“You can’t scare me. I have two daughters.”
Max Collins
Darius left my parents’ house soon after we got back from our ride. He’d been quiet during lunch, and it was clear that whatever he thought about the Manet, he wasn’t going to share it with me. I was a thief, after all, and he didn’t trust me. Fair enough.
I was in the garage wiping down the Bonneville when my dad found me.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said, grabbing a shop towel and kneeling at the other side of the motorcycle to help. “Everything okay?”
I shrugged. “Not really.”
He was silent for another minute. It’s how we’d always talked – working on something, with long silences between the words. “Your mom said you got an old painting of hers back from the guy who caused the rift between her and Alexandra. Seems like it meant a lot to her.”
I nodded but didn’t say anything. Dad must have caught the motion, because he nodded too. “You take it?”
“Yeah,” I said after a minute.
Dad sat back on his heels and studied me. That rarely happened. Most of the time our hands were too busy for our eyes to look. “He catch you?” he finally asked.
I knew he meant Darius. My dad and I had a shorthand that had never really required too many words, which might explain why I sucked at being a girl sometimes. I didn’t use the requisite number of words most of the time, or I used too many, and they were the wrong ones.
I sighed. “Yeah.”
More silence. I finished wiping down my side of the bike and moved next to him to get the parts he hadn’t gotten to yet. “That his job?” Dad finally asked.
“Yep. He’s good at it too.”
“Hand me the chrome polish,” he said, already reaching. I tossed it to him and got a clean rag to polish what he applied. We polished the chrome in silence for a few minutes, and I was glad to have something shiny to focus my attention on. My reflection in the pipes distorted to something fantastical and freakish, but the story that would usually spin its way out of my brain didn’t come, and the fantasy faded into something flat and strange with no magic at all.
We finished the chrome, and my dad stood up with only a slight wince.
“He wants you,” he said.
The words startled me, and I shook my head. “No. He might have if I hadn’t lied to him.”
He studied me. “You lied?”
“Yeah.”
“About a life or death thing?”
I shook my head and scoffed. “A freedom thing maybe, but not life or death.”
“Same thing to some.” My dad took the shop towel out of my hand and turned me around to face him. Then he opened his arms, and I stepped into them for a hug. In my dad’s arms was the one place I ever felt like I could be vulnerable, and I let myself relax into his hug.
“Thanks, Dad,” I whispered into his sweater.
“Your mom’s already got that painting up above the fireplace,” he said after a long moment.
“How attached are you to the purple sofa?” I asked.
He chuckled at that. My mom was known to change all the furniture in a room to highlight a new piece of art. There was no question where my sister had gotten her decorating skills.
“I could never give your mom her sister back. You did that.”
“Colette and I did it together,” I murmured.
Dad stepped back so he could look at me, and he wore a wry smile. “She might have had a little something to do with it, but we both know who did the taking.”
“I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about that, Dad. Flattered that you think I’m capable, or insulted that you’re so sure I’m the one with the criminal tendencies.”
He laughed and pulled me back in. “Both. But not insulted.” Abruptly, he let go of me and busied himself cleaning up the shop towels. “Your sister is a princess, and God knows, she has her own way of getting what she wants.”
I smiled at that. “She does, doesn’t she?” I had to admit I was kind of proud of her for it.
My dad studied me. “But you think outside the box like there is no box, and you’re the only one creative enough to see that.”
I sighed and hung the helmets on their hooks on the wall. “I’m not sure what to do next. Taking the painting has opened a whole can of worms that I don’t know how to close back up again.”
“Here’s the thing, kiddo. Right and wrong aren’t as simple as black and white, because there are about a million shades of gray in the world.”
“You think?” I scoffed, because that was exactly what I thought. And exactly what Darius didn’t.
He sighed as if he wanted better words. “You’re who you are because of the life you’ve had. You had advantages and an education that shaped you – you’ve traveled the world and done some pretty incredible things. What’s right for you might be a couple of shades different than what’s right for someone with different experiences.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I can see that.” I thought about what Darius had said about building three hours into his travel schedule because the sound of his name fit a profile. Meanwhile, Colette could talk her way out of a ticket just by smiling.
My dad continued. “That doesn’t mean there isn’t a hard line on things that hurt other people, but you know what your own code is. You know what you can live with and what you can’t, and I like to think you were raised to make workable choices.”
“I’ve never had a problem with that, Dad. I’m pretty clear on where my hard lines are.” I had realized when I was a kid, choosing Honor as my D&D character, that my personal code felt a little like a mix of Robin Hood and Mulan, with an unfortunate dose of Sid, the filterless sloth.
“So, work with what you’ve got,” my dad said as he organized his impeccable workbench. “Trust your gut, protect yourself and the people you care about, don’t hurt anyone, and stay true to what you believe in. At the end of the day, there are a lot of things more important than a couple of swirls of paint on a canvas, even if they make your mom happy.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
He swept a hand over his spotless work bench and headed for the door, but turned back just before he left the garage.
“Anna?”
“Yeah?”
“You bring people to life when they’re with you. Choose someone who does the same for you.”