“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.”