Seattle is a dizzying maze of buildings and bypasses, tunnels and byways, skyscrapers that might be built right on top of the highway itself, like something from an impossible Lego set. There are exits left, exits right, viaducts and express lanes, the overpasses and underpasses all curling around each other like a bunch of huge concrete spaghetti noodles jammed against the hillside that rises steeply from the water.
He drove through it before, on his way from the airport,
but it hits him more clearly now. Compared to Modesto, this really is a different world.
When he spots the exit for Capitol Hill coming up, he flicks on the turn signal. Stay right, then turn left, three blocks and a right. He’d memorized the series of turns, the post-freeway route through the city streets, just in case.
Finally, he turns onto the right street and starts looking for the street number, drawing irritated honks from passing traffic as he inches along, scanning the tightly packed storefronts, coffee shops and juice bars and vintage clothing stores with their goods spilled out onto sidewalk racks. It’s ten minutes until six on a perfect August evening, and the neighborhood bustles, a mixture of hipsters and neighborhood folks tethered to dogs. Commuters with messenger bags and purposeful strides.
Here’s the address Michelle Yates had given him. He double-checks to make sure, because it’s a plain gray door. After weeks of trying to get this meeting . . . this is Brinks
Development? He had expected some shiny office tower, but maybe this is how successful people do it in Seattle. Shaved yam instead of pastrami and humble storefronts instead of steel skyscrapers.
By some miracle, on his second circle around the block, he spots an open space right in front.
He cuts the ignition and checks his phone. Still nothing from Avery. Should he send a text? Nah, he’ll call her after. By then, he’ll have a story about his father to tell. The slam of the camper’s cab door is swallowed up by the busy city sounds. He feeds the meter with two crumb-coated quarters he digs out of the console.
To Cameron’s surprise, the plain gray door is unlocked. It opens to a nondescript vestibule, apparently an apartment building. On the wall to his left there’s a row of slightly dinged-up metal mailboxes, a half dozen of them. Several fliers and pieces of junk mail litter the floor.
On the right, there’s a staircase that only goes up. Directly ahead, on the back wall, there’s an elevator, and Cameron notices that it has call buttons for both up and down. Michelle had said to take the elevator to the basement.
“Down the rabbit hole,” he says to himself as the elevator dings.
Right away as he exits, there’s this weird smell. Something waxy and spicy, like cinnamon, out of place for the middle of summer. It hits Cameron as soon as the elevator doors open. It must be coming from the candles, which are everywhere in the dark hallway, candles against mirrors on both sides making it look like there are a million little flames going off into infinity. Upon further inspection, he discovers that they’re fake candles. Which makes sense. What fire code allows someone to put so many candles in a basement?
What the hell is this place?
He follows a threadbare gray carpet down the hall and around a corner, which deposits him inside the world’s tiniest cocktail lounge.
It’s empty. A short bar, five stools tucked underneath. Warm light reflects off the brass ceiling tiles, giving the whole place a yellowish glow.
On the bar, there’s a small paper square propped in a holder. A menu. Mudminnow’s Bespoke Libations, it says at the top, followed by a list of drinks with ridiculous names. He blinks at the prices, making sure he’s reading them right. Do people not realize they can get a six-pack at any grocery store for half the price of one of these libations? He pulls out a bar stool and sits.
Something clinks, and Cameron looks up to see a girl come through a doorway behind the bar. She has short, bright green hair that reminds Cameron of flattened grass. She balances a stack of highball glasses in each hand, and her eyebrows register the tiniest moment of surprise before she begins to unload the glassware into some unseen shelf down in the well. “We open at eight,” she says, without looking up.
“I have a meeting.” Cameron clears his throat. “With Mr.
Brinks.”
The grass-haired girl looks up. The expression on her face is painfully blank, as if Cameron were the least interesting thing she’s ever encountered.
“I’m serious,” he says. “Michelle set it up.” He hopes it’s okay to call Michelle by her first name.
The girl shrugs. “Okay,” she says, ducking away. “I’ll let him know.”
SIMON BRINKS.
Cameron has repeated the name in his head so many times these last two months, has studied so many photos of the coiffed man blown up huge on his billboards, that when
this disheveled dude emerges from behind the bar with a tired smile, he almost doesn’t believe it could be him.
“Hi,” Cameron says, his voice suddenly shaky and nervous. “I’m—”
“I know who you are, Cameron.” Behind the bar, Simon’s smile broadens.
“You do?” Cameron’s heart hammers, but is it from nerves, or rage? Somehow the idea of socking or extorting this guy seems preposterous.
“Why do you think I suggested this venue?” Simon Brinks waves a hand around the tiny room. “As I’m sure you’ve discovered, I have lots of offices and properties, but this place was originally for Daphne. It’s the perfect spot for us to meet.”
Cameron’s pulse is pounding now. For Daphne? Is Brinks about to fess up to a lifetime of deadbeat parenthood, just like that?
Simon smiles. “You met Natalie.” He tips his head toward the doorway behind the bar, through which the grass-haired girl had disappeared. “She knows the whole story.”
“The whole story.” Cameron can barely force the words out.
“Well, sure. She’s my daughter.”
Daughter. His head whirls. A father and . . . a sister? Before he can stop himself, his eyes dart to the doorway behind the bar again. Could that girl with the strange hair really be his half sister?
Simon clasps his hands and leans on the bar. “You have your mother’s eyes, you know.”
“My mother.” Cameron swallows hard.
“Daphne always had those incredible eyes.”
Cameron sucks in an embarrassingly sharp breath. She did have pretty eyes, didn’t she? He wonders whether he’s inventing this or if he actually remembers.
“Anyway,” Brinks says, with a slight shrug that seems to knock the conversation in a more casual direction. “Can I
pour you a drink?” “A drink?”
“I make a mean old-fashioned.”
“Uh, a beer is fine. Whatever you have,” Cameron blurts. His ears burn. Why does he care? Is impressing one’s father a hardwired predisposition?
Without a word, Brinks reaches down into a below- counter refrigerator and rises again with two longnecks clutched between his fingers. The bottles hiss as he pops the caps. “Cheers,” he says, lofting one.
“Cheers,” Cameron echoes. How bizarre will this story be later? When he tells it to Avery and Elizabeth, in turn?
“So, you have questions about your mother, naturally,” Brinks says, after a long pull on his beer.
Cameron pulls himself up by the shoulders. No more chickenshit. His voice is even when he says, “I have questions about you.”
“Oh?” Simon cocks his head. “Okay, well. Everyone thinks I’m some sort of enigma, but for you, I’m an open book.” He smiles. “So, shoot.”
“Why did you . . .” Cameron swallows, then regroups before trying again. “I mean . . . how could you . . .” A sob messes up his throat. Why didn’t he make a secondary plan for when the words wouldn’t come?
“How could I what?” Simon Brinks scrapes his chin. “Let her go? Well, I cared about her.”
Cameron’s face hardens, and his voice is pure acid when he spits out, “But you never cared about me.”
“You? Of course I care about you. You’re her son. But what could I do, once she was—”
“I’m your son, too!” Cameron’s voice cracks.
Simon Brinks takes a step backward, recovers. “I’m sorry, Cameron. You’re not,” he says softly.
“I’m your son,” Cameron repeats.
Brinks shakes his head. “That’s never how it was with me and Daphne.”
“But it must have been.” To Cameron’s horror, his chin starts to tremble. He knew this might happen, right? The whole thing being a dead end. He prepared himself for this, or tried to. So why is he about to lose his shit right now?
“Like I said, I’m not surprised you’re here, Cameron, but
—”
“Why did you give her your class ring?” Cameron fishes it from his pocket and drops it onto the bar. Simon picks it up and a faint smile comes over his face as he examines it. When he turns it over and looks at the underside, the smile fades.
“This isn’t mine,” he says quietly. “Oh, come on. I saw the picture.”
Brinks carefully places the ring on the bar. “Daphne was my best friend,” he says. “Look, I know how that sounds, but we really were just friends. Best friends.”
Cameron is about to fire back. But then he remembers Aunt Jeanne’s constant digs about him and Elizabeth. A heavy feeling sinks through him like a lead balloon. He’s no closer to finding his father than he was two months ago.
“You never, um . . . slept with her?” Cameron hates how crass the question sounds.
“No, I did not.” Brinks chuckles. Then his face goes somber. “Look, I’ll do a cheek swab if you want. I’m a hundred percent sure on this one.” He picks up the class ring and turns it over again before replacing it on the bar. “Hang on. I’ll be right back.”
He returns a few minutes later with a beat-up hardcover book and something cupped in his hand. The book gives off a puff of dust when he sets it on the bar. The cover reads SOWELL BAY HIGH SCHOOL, CLASS OF 1989. Presumably the source of all those photos someone scanned and posted, including the one of Simon and Daphne on the pier. Then Brinks extends his palm. “This one is mine, see.”
Cameron picks up the ring and holds it in his left hand, while holding one he’s brought with him in his right. The
weight feels identical. So close, yet . . . wrong.
Brinks tips his head toward the back of the bar. “There’s a big unfinished space back there. I use it for storage. But I suppose it’s also sort of fitting that all this high school stuff lives down here. It was supposed to be our place, after all.”
“Our place”? What’s that supposed to mean? Cameron turns the ring over, expecting to see the EELS engraving, but to his surprise, it says SOB.
“What’s SOB?” he asks.
Brinks chuckles. “My initials. I’m Simon Orville Brinks. Mind you, I don’t advertise that, because the jokes practically write themselves. Lucky son of a bitch, huh?”
Cameron stares at the two gold rings on the bar top. “You had it engraved with your initials? Did everyone do that?”
“Most people did, I guess.” Brinks shrugs. “Lots of people tried to get cute with the personalization. A bunch of youth- group types all got theirs with ‘GOD.’ And I’m sure more than one kid had a ring that said ‘ASS.’ I thought about getting ‘ASS,’ but my mama would’ve shanked me.”
“Do you remember anything about this one?” Cameron picks up EELS. Whoever he is, he must be a big fan of marine life. Or sushi. Did he pay extra for that fourth letter?
Brinks shakes his head. “I wish I could help you.” “You don’t know EELS?”
Brinks adds softly, “I never knew my father, either.” “Yeah, and somehow you still ended up a zillionaire.”
Cameron’s shoulders slump.
“I worked hard,” Brinks says, and there’s an edge to his voice now. “Look, I came from Sowell Bay, too. Do you know how your mother and I met? Became best friends?”
“Um . . . no?” Cameron honestly hadn’t thought about this. Even when he thought they were together, he’d assumed they met at school, like everyone else.
“We lived in the same crappy apartment building; she lived there for a while our junior and senior year,” Brinks says. “On the wrong side of the highway.”
“I didn’t know there was a wrong side of the highway in Sowell Bay.”
Brinks lets out a hard laugh. “Well, these days, the whole place is sort of on the wrong side of the highway, but it’s turning back around.” His tone shifts; he’s talking business now. “Lots of development these last few years. I’m doing a waterfront condo project up there. Really nice units.”
Cameron nods. For a sparse second, he wonders whether Brinks would hire him to work the project. But he’d probably ask for references, and, well . . . that’s a no-go. Even for his former best friend’s son.
“Anyway.” Brinks leans over, propping his elbows on the bar again. “I asked you to meet me here instead of at my regular office because I thought you might get a kick out of seeing it.” He picks up the cocktail menu and, staring at it, says, “Like I said, I made this place for her.”
Cameron looks around the tiny lounge, now thoroughly baffled. A ridiculously small bar in the basement of a nondescript apartment building on Capitol Hill . . . for his mom?
“We talked about something like this, together, once we grew up a little. Mind you, this was back in the eighties, when speakeasies weren’t a total hipster cliché.” Brinks rolls his eyes. “I don’t even know how two teenagers come up with that sort of idea, but we used to spend hours talking about it.” His face grows more somber. “Of course, that was before her . . . problems.”
“Problems,” Cameron mutters.
Brinks is still studying the menu in his hands. “She even picked the name of the place, strange as it is.” He looks up with a half smile. “Mudminnow. It’s a—”
“It’s a tiny fish,” Cameron cuts in. “They live in rivers and other fresh water. Can survive really bad conditions. Extreme temperatures, hardly any oxygen in the water. So they’re usually the last thing to survive when shit goes
south. They’re like the cockroaches of the tiny-fish world. But with a much cooler name.”
Brinks gapes. “How on earth do you know all of that?” Cameron shrugs and explains that he read it somewhere,
once. “I retain random knowledge. I kind of can’t help it.”
Brinks laughs. “You’re exactly like your mother, you know.”
Cameron’s mouth drops open. “I am?”
“Oh, absolutely. She wanted to apply to be on Jeopardy! after we graduated.” He clears his throat. “Her family never understood her. She hid her real self from them, I think. Even from her sister.”
Big, hot, fat tears hang in the corners of Cameron’s eyes. He can feel that his lips are pressed into an embarrassing, involuntary grimace.
“That’s just the face she made when something unpleasant surprised her,” Brinks says.
Cameron presses a fist against his pursed lips. “I guess I always assumed I got this weird photographic memory from my father.”
“Well, maybe from him, too,” Brinks says. “Daphne never told me who your father was.”
Cameron snorts softly. “That makes two of us.”
“Daphne was an oddly private person sometimes. We were incredibly close, but I know there are many parts of her life she never shared with me. This was one of them. I’m sure she had her reasons.”
“Yeah, well, because of her reasons, I grew up with no parents. I’m sure she had good reasons for abandoning me, too.”
“I have no doubt she did,” Brinks says, without a trace of sarcasm. “She loved you, Cameron, more than anything in the world. I know that much. Anything she did, it was from a place of love.”
Something clatters in a semi-close sort of way, probably from beyond the door behind the bar. Is the grass-haired girl
listening in on all of this? What was the daughter’s name? Natalie? A wave of nausea hits him square in the gut. She knows the whole story. Her father’s brilliant best friend who got pregnant and went off the rails, and the son who might come looking for them someday. As usual, Cameron is the last to know.
Brinks sighs. “I wish I could tell you more. I feel terrible that you came all the way up here, expecting one thing and finding . . . another.”
“Do you know where she is?” Cameron twists his hands together in his lap. Did he really ask that? Does he even want to know?
But, to his semi-relief, Simon just shakes his head and says, “No, not anymore. I haven’t seen her in several years.”
“What was she—I mean, where—”
“She was living in Eastern Washington somewhere, back then. She showed up at my house. Needed cash. Which I gave her, of course. But it was clear she was still struggling, Cameron. Still using.” His brow creases. “Maybe I shouldn’t have given her the money? I don’t know. Part of me wanted to drag her into my house, put her up in the guest room. Fix her. But I had my hands full with Natalie already. And, well . .
. you can’t fix someone who is determined to stay broken.” “Right.” Cameron fakes a smile. “I guess I’m a chip off
the old block.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, Cameron.”
“I can’t even put trash liners in the right way.” Brinks shoots him a puzzled look.
“At the aquarium. I’ve been working there, chopping fish and cleaning. And the trash cans—oh, never mind.” Cameron cuts off his own pointless rambling. Simon Brinks, renowned real estate tycoon and speakeasy owner, from the wrong side of the highway but bootstrapped his way into wild success, doesn’t want to hear about janitor problems.
After a long pause, Brinks says, “Daphne would’ve been proud of you, Cameron.”
“Yeah, I’m sure.” Cameron slaps a five-dollar bill on the bar, hoping that will cover a Mudminnow’s beer. Close enough, anyway.
Brinks pushes away the cash, but Cameron is already halfway to the door.
