A Baby in the Bargain (7 page)

“What was his business?” Jani asked, hating what she was hearing even though Gideon was telling her this matter-of-factly and without the animosity he’d exhibited before.

“He owned Franklin Thatcher Insurance. He’d built it from the ground up, and it was doing well—he was a leading businessman, which was part of what helped him win his mayor’s seat in the first place. But a majority of his clients were in Lakeview and after the Camden warehouses and factories were all that came of the deal with H. J. Camden, there was a boycott on Franklin Thatcher Insurance. The agency went under. Then his house was torched—”

“No...” Jani said, flinching from that thought. She dug her hands into her pockets and shrugged deeper into her coat and scarf as it suddenly seemed to get colder.

“Yep, somebody burned down his house. At least they made sure my great-grandparents and my grandfather weren’t in it at the time, but they lost everything. Literally. They ended up with the clothes on their backs and a car that had been smashed all to hell with baseball bats during an attack of vandals a couple of nights earlier. There wasn’t a lot of effort put into finding out who did it all.”

“Oh, Gideon...” Jani said with heartfelt sympathy.

“That was when they ended up here—my great-grandfather got a job mopping up, emptying the trash, general maintenance. My great-grandmother made sandwiches to sell with her pickles and deviled eggs as bar food, and the owner let my great-grandparents and my grandfather live in the two-room apartment above the bar because he felt sorry for them.”

It just got worse and worse; Jani was huddled inside of her coat as much from the cold as from shame.

But when Gideon noticed, he only thought that she was cold and suggested they head back.

“So your grandfather grew up in two rooms over that bar?” Jani asked as they retraced their steps. She didn’t want to hear any more but she knew she had to and, since Gideon seemed to be in a talkative mood, she also knew she had to pursue it. Plus, despite the subject matter, he wasn’t displaying any hostility and that helped.

“On the first round, my grandfather was here for only four years—he was twelve when they left Lakeview. It was tough on him, too. He’d had his friends turn on him, literally throw rocks at him, beat him up—the stuff of twelve-year-olds taking out their parents’ frustrations on the son of the man they held responsible for misleading them. My grandfather didn’t adjust well to his new school, he didn’t try to make new friends, and when he was sixteen he dropped out, and lied about his age to join the army.”

“How did that work out for him?” Jani asked, hoping for the best but not expecting it.

“He didn’t rise through the ranks. He apparently had a chip on his shoulder and was in trouble quite a bit for insubordination.”

“He had a lot of anger,” Jani guessed. Then she added quickly, “Not that he didn’t have reason...”

But this time Gideon didn’t jump on that the way he might have in previous encounters. Instead he merely confirmed that, yes, his grandfather had been an angry man his entire life.

Then he said, “When my grandfather got out of the service he ended up right back at the bar again, tending bar rather than sweeping up—I guess that was an improvement.”

“But it’s where he spent his life, too?”

“My whole family had trouble getting away from that place. It was like it had a hold on them. Or maybe, after Lakeview, they just didn’t have the courage to move too far from the hole they’d hidden in,” Gideon mused. “The anger and hatred that drove my great-grandparents and my grandfather out of Lakeview followed them for a few years, but they were still so beaten down by it long after the Thatcher name didn’t mean anything to anyone outside of Lakeview.”

“Did you know your great-grandparents?”

“I was little when they were around, I only remember them as frail, fearful old people. Furious really is what my grandfather was, right to his grave, furious and unhappy, and yeah, so beaten down by what had happened to him as a kid in Lakeview that he even passed on his defeatist attitude to my father—”

“Was your father raised around the bar, too?”

“Yeah. My grandmother was a regular patron—that’s how she and my grandfather got together. It didn’t make for the best connection. My grandfather married her when she got pregnant with my father but by the time my father was two, my grandmother had run off with some other guy and was never heard from again. My great-grandmother had died, there was just my great-grandfather, my grandfather, my two-year-old father and the bar—”

“Were they all still living in the apartment over it?” Jani asked, afraid of the answer.

“Yeah. My great-grandparents never left it. For my grandfather and my father there were a couple of moves into other places, but then money would get bad and they’d end up back there. It’s where my father grew up.”

Jani didn’t know what to say about that but Gideon’s tone let her know it wasn’t something he was happy to report.

“Did your dad make it through school?” she asked.

“He got his high school diploma, but it didn’t really matter. He was drinking before he ever graduated. He went to work bartending as soon as he was old enough, too. His greatest ambition was for him and my grandfather to buy the bar—”

“Did they?”

“Nah. They could never scrape up the money. My dad just stayed tending bar, doing it the same way his father did—pour a drink for the customer, pour one for themselves if they could get the customer to buy. My grandfather weathered the boozing better than my old man—my grandfather made it into his sixties before liver disease brought on by alcoholism killed him. My father only made it to forty-seven.”

And all of it tracked back to what
her
great-grandfather had done...

“I’m so sorry...” Jani said, genuinely contrite. Then she asked another question she was dreading the answer to. “What about you? Did you grow up in that bar, too?”

“I started out there, but no,” he answered without going into more detail. Instead he said, “I just thought that since we were this close, maybe you ought to see where the Thatchers landed post-Lakeview.”

Landed and got stuck...

Jani and Gideon had reached the much more trendy stretch of the street again but were only about halfway back to the restaurant. They drew up to a cart set among a ring of heat lamps outside an ice cream parlor. Gourmet hot chocolate was being sold from the cart, and the cold January night—and a heavy helping of guilt—inspired Jani to say, “How about a little hot chocolate for the rest of the walk? You didn’t let me buy you dinner, at least let me buy this.”

He didn’t argue, so they both warmed up under one of the lamps while cups of molten chocolate and cream were prepared for them.

When they were on their way again, sipping as they went, Jani decided to push a little and said, “So you started out at the bar but didn’t grow up there?”

“My parents met there, too, but not because my mother was a barfly the way my grandmother was. My mother was a nurse’s aide at the medical center when the main campus for the medical school was farther north on Colorado Boulevard. She got off work late one night and her car made it just far enough to die outside of the bar. The bar was open so she went in.”

“And your dad was pouring drinks,” Jani concluded.

“Right. He was only about a year into it by then—my mother said his drinking was in the early stages. Anyway, he bought her a drink, flirted with her until closing, then went out to take a look at her car. They were married six months later. I was born ten months after that.”

“And went home from the hospital to the apartment over the bar?”

“Yep,” he said fatalistically. “My mother was young, she’d come from modest means herself, she wasn’t too put off by it at first—”

“Were your great-grandfather and grandfather still living there, too?” Jani asked, finding it difficult to believe that a new bride was thrilled to live above that bar.

“No, they gave the place over to the newlyweds and rented a room in a boarding house within walking distance of the bar.”

“So at least they had the apartment to themselves...” Jani said, trying to find a silver lining somewhere.

“Yeah. My father had told my mother that he was going to own the bar eventually, that they just needed to live there long enough to save some money. I was about four by the time she realized that was more my father’s pipe dream than anything that would ever actually happen. And his drinking had gotten worse and worse on top of it.”

“She left him?”

“No, but her goal had become to put some distance between him and that bar. He wouldn’t quit his job there—he was still swearing he was going to buy the place, that it was his future. But she at least forced him to make a move out of the apartment above it and told him he could only spend time there when he was working.”

“He agreed to that?” Jani asked, sipping the steaming drink.

“Well, he agreed, but he didn’t abide by the agreement. They got a little apartment a few blocks away, and my great-grandfather and grandfather moved back into the one over the bar. But my father still spent his off hours there. My parents were divorced by the time I was six. Which was when my mother and I had to move in with her mother.”

Gideon’s frown when he said that was very dark, leading Jani to assume it hadn’t been a positive experience.

“You didn’t like your maternal grandmother?”

His eyebrows arched. “Oh, sure, I liked her. But my grandfather on that side had died before I was born and my grandmother wasn’t well. The living arrangement was really just a necessity all the way around. Financially, and so that my grandmother had the care she needed, and in order for me to have an adult around when my mother had to work night shifts. But my poor mother worked as a nurse’s aide, then came home to take care of my grandmother’s failing health. And me and everything else. Plus there were only two bedrooms in my grandmother’s house, so I grew up sleeping on the couch—”

“The whole time you were growing up, you didn’t have a
bedroom?
”

“Or a bed,” he said with a humorless laugh.

“Was the couch a fold-out?”

“Nope, just a couch. I did put sheets and blankets on it every night. And I had a pillow—”

“But it wasn’t even a fold-out couch,” Jani lamented. “How long was it before you got a bedroom. And a bed?”

“When my grandmother died. I was sixteen. Then my mother took her room and I got my mother’s room. And a new mattress, which was a treat.”

“But still, you slept for
ten years
on a couch?” Jani said in dismay. “Finances were that bad?”

“I loved my dad, he was good-hearted. But he drank everything he earned. My mom didn’t make much as a nurse’s aide, so yeah, finances were always bad. I worked wherever I could—mowing lawns, shoveling snow, anything for a few bucks until I was old enough to get a formal job along with the odd jobs. But even then it was only after school and on weekends—I’d seen enough, I was getting an education come hell or high water.”

“Which you did—high school, college
and
a graduate degree,” Jani said, her admiration for him mounting along with the guilt she was feeling.

“Is your mom still around?” she asked, hoping that the woman had at least benefited from Gideon’s success.

But he shook his head sadly. “She died of a massive coronary three months before I graduated with my bachelor’s degree. Six months after my dad had died. At barely twenty-two I became all there was of the Thatchers or the Wadells—that was my mother’s maiden name.”

Jani closed her eyes and shook her head slowly back and forth as they crossed First Avenue, threw their empty cups in a trash can and returned to the restaurant parking lot.

She was grateful that Gideon hadn’t shown any animosity or hostility tonight as he told her his family history. But now she also marveled at the fact that he’d told the entire story without a drop of self-pity, either.

It was impossible not to be impressed by him. And not only because he was tall and lean and broad-shouldered and drop-dead gorgeous, or because he exuded self-assurance in every step. It was impossible for her not to look at him and see how far he’d come, on his own, to achieve all he’d achieved. To be the man he seemed to be. A man who wanted some honor and dignity restored to his family name. Honor and dignity that her own great-grandfather had stolen...

“It’s hard not to think about how different things might have been if Franklin Thatcher had gone on being mayor of Lakeview and owning his insurance agency, isn’t it?” Jani asked.

“Sure. Over the years I’ve done a lot of that. After hearing as much as I did about the glory days when my great-grandfather was mayor, when my grandfather was king of the hill because he was the mayor’s son, after hearing as much as I did about what might have been, I had my own fantasies—”

“Like what?” Jani asked, wondering if the Camdens might still be able to help make those fantasies a reality.

“I’d imagine that we lived in the suburban dream community my great-grandfather might have built. That I was important because I was a Thatcher—the great-grandson of the mayor,” he said, smiling slightly at the flourish he used with that title. “In my head I’d make my grandfather a businessman—selling insurance at the agency he’d taken over. I’d imagine that my father wasn’t a slave to a glass, that he and my mother stayed together out in the burbs where he probably sold insurance, too—”

“And I’m sure you’d picture yourself with your own bedroom. Your own bed...” Jani said, her heart breaking for the young Gideon, that heartbreak echoing in the softness of her voice. “You
do
have a bed now, don’t you?”

Something about that made him laugh as he leaned against her car, bringing him slightly closer in front of her. Enough so that Jani could feel a little of the heat radiating from him and smell the faint scent of a clean, crisp cologne that she liked. A lot...

“You’re making me feel guilty,” Gideon said.

“
I’m
making you feel guilty?” Jani asked in astonishment.

“You look like a deer I’ve caught in my headlights. You really didn’t have any—
any—
idea of what H. J. Camden brought about, did you?”