A Call Part II
“I’ve stayed true to my vows. I’d never cheat on her. I don’t know where she got the idea I’d made a child with someone else. I wanted so much for her to bear my babies.” A hint of a smile pulled his lips. “I had to beg her to let me try because she wanted to finish school first. She was a couple classes short of her degree when she left.”
The further away from the town lines they
e, the
more upset Thisbe was getting. She kept looking over her shoulder out the back window of the car.
“I know you love her Gully, but I do too. She was the sister I never had. She was the one person in the world who didn’t judge me because of my money, my name, my family. She loved me for me and she saw me, my creativity and she made me dream. She forced me out of my shell and made me think outside the box of what the world wanted for me and to go after what I wanted. Knowing she hates me for my role in all this is killing me inside. I hate leaving with her thinking I betrayed her.”
“You did betray her.”
She shot him an angry look. “I didn’t want to.” 17:33
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“Yet you did. Her anger is justified. We need to work with it and around it. We’ll find a way.” He saw her rubbing her nose. “Now what?”
“You still stink. Confined in this car with you it’s amplified.”
“I bathed frequently.”
“It’s in your pores. Five days later and you reek it.”
He shrugged, “the little thing needed help holding on its oxygen mask, but it was scared. It sprayed. He had these little beady eyes and a little heart shaped nose. He was so thin you could see his ribs. He settled down on my chest when I was holding him with his oxygen and then eventually I got to give him some cereal from a syringe. Cute as a fuck.”
“Only you would hold a skunk and call it cute.
“Ford was telling us how sometimes people keep them as pets.”
“They’d ruin your house!”
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“No, apparently you can remove the scent glands and treat them like cats. You can even litter train them.”
“Why would you keep them?” she made a horrified face.
“If they can’t be returned to the wild, and are still healthy enough not to be euthanized, they are often used as education animals or as pets.”
“You really paid attention at Ford’s workplace.” Sh laughed at him.
“It was a nice distraction from Grandfather moping all over my goddamned office. Told me to make it up to me he would find me a virgin from his birth village.”
“He’s so weird.”
“Apparently when he was a very young man, such a thing was an honor. I took great pleasure in telling him my wife was innocent the first time I had her. I was her one and only. It only made him sadder.”
“He does feel bad.”
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“He should. He put so much fucking pressure on me to merge the two families that he threatened to take my seat from me and give it to Glenn. Glenn was freaking out because he sure as fuck doesn’t want to be in my shoes. I was raised for it. He was raised to be my right hand but there are days he would rather be a rock star.”
“He’s a damn good musician.”
- e.
“He sure is.” Gulliver frowned and looked at his r “I swear his ears are ringing.” He answered the bung, “Glenn, what’s going on?”
“Well, I’m having lunch with Ford and Mitsos. Ford was telling me how the kid who brought the skunk to the wildlife center was a doppelganger for Mitsos. He said it was eerie. He asked the mom if she was related to the Raptis family and she denied it. He said she was edgy and cranky, not friendly at all and so he chalked it up to the fact she’d been driving for hours in a car with a dying baby skunk and they both stunk to the high heavens. I laughed but he keeps staring at Mitsos and saying the kid was his twin. He asked me if it was possible Mitsos was a twin and that his mother kept one. I said hell no, but he asked me to see a picture of his mother. I was getting my phone out to show him. The chat from you and I this17:34
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morning was open with the photo you sent me the driver took at the gas station. He got excited and said, yeah, that’s her.”
Gulliver frowned, “what do you mean?”
“I mean, Ford is sitting in front of me telling me that January and her kid Kaylee were the ones who brought the baby skunk into the rehab center. How the fuck you two didn’t run into each other there is a god damned mystery, Gulliver but, he’s insisting the woman phone, from our chat log, is the one who he talked to at
the center.”
“She was there?”
“Yes.”
“With a child?” he didn’t try to hide the tremor in his
voice.
y
“Her child. One that could be Mitsos‘ double. The Raptis genes are strong Gulliver. What if the reason she was home that morning was because she was going to tell you she was pregnant and she walked in to find out that she was your side piece?”
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“She was never my fucking side piece!” he yelled furiously.
“She thought she was,” Glenn yelled back. “Our plan was flawed and faulty.”
“Well, this is just great.”
“What?” Something in his tone made Glenn pause.
ed
“Because we found her. We walked into her god a boutique. She’s the jewelry designer Thisbe’s been buying from. She looked me right in the face, told me she hates me and to get the fuck out. She had an old man with a god damned shot gun pointed at me to run me out of town. Now, I’m an hour away from her and I don’t have her fucking home address, and she has my kid and a head start? She’s going to fucking run with my daughter?” He gripped his chest and gasped for breath, tears welling up in his eyes and looked to Thisbe, whose own eyes were wet. “I have a daughter?”
Thisbe spoke quietly, “Grandfather is going to implode.”
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