Fortunate Son

“You stay,” Kronin ordered.

“I’m not your damn servant,” she said, barely raising her voice. “And neither is my brother. If you want to talk to me, do it with Mikey here.”

Michael felt like a bug he’d once seen on the nature chan-nel. Beneath the sand a hypersensitive subterranean snake was stalking him while from behind came the shuffle of a small rodent that had picked up his spoor. He’d die if he ran and die if he stood still. Michael had turned off the show, unable to bear it because of his identification with the insect.

“I will not be bullied by you,” Kronin said to the queen of his heart.

“I’m not the bully.”

“What did you do with that money?”

“It’s my money, and I can do with it what I please.”

“Not ten thousand dollars.”

“Why not? Didn’t you put it into my account? Didn’t you tell me that you trusted me to make sensible decisions?”

“I don’t know if I trust you anymore.”

“I’m tired,” Raela said then. “I’m going to bed.”

“Eat something,” Kronin said, no longer loud or a bully.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You’ll die.”

“Everything dies.”

Michael was beyond understanding this confrontation. He was unaware of Eric’s relationship with his sister. He hadn’t heard much from his friend since the funeral. Michael had called Eric, but that phone number was disconnected and he’d taken a leave from UCLA.

Raela walked out, leaving the older man seething and the younger one perplexed.

2 6 3

Wa l t e r M o s l e y

“Do you know what’s going on?” Kronin asked Michael.

“No, sir.”

“Why not? You brought him into this house.”

“Who?”

“That Eric Nolan. He’s bewitched her. She’s taken all the money I gave her and given it to him.”

“To Eric? Why?”

“Talk to your sister. And if you want to keep coming here you’d better make her listen to reason. The only reason you are suffered in this house is because of her.”

Michael had always known that he was not a true member of the family. Maya never wanted him, and Kronin hadn’t adopted him. Everyone loved his sister, not him. But no one had ever spoken these words. No one had ever told him that he was worthless. And so, even though he revered Stark and loved his life among the rich in Bel-Air, Michael went to his room and packed up his few things. He drove away from the Stark residence with no intention of returning.

Six blocks away his cell phone sounded.

“Hello?”

“Come back home, Michael,” Maya said into the receiver.

It was the first time she’d called him in well over a year. He disconnected the call.

A few minutes later the phone sounded again. Michael wouldn’t have answered except that it might have been his sister.

“Yes?”

Kronin Stark’s voice boomed into the young man’s ear.

“Michael.”

Again he disconnected the call.

*

*

*

2 6 4

F o r t u n a t e S o n

M i c ha e l drove for many miles that night, taking the same path that Christie had when she’d made her fateful decision. He couldn’t have known where Christie had gone, but there he was. He stopped at a motel outside of Twentynine Palms and gave them his credit card.

“Do you have another one, son?” the silver-haired propri-etor asked. “This one’s being declined.”

The room was only twenty-nine dollars a night, a promo-tional offer for the off-season. Michael had enough money to last him a week.

He went to his room, which opened onto the parking lot, and sat on the lumpy mattress, amazed that Kronin had canceled his credit card so quickly. This made Michael feel insubstantial. It was as if his whole life had been jotted down in light pencil and at any moment it could be completely erased. He had no mother or father, no one who loved him.

“Do you love me?” he had asked his sister when he was seventeen and she was eleven. He asked because he needed someone to care, and he believed that he saw his love reflected in Raela’s eyes.

“I would die for you,” she replied.

That night he went across the highway to the Monster Bar and ordered a beer. It was a small bungalow under the huge, looming shadow of a billboard in the shape of a Gila monster.

The reptile’s fat red tongue lolled lasciviously.

The woman behind the bar was named Doris Tina War-ren. Her lower lip had been deeply cut from side to side, and the scar was like another, fatter lip bulging out from the first one.

“You stayin’ at the hotel across the street?” she asked him.

“Yeah.”

“Vacation?”

2 6 5

Wa l t e r M o s l e y

“I just got kicked out of my sister’s father’s house.”

“You have different fathers?”

“No. We have the same father, but he died. This guy adopted her but not me.”

“That’s fucked up,” the fake platinum blonde said. “What is he, some kind of a pervert?”

“I don’t know. He gave me a credit card a long time ago, but as soon as I was gone he canceled it.”

“But you have cash?”

Michael looked into the thin woman’s eyes, which were two different shades of blue, and realized that she was worried that he couldn’t pay.

“I got enough for this beer and the next one,” he said.