Hobbs drank coffee and watched Alan tear into a muffin like an animal. He was short on table manners, but Hobbs had stopped thinking he should have pushed him off that roller coaster. He wasn’t a bad kid, just young and green and looking to prove something, most of all to himself. Those days were so far gone for Hobbs he could barely remember them.
The kid tried to make some small talk, but Hobbs touched a finger to his lips. “This isn’t the part where you talk. This is the part where we be quiet.” Alan shrugged and said, “OK, this is the part where I go sleep,” and left. Hobbs watched him go. He wondered what it would have been like to have a kid of his own, a son. He tried to shake it off, but it wouldn’t go.
It was Grace. She was the reason for every thought that tied him down. She held his life together in ways that he hadn’t even known were possible. He had been some wild thing before he met her. He had been married, but that broad hadn’t been any damn good. She’d had a bad loyalty gland and had killed herself from the guilt of betraying him. He had never figured out how a person could lack loyalty, but still feel guilt about it.
Hobbs was loyal to work. To the job. He was honest on the job, because that was the best way to get the job done.
After his wife was out of the picture, he had chopped his way through twenty jobs and twice as many women. He had been a shark. Swim, eat. Swim, fuck. Swim, eat. Swim, fuck. But always swimming. Always moving on.
Then came Grace. She had been on the arm of an idiot who had fingered a precious metals robbery. It had gone wrong, but when the dust had settled, she’d still been there. That first time, they’d coupled brutishly, with the reckless abandon of people freshly paroled by death. But for some reason she’d lasted where others had not.
She grounded him. She helped him square away his finances. Launder money. Invest it. He was a sail, she was a keel. And so they had passed through the years. It had been good and he hadn’t thought much about it.
She didn’t like what he did, and she never wanted to talk about it. She had never asked him to stop. Not with any force anyway. She had suggested, once, that things might have been different if they had had children. He refused to talk about such things, but he had never been able to get it out of his head.
Hobbs wondered what kind of father he would make. What was that job anyway? Raise a good citizen? He couldn’t square that. Help a kid along his way? Maybe he could do that. But maybe not. Nobody had helped him, at least not any more than he’d helped them. Nobody except Grace.
And Alan? He was smart, could use computers. Why was he doing this? Hobbs knew. Not exactly why, but he knew that the kid had a hole in him, the kind that might never be filled. He wanted respect—all young men did—but beneath that he wanted freedom. He didn’t want to live under somebody else’s thumb—be a part of some corporate machine, work his way toward a shitty pension that they would jerk out from underneath him at the last minute.
Hobbs was old enough to know that some holes were just empty, sucking spaces that would never be filled. Someday he might be old enough to stop trying to fill his. But he doubted it. It would have happened by now.