Page 28 of My Heart Still Beats
“I’m sure it will be delicious,” Tessa says.
“You all let me know if you need anything else.” Olivia whisks away, pulling out a pad to take an order for another table.
I’m a gentleman, so I wait for Tessa to take the first bite of her burger.
I wait and I wait, and finally my stomach lets out a growl.
“Sorry,” I say. “The enticing scent of sauerkraut and all.”
“Oh, please. Go ahead. I’m just”—she looks at her burger, her eyes widening slightly—“gearing up for it.”
“After the pork fat and dairy diet you’ve been on, this will probably taste pretty good.”
“It does smell good,” she says. “My appetite has just been…”
“Hey. I get it. I do.”
“Please don’t insult me like that.”
I shake my head quickly. “You’re misunderstanding me. I’m not saying I get what you’ve personally been through. It’s like what I said before. I understand how it feels to fight demons.”
“Please.” She scoffs. “I honestly don’t mean to be disrespectful, but you’re a billionaire, and you can’t deny that money does make a lot of things easier. What the hell kind of demons have you ever had to fight?”
Her comment is one I’ve heard many times before. People seem to think money can take care of everything.
It can take care of a lot. That’s true. But it can’t erase demons. It can’t bring light into darkness.
The funny thing about darkness is that it’s actually not dark. You can still see. You can still hear. You can still smell.
You can smell rotted flesh, that sweet—sickeningly sweet—aroma that gets inside your nostrils and never really leaves.
It’s the smell of death.
My mother’s death.
Something I always blamed my father for—my father and his drinking. But recently I found out there was another culprit.
My brother.
He confessed it all to me.
I told him not to worry about it. It was in the past.
But doing the whole best-man thing with his confession still in my mind has been more difficult than I imagined.
I tell myself nothing has changed. This all happened decades ago, and we have the world at our fingertips now. We’re billionaires. A couple of construction guys from South Boston are fucking billionaires.
But that’s not the only demon I’ve had to fight.
Not by a long shot.
…
Fifteen years earlier…
The day comes when I finally decide not to go to work after school. I had a shit day. I had to break up a fight in the boys’ room. Three football jocks were shoving a freshman’s head into the toilet.
Poor kid. He was a nerdy-looking thing—skinny with freckles and bucked teeth. Voice hadn’t dropped yet. So I helped him up, got him dried off, and then chased the motherfuckers down the hallway. And who got sent to see the principal?
