Jessup at thirteen. Eighth grade and still hadn’t grown yet. Hoping he was going to grow. Not that he was a shrimp, but he was on the smaller side. Mom always told him that his dad was a big guy, she’d say six two and solid. An engineering graduate student at Cortaca University. Either way, he was a drunk—that’s what Jessup’s father and mother had in common—and he killed himself in a single-car accident before Jessup was even born. From what his mom said, it didn’t seem like things would have stuck between them anyway; they came from different worlds, and it wasn’t much more than a fling, the two of them partying together, Jessup the only good thing to come out of it. She doesn’t have a lot to say about Jessup’s father, and they aren’t in contact with that side of the family.
Ricky’s dad, Pete Gilbert, was around here and there, though right now he is serving time at a state prison. Different prison than Ricky. Pete did okay as a dad when he wasn’t in jail, usually remembering Ricky’s birthday, showing up for football games despite how bad the team was, dropping by every few weeks. Doing his best to do right. Scrawny guy, and Ricky took after his dad. Pete and Jessup never talked much, but not a cross word, either. Nothing wrong with Pete except that he was just a kid when he got Jessup’s mom pregnant. She was only fourteen, right at the end of her freshman year, when she had Ricky, Ricky’s dad one year older but already dropped out of high school. What passed for a relationship between Pete and Jessup’s mom was over long before Ricky could walk. By the time David John had become a going concern, Pete was just some guy who occasionally looked in on his son. No beef between the two men.
Ricky was already ten when David John came on the scene, but Jessup was only five. He doesn’t remember what it was like before his stepfather. Nothing concrete. His life might as well have started the day David John walked through the door. Ricky’s told him stories about what it was like before David John, but they seem unconnected to Jessup’s life. Theoretical. Even though Jessup knows that it’s true—his mom still goes to meetings every few weeks and calls herself an alcoholic—it’s hard for him to believe. They don’t keep alcohol in the house and Jessup doesn’t have a memory of his mother ever having a drink. But he knows that’s his stepfather’s doing.
From Ricky’s perspective, David John is the best thing to happen in his life. David John made good money as a plumber, and with him around, Mom stuck to cleaning houses. Dinner on the table every night. A full refrigerator. Ricky no longer making grilled cheese for Jessup because their mom was working double shifts, cereal for dinner, school breakfast and lunch okay during the year, but things lean in the summers and on holidays. The nurse at school keeping a food pantry and Ricky bringing food home to make sure he and Jessup had something to eat.
Neither Ricky nor Jessup was the kind to make excuses—David John wasn’t one for excuses, and they’d learned to own up to their actions—but in letters the brothers had written back and forth, Ricky had been remarkably forgiving of their mom.
Not like Grandma or Grandpa were much help. Can’t have been easy. She was just a kid herself.
Which was true. Ricky at fourteen, Jessup when she was nineteen. By the time she met David John and they’d married, she was only twenty-five. And her parents. Grandpa was okay. Stubborn bastard, but he didn’t say much. He liked spending time in the garage. He helped Jessup fix up his pickup, the only occasion Jessup can think of when he’s ever spent much time with his grandfather, the truck a beater that Jessup bought for six hundred bucks and brought back from the dead. But his grandma, his mom’s mother. Jesus. The old bitch had never been happy a day in her life. Hand the woman a pile of cash, and she’d complain about getting paper cuts. They kicked Cindy out when she was seventeen, Ricky only three. You’re on your own, girl.
So David John was a lifeline, and Ricky grabbed hard.
Not Jessup. He didn’t know why. Ricky was calling David John “Dad” by the time Jewel was born, but Jessup never got there.
“Mr. Serious,” his mom called him.
“Doesn’t matter none,” David John said, because it didn’t matter none to him. He treated both Ricky and Jessup like they were his own boys. Plenty of Jessup’s friends didn’t have fathers around, and plenty of the ones who did would have been happier without. If Jessup struggled to remember what it was like when his mother was drinking, all he had to do to get a sense of that life was to look around. Their closest neighbor had a boy near Jessup’s age, just a year older, and his dad was a drunk and mean and quick with a fist. Mostly they played at Jessup’s.