I fix my eyes on the bookshelf across the room. He’s got his wing-tip shoe on my Achilles’ heel and he knows it.
My father is ridiculously wealthy, and the allowance he sends me each month is ridiculously generous. I don’t spend a penny of it on myself. Except for the books. After what happened over there, it’s easy to tell myself that I’ve earned the right to sit and brood with overpriced books.
But the thought of losing my book collection isn’t what has my heart pounding in my chest. I don’t need the books. But I do need my dad’s money, at least until I come into the trust fund from my mom’s side when I turn twenty-five.
The thought of continuing to take his monthly allowance, knowing that he thinks it all goes toward books and video games, makes me nauseous. I’d like nothing more than to tell him where he can shove those checks.
But the money’s not for me.
So I’ll continue to take it. Even if that makes me nothing more than a mooching cripple in his eyes.
“What do you want?” I ask gruffly, refusing to meet his eyes. It feels cowardly, but hey, I’ve gotten pretty good at cowardly.
He blows out a long breath. “I want you to try, Paul. I want you to at least try to come back to the living.”
“I mean with the next nurse you’re sending up here,” I say, cutting him off. “What do I have to do so you don’t throw your pathetic son out on the street to become yet another begging veteran?”
The word veteran hangs between us, and for a second I think he might relent, because if my Achilles’ heel is my dependency on him, his Achilles’ heel is my sacrifice for this country.
But the man’s stubbornness has only increased with age, and instead of backing off, he turns toward the desk, dropping the whiskey glass with enough force so that the liquid sloshes over the sides and onto the wood. It’s an uncharacteristically careless gesture.
“Six months,” he says. “You cooperate with this woman for six months. You do as she asks, when she asks it. She tells you to get to the gym, you get to the gym. She tells you to eat fucking broccoli, you eat fucking broccoli. She wants you to wear a tux for dinner, you’ll do that too. I’ll speak with this woman every Sunday, and if you’ve so much as looked at her funny, this all goes away.”
“Break it down for me,” I say through my clenched jaw. “If I misbehave, I’m homeless?”
His eyes close for a half second. “I’m saying that after this, you’re on your own. You want to give up on life, you do it on your own dime.”
My chest tightens, and for a second I think it’s anger and feel like I might punch the man for not understanding. Did he ever have to watch a little boy’s stunned expression as his mother gets blown to kingdom come? Or see a skinny dog lose a leg to an IUD? Did he ever have a knife to his face, or see bodies so mutilated mothers wouldn’t recognize their own son or daughter?
I snarl and push the thoughts away. All of them.
This isn’t about me. This isn’t about my dad. And it’s sure as fuck not about some stupid, useless caretaker who thinks my entire world will be fixed by eating chicken noodle soup.
This is about a woman who lost her high school sweetheart. It’s about a little girl who has cancer instead of a daddy. Talk about getting the short end of the fucking stick.
I don’t need my dad’s money.
But Alex’s family does.
“So if I make it through the six months acting like a good boy, the checks keep coming?”
He meets my eyes, and for the first time today he doesn’t look angry or disgusted. He looks sad. “Yes. The checks will keep coming.”
I inhale a long breath through my nose. The situation is beyond shitty, and for the thousandth time I rack my brain for ways to provide for the Skinners without my dad’s money. If it was just a matter of putting food on their table and Christmas presents under their tree, maybe whatever low-paying job an injured war vet could get would be enough.