“I know, bro, she’s psycho. Though, I mean, she is super hot.” Jared grinned at me, and I resisted the urge to smack the smile off of his face.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”
“I wanted the two of you to meet naturally. You’re a shitty ass actor bro, sorry to say, but you are. So I wanted your first meeting to be natural, and to see if you hit it off great.” He laughed. “And it looks like you guys hit it off.”
“Yeah.” I looked at the wall, my heart racing. “We hit it off.”
“So, what do you think? You willing to date her to pay her and her family back for what the mayor did to Dad?”
“I don’t know.” I was hesitant, even though that had already crossed my mind when I had been in her house. Hadn’t I made love to her in her parents’ bedroom as some sort of sick revenge? I felt my stomach knotting, and a dart of pain shot through me as I pictured the look of fear in her eyes as I’d held her down.
“We don’t owe them anything, Logan.” Jared stared into my eyes bleakly. “He ruined Dad’s life, and ours. He cost us our childhood and our mother.”
“I know.” I nodded. “I just don’t know that we can take that out on Maddie.”
“We’re paying for the sins of our father.” Jared’s voice was agitated. “She should pay for the sins of her father.”
“I don’t know.” My voice trailed off. I no longer knew how I felt about Maddie, everything was so confused in my head, and the hatred that had existed for everyone in the Wright family was now hazy.
“He ruined our lives, Logan.” Jared jumped up. “This is our chance to pay it back.”
“Revenge isn’t always the way.” I sighed and stared at him. “Let me think about it.”
“You want to think about it? Go downstairs and look at Dad; look at all the beer cans in the living room. Go try and have a conversation with him. He could have been something. You know that, I know that, Mom knew that. And it was all ruined.”
“Yeah.” I nodded and thought about my dad and his life. A life that had been diverted off-course because of Mayor Wright.
“Think about it, Logan.” Jared walked out of the room. “And keep the money, use it to pay the rent.”
“I, uh.” I looked at him gratefully and sighed. “When did you grow up?”
“A long time ago, bro.” He smiled at me. “A long time ago.”
He walked out the door, and I sat back on the bed and lay back and closed my eyes. I could picture my mother’s smile and the loving look in her eyes as she had played with me, Vincent, and Jared as kids. She had made sure to tell us she loved us every day. As we got older, we used to squirm and blush, embarrassed at her declarations of love, but what I wouldn’t give for her to tell me she loved me one more time. She died within three weeks of getting diagnosed with cancer. There was nothing they could do. That’s what the doctors had said. The cancer had spread, and even a mastectomy wouldn’t have helped at that point. She should have been going for yearly checkups, they said. But we couldn’t afford yearly checkups. My parents barely got by. The only income my dad could get was from the cars he stole, and that always depended on how much money Marty gave him and didn’t win back in a poker game. My mom had died from cancer and nothing had ever been the same in our lives again. Not that everything had been great before then. It hadn’t been, but there had been hope. Hope that my dad would get over his bitterness and try and make something out of his life. But his hatred of the mayor had consumed him. And he had every right to hate him. My eyes popped open and I stared at the ceiling as the bitter poison of hate ran through my veins.
Mayor James Wright, or just James, as he had been called back in the day, had gone to school with my dad. They were both in the same grade and they were best friends. James came from a rich, prominent family, and my dad’s parents were hardworking Italian immigrants with little money but lots of ambition. Their greatest wish for my dad had been a top quality education and a job as a lawyer or a doctor. My dad had been really smart and had done well in school. He had been a handsome man as well, so he had done well with the ladies. He seemingly had the best life, aside from being poor, but that would have eventually changed, because he was smart and there was hope that he would get a scholarship to go to college. My dad signed up with James to take some college entrance exam and they both took it at the River Valley Library with about thirty other students. But the day after the test, it was discovered that some of the tests and answers had been stolen. Someone anonymously reported that my dad had stolen the exams. The school board and the colleges all believed the report because my dad had near perfect scores. So he was kicked out of school. But that hadn’t stopped him: he had decided to get a GED so he could at least get into one college; even if he didn’t get a scholarship, he could get financial aid. And he started tutoring students to make extra money, and that was when he met Mom. He had fallen in love with her right away, but so had James. James made a play for her, but my dad won her heart right away. Things were looking up for him; he got another opportunity to take a college entrance exam, but the night before he was to take the test, the police took him in for questioning. A car had been stolen, and he had been identified as the thief. My dad thought there had been a mistake. He didn’t understand why or how two such huge and horrible incidents had been pinned on him. But then he found out it was James. It had been James all along. James wasn’t as smart as dad, and he had stolen the tests. He had also been mad about being rejected, so he had stolen a car and left some of dad’s belongings in it. He’d gotten his cousin to pretend to have seen dad stealing the car. Because James was from a prominent family, the police believed everything he had said easily.
So that had ruined dad’s chances. He hadn’t been able to go to college and get a loan or scholarship because he had a record, and no one in River Valley would hire him because of all the rumors saying he was a bad seed. Then one day Marty had showed up and presented him an offer: steal cars and sell them to him. And my dad took the offer. That was why he had never really spoken up to Marty. In some weird way, he thought Marty had given him an opportunity to make a living. I didn’t see it that way; I felt that Marty had made Dad’s life worse because after my dad turned to that life, nothing was ever the same again. He married my mom, and he had us kids, but he was never able to turn his life around. And he blamed it all on James Wright. And when James became mayor, my dad became obsessed. He took us to his house every week, and we would sit in the car and listen to the story of how the mayor had ruined his life, and our lives as well. And that it was us who should have been living on Manor Road. We just sat and listened and grew to hate the mayor, not only for what he had done to Dad in the past but what he had done to him now as well. We hated the mayor for making us grow up with a father who was a violent drunk, and for making us lose our mother, and for making our family the social outcasts of River Valley.