Page 24 of The Banker and the Blue Collar Man

He was looking at me again, out of the corner of his eye, as though watching to see which way I’d jump. What mean thing I’d do next.

I had a feeling that had I hurt Buddy or Jasmine, he’d have been all over me with the intent of teaching me a lesson about kindness.Always worried about the wild things, Lucas had said. I remembered Jake had advised me against driving home in the twilight. About how I’d not be able to see. He’d not been worried about me, right? Surely not. He’d been worried about the foxes and deer I might not see in time to avoid hitting them.

Maybe I wanted him to worry about me. Just once it would be nice if someone would.

Sure, Lucas had always looked out for me at the office. That was an eight-to-five gig, and he did his best as long as he was there. He did pretty good, in fact.

But now I was on my own.

My brothers ignored me, except when they needed me. I could explain that they were crass assholes because they blamed me for my parents’ deaths, but really, they’d always been that way, ever since I could remember.

I was the youngest. Typically, the youngest child was the pet of the family, spoiled beyond belief, but that wasn’t the case in our house. Rather, I was certainly an afterthought, standing at the end of a long line of more important things.

My parents had died in a car accident, on an icy road curving around a half-frozen lake, on the back way to Denver International Airport, because they hadn’t wanted to pay to drive on the clean and dry toll roads.

They’d been coming to pick me up from the airport, as I’d gone to Chicago to take the test to get my bank examiner’s certificate. My two years of study had been online, but CSBS preferred it when you took the test in person. The cheapest flights were in early December, so that’s when I went.

When I got home, certificate in hand, my parents were dead, and my brothers’ dislike of me turned into something far more severe.

Cadmar, the oldest brother, was the executor of the estate, and I got the short end of the stick. Not that I’d expected anything different. Cadmar got the house we grew up in, a nice two-story brick building in the old part of Cherry Creek. Ansley, the middle brother, bought a new loft townhome in downtown Denver with his inheritance and invested the rest.

I received a check for $5,000 and the deed to twenty dusty acres where the well had dried up, out near Scottsbluff, Nebraska. From the stories, the land had a pretty view to the west of the river and the bluff, but I’d never been. My dad had gone back once for his father’s funeral, but not since.

Sometimes I thought about taking a road trip out that way, to visit Grandpa’s grave and take a look around. But my work in Denver kept me busy. It paid the bills.

It was no fun to brandish that CSBS certificate if my parents weren’t around to show it to. Not that they would have praisedme. Their expectation that I would follow in my father’s financial footsteps was supposed to have been enough to keep me going.

I took pride in my achievement, but the growing chasm between my brothers and me, while it didn’t make me sad or angry, did make me realize that they didn’t care about me. Had never cared beyond the tiniest amount.

When I complained about my family, Lucas never saidOh, but they’re family. You have to love them. I loved that about him. He had family problems of his own, so he understood mine.

Tired, as I always was, of walking down that particular road of memories, I yanked my attention back to the present, where pointed tips of flame danced in the air against a very dark sky. Someone had turned off the outdoor lights on all the bunkhouses, and now the gold-and-orange firelight was the only illumination.

I turned to Jake, expecting that he’d be staring into the middle distance, at nothing. But his head was tilted back, and his eyes were focused on the night sky.

“What’re you looking at?” I asked. I looked up, too, but all I saw was a spread of stars. They sure were pretty, but I could see no discernible pattern.

“Them,” he said, and he drew his focus from the sky and onto me with a graceful turn of his head.

Something curled in my belly, and my face grew warm.

A second later, he was pointing upward. “That’s Saturn. That bright light there.”

I looked where he was pointing.

“And that’s Ursa Minor.” He traced a little square, just to the north, halfway up from the horizon. “Over there is Ursa Major.”

The tracing was more complicated this time, and I really couldn’t follow it. What I could follow was his quiet joy in spotting constellations that seemed very familiar to him.

“Where’d you learn all that?” I asked around, a mouthful of popcorn. It was dark, and I’d evidently thrown my manners to the side. “They teach you that in school out here?”

“No,” he said. “There was this book,Star Finders. Walter gave it to me a long time ago. Don’t know where it is now.”

For a heartbeat, I got the feeling that he was bracing himself for criticism.

I knew that feeling, boy did I. When I did my best, I still half expected praise from my brothers. My parents. The other half of me knew better but couldn’t quell the hope that, one day, they’d throw me a party for getting that master’s degree in banking. The party never came, nor did the acknowledgment.

Well, I wasn’t going to continue that practice. Instead, I let my admiration show through very clearly in the dark.