Track [16] “Story of My Life”/Social Distortion
I didn’t think this through. When I texted Jane’s dad to ask him about fixing the Skeleton King, I should have probably tried to move the Jeep out to Aunt Zabel’s place. Quiet out there. But here, in the tiny record store parking lot off the Strip, it was anything but.
Road traffic. Foot traffic. And the worst traffic of all: Aunt Pari traffic. Because Mr. Marlow had only been here forty minutes, and my lovable but extremely busybody aunt had already ambled out to the parking lot a couple thousand times, first with water, then an old blanket—“In case you need to get under the Jeep. You won’t get dirty.”
He told her he didn’t need it. She didn’t care. That’s one thing that she has in common with my mom. All three Kasabian sisters, really. If they think you need something? You will fucking get that thing. Argument is futile.
“How long have you been doing this?” my aunt asked Mr. Marlow, peering into the engine over his shoulder. “Fixing cars, I mean.”
“All my life, really. Since high school,” he told her. “I’ve always been good at tinkering.”
“Mad Dog must have a lot of cars to keep you on full-time,” she said.
“Auntie,” I warned, feeling mildly panicky. “It’s none of our business.”
Maybe I was too self-conscious about the stuff Jane had told me—that her father hated Eddie. And I was no Eddie, thank the saints, but I was still cut from the Sarafian cloth. Mr. Marlow could decide that he didn’t like the looks of me and tell Jane not to hang around that horrible Fen Sarafian anymore.
Basically, I didn’t want to piss the big guy off.
And I didn’t have a great track record when it came to fathers.
Thankfully, Mr. Marlow wasn’t offended by my aunt’s curious poking around into his life. “I take care of all the vehicles for the family and staff too,” he said. “But yeah. I do all the maintenance, and I’ve rebuilt a few old cars for Mad Dog too. And he’s legally blind, so I drive him.”
“That’s right,” she mumbled. “One summer, about four or five years ago, my brother-in-law, Serj, had a driver. For the life of me, I can’t remember what happened to that guy.…”
“Dad kicked him out of the car in the middle of the Strip because he wouldn’t follow directions,” I reminded her. “He sat in front of the Bait Shop for two hours, waiting for a ride back home to Fresno.”
“Ugh,” Aunt Pari said, gritting her teeth and looking embarrassed. “Forgot about that. My brother-in-law is a demanding man, Mr. Marlow. I’m sure you’ve heard.”
Jane’s father lifted his blond head from the dark of the hood. “I try not to listen to gossip, but eventually there’s no avoiding it.”
“You can’t walk through a mud puddle and come out clean,” I agreed.
“Our family can be quite the mud puddle,” Aunt Pari said with a soft smile, then she handed me a printout from an online order. “Can you fix this in the system? The status is stuck as ‘shipped,’ but I never mailed it. It’s the one with the damaged sleeve—remember?”
Was she trying to get rid of me? Oh, yes. Distinct whiff of Adults only look in her eye. Why couldn’t she just let the man fix my car and go?
I gave her a look that said, You will have to cleave me in half with an axe forged from the souls of the damned before I move from this spot.
But she was immune to my dark powers. “Thanks, babe.”
Frowning, I snatched up the printout and strode toward the shop’s back door. As I made my way around a delivery van, I heard Jane’s father say, “Speaking of mud puddles, I am curious about why Fen isn’t living at home anymore.”
Ah, shit.
I stood in place, hiding behind the van, and listened to my aunt’s response.
“That’s complicated,” she said. “But in a nutshell, it comes down to Serj driving his two oldest boys into a competitive frenzy. I don’t have kids myself, but most parents I know go out of their way to make sure everything is equal for their kids. Same presents, same privileges. Right? You treat them the same.”
“Only got the one, but sure.”
“Not Serj. He had a different parenting philosophy, and no matter how much Jasmine disagreed, he raised those two boys to compete for everything—if there was a band they both wanted to meet, then Serj would only let the boy with the highest test score backstage. He gave Eddie an Alfa Romeo that’s worth more than the record store, but only after Eddie ‘proved himself’ at the festival grounds in some scheme Serj devised to see which of the boys could sell more T-shirts.”
“Huh,” Mr. Marlow grunted.
But that was only half the story! She wasn’t telling him what Eddie did, that he cheated on the test to get that backstage band meeting, and that he locked me in a festival outbuilding for two hours until a janitor found me—just so he could win our dad’s ridiculous T-shirt selling game.
“Serj raised them to be competitors, not brothers,” she was telling Mr. Marlow. “No surprise that the boys would be out for blood, really. It just escalated. Eddie got more competitive—and craved more of Serj’s attention. And before you know it, the boys were always bickering, accusing each other of treachery. It was high school. How much treachery could there be?”
She’d be surprised.
“Honestly, I’d rather be redeployed in a war zone than have to go back to high school,” Jane’s father said.
Thank you.
“Well, it basically amounted to terrible shouting matches,” my aunt said, “and to keep the peace, Fen moved into my sister Zabel’s place. He was already hanging out here after school, so I put him on payroll.”
“What about his mother? How does she feel about all of this?”
“She wants a happy home, so she’s trying to keep everyone calm, always playing referee. But she’s miserable about what’s happened with those boys. She wants Fen at home. But she sent him to us to keep him safe.”
“Is Serj, uh, physical? I mean, is he violent?”
Does shouting in your face count?
“No, nothing like that. It’s just the constant arguing. It’s mentally exhausting. She’s got the twins, too—her youngest? She didn’t want them seeing the boys fighting all the time. It wasn’t healthy.”
“I see.”
“But Fen getting kicked out of the house? That was never as bad as all the talk around town said it was. So if you hear that Fen did this or that, it probably isn’t true. He’s a good kid. Little dramatic, but that’s better than boring.”
Well, thanks, Auntie.
“I won’t listen to gossip,” he assured her.
Thank you, Mr. Marlow. Jane was lucky to have him. I was a little jealous, to be honest.
“You’ve only got one kid?” my aunt asked. “You get along?”
“We do,” Mr. Marlow said. “I would do anything for her. That’s why all this is bizarre to me. I can’t imagine my world without Jane.”
Yeah, well, I could definitely relate to that. Her face popped into my head, and a corresponding happy ache tugged at my chest. If I didn’t watch myself, I might do something dumb-diddly-dumb-dumb like declare my very messy feelings about Jane right here in front of Mr. Marlow, my aunt, and the group of loud tourists dripping ice cream across the parking lot.
Better to tell Jane in private.
Bees in my chest.…
Screw all this. I started to turn and jog into the shop, when I heard my aunt’s voice again.
“Heard some mud about your Jane, too,” she said.
“Is that so?” Mr. Marlow replied.
“That Mad Dog keeps her as close as he would a daughter.”
Silence.
Awful. Fucking. Silence.
Dammit, Aunt Pari! Why did she ask that? He was clearly uncomfortable. I debated rushing around the van and making up some excuse to interrupt. But then he finally spoke up.
“Jane’s my girl. I was there the night she was born, and I was there a few years later when her mother died. I changed her diapers, rocked her to sleep, and helped her with her homework. And since I won’t be paying attention to gossip about Fen or Eddie or even Serj, then maybe you shouldn’t pay attention to gossip about Jane. As long as no one’s getting hurt, let ’em be.”
Hell yeah! Ten points for the Henry Rollins fan.
Just let us be.
No one was getting hurt. How could you get hurt when you weren’t doing anything wrong?