didn’t elaborate, but I made out the lines that moved across his forehead while he stared ahead at the long bridge in front of us. “She wouldn’t say what it was, but I got the point.”
“When did you figure that out?”
He didn’t move his head to look at me, but still shifted his gaze in my direction. “When you took her kid to the pinball machine. She watched that boy like she thought someone might run in and snatch him.” Dad adjusted his body, holding the wheel steady with his knee as he unbuttoned his jacket. “I remember being like that when Koa and Mack were little things. Not so much now. Simone’s kid is fourteen. She should be worried about him sneaking smokes or trying to talk naive girls into letting him feel them up. Not him playing pinball.”
“You asked her about it?”
“Yeah. Like I said,” he loosened his tie, finally slipping it over his head, “she didn’t say what she had, but I could tell it was serious. Simone was never the type to let herself go and trust me, she has in the past thirteen years. She’d started in on Botox at twenty-five. No way the woman I was with would skip that unless something serious kept her from it.”
“Maybe she’s just broke now. You said she never got married after you broke up.” Dad had filled me in on his ex that morning while he dressed. He made the suit look good, to say the least. That was something else I was grateful Dad had passed down to me—the ability to work a damn suit like he had that morning. Poor woman hadn’t stood a chance when Kona strolled her way, using that Hale Demon Magic, as Mom called it, to put Simone at ease once the shock of seeing him had ebbed.
“She’s not broke, keiki kane. Her priorities have shifted.”
It was the boy, I realized. The one that had met his mother before she’d made it down the steps. Across the sidewalk I had watched him, holding onto his mother’s elbow, helping her down the steps in a way that you didn’t often see with kids his age. It was more than respect, more than affection and seeing it that afternoon had me a little taken aback when I understood the kid had me smiling despite what his mom was trying to claim about him. The boy was loyal to his mother. His single mother. Just like I’d been at that age.