If you need that many toys to enjoy life, then you’re still a child.
They had already called ahead and arranged to meet with him. They checked in at the front gate, were admitted into the house, and escorted to Lineberry by one of the maids. He was still in bed, the woman told them—which alarmed Pine, because it was well into the afternoon.
They entered the room and the maid left. The space was dark and overly warm, with all the window shades lowered. It was like a tomb with wallpaper and carpet, and living people. The effect unnerved Pine.
“Jack?” said Pine.
Something stirred on the bed. A pajama-clad Lineberry struggled to sit up, and finally managed to do so. Pine and Blum drew nearer and looked down at him. Their features betrayed their alarm at the state of the man. He looked like he had aged two decades since the last time they had seen him. A tall, handsome man in his sixties, he looked shrunken, withered, fragile, and, most tellingly, done with life.
Blum said, “Jack . . . what happened?”
He focused on her with a pair of weary, bloodshot eyes, his brow crinkling in annoyance approaching anger. “Nothing . . . happened. I’m . . . doing okay.”
“You don’t look okay,” Pine said bluntly. “You don’t look okay at all.”
“That’s your opinion,” he replied testily.
“That would be any reasonable person’s opinion,” countered Pine.
“I was shot, Atlee. It’s not like I have a case of the flu. Nobody just pops back from that. Particularly not someone my age.”
“I realize that,” she began before glancing at Blum. “And I know I was mad beyond all reason after my last visit here.”
“You had every right to be as angry as you were. I feel like I got off easy, actually.”
“Don’t go all chivalrous and make this harder than it has to be,” she said in a lighter tone.
He held up his hand before she could go on. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, Atlee. At this time in my life it’s imperative to do so.”
“Thinking about what?” she said sharply, not liking his fatalistic tone.
“About you, about Mercy, about your mother and Tim. And, finally, about me.”
Pine drew up a chair next to the bed and sat down. “And what have you concluded?”
Part of her didn’t want to know his answer, but in life you needed to listen to things you didn’t want to hear, maybe those most of all.
“Well, first of all, I’m leaving everything I have to you and Mercy.”
Pine immediately shook her head, recoiling at this news. “Jack, I don’t—”
“Please hear me out. Please. It’s important!”
Pine shot Blum another glance, and the woman nodded with a pleading look on her face.
She sat back, folded her arms over her chest, assumed a stubborn expression, and said, “Okay. I’m listening, but that’s not the same as agreeing.”
“I am your and Mercy’s father. That gives me certain responsibilities, none of which I have lived up to.”
“You didn’t know where—”
He interrupted. “I knew more than I let on. And what I didn’t know I could have found out. The bottom line is, I have behaved abominably throughout this entire thing. I doubt any man could have been a worse father.”
He was so distressed that Pine felt her anger at him start to fade. She sat forward and laid a hand on his arm. “Jack, you were between a rock and a hard place. There was nothing simple about the situation.”