Belonging Read online

  “Because that’s not gratuitous.”

  “That was why the show lasted two full seasons. When it got cancelled, the only people who complained were horny housewives and me.”

  “Oh man, did you actually send a letter to the network?”

  I grinned at my friend. “Jason was so damn hot. Still is, he’s only gotten sexier over time. What do you suppose the chances are that he’s gay?”

  “Come to the party tonight and find out.”

  “Two problems with that. I have to babysit, and you have to stay away from Miles Harken.”

  “Who are you babysitting?”

  “My brother Mikey’s boys. He has a date tonight.”

  “Well shit, if it’s Mikey he’ll be home by ten. The party will just be getting started.”

  I chewed my lower lip as I thought it over for a few moments. Finally I said, “If I went, I would need a solemn oath from you.”

  “I won’t let Miles get me in bed, I swear.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Yosh grinned at that. “So, you ask for an oath and when I give you one, you immediately shoot it down. I can’t win.”

  “You’re right. Sorry. I just know how irrational you get where Harken is concerned.”

  “Not this time. Tonight is all about throwing you at your crush and seeing what sticks.”

  I smiled at him. “Is that what we’ll be doing?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “I doubt he’s gay. He’s always being photographed with some beautiful supermodel or another.”

  “Maybe they’re just his beards.”

  “Well hell, let’s go tonight and find out.”

  Yosh beamed at me. “Awesome.”

  “Want to hang out with me while I babysit? That way, we can go straight to the party when Mikey gets home.”

  “I could, but maybe you should get someone else to watch your nephews. What if your brother gets lucky and spends the night?”

  “He won’t.”

  My friend chuckled at that. “Mikey’s a really good-looking guy, you know. It could happen.”

  “Well sure, it could. But he’s a dad first and foremost, so he won’t be spending the night anywhere. Now are you actually going to lift those weights, or just pose with them? I do actually have to work today so we need to get moving.” I made air quotes with my fingers when I said the word ‘work’.

  Yosh configured his weights, then got on the bench as he asked, “How is your quote-unquote job, anyway? That guy still driving you insane?”

  “Utterly.”

  “Well, we’d better hurry up and finish our workout. We know how you are about being late.” Yosh smiled at me as I rolled my eyes.

  *****

  About the only thing Zan Tillane didn’t routinely complain about was my punctuality. He undoubtedly would have, if he actually owned a clock and if my job description said anything about me being there at a certain time. Absolutely everything else in the world was complaint fodder, after all.

  The door to the den where Zan spent almost every minute of his life was closed when I let myself into his huge house in Marin. I deposited five canvas grocery sacks on the kitchen island, then went back out to the car, taking two triple-bagged sacks of trash with me. Those I stuck in my trunk before returning with three boxes of books that I’d mail-ordered for him. He wouldn’t actually tell me what he wanted to read, but he told his son Christian, who passed the information along to me. It was such an eye-roller.

  Up until a few months ago, Christian had been doing all of that for his dad. But my friend had had surgery to remove a brain tumor and was undergoing chemotherapy, so he’d hired me to do the job. To say his father resented my intrusion into his life was putting it mildly.

  I’d just about finished putting away the groceries when the door to the den finally swung open. Sometimes, Zan didn’t come out at all. Usually when he did, it was to complain about something.

  “You bought the wrong kind of tuna last time,” he announced, pushing his long, dark hair over his shoulder.

  “I know. I had to, because of the worldwide shortage.”

  He looked surprised at that. “Of tuna?”

  “No, of douchebags pretentious enough to spend six bucks on a can of fish. That brand you insisted on went under, so now you’re stuck with pedestrian two dollar tuna.”

  “Are you sure it went under? Did you call the company? Maybe the store just stopped carrying it.”

  “I did actually, and then I was pissed off at myself for buying into that doucheyness. There’s no difference between the discontinued brand and the stuff I got for you. It’s a fucking fish in a fucking can!”

  “Which is, by definition, not pretentious! It isn’t as if I asked for a bleedin’ fifty dollar nugget of Ahi on a bed of twenty dollar bills.” As he became more agitated, his English accent started taking a turn for the cockney. I always found that entertaining.

  “Normally, no. Canned tuna is the exact opposite of pretentious, until you slap on a fancy label and charge six bucks for it.”

  Zan spotted something on the kitchen island and frowned as he changed the subject. “What is that?”

  “A fruit.”

  “I gathered that. What kind of fruit?”

  “A tangelo.”

  “What’s a tangelo?”

  “It’s a cross between a tangerine and a....” I paused to consider that, then admitted, “Hell, I have no idea. Let’s just say it’s a big, fat tangerine.”

  “That wasn’t on my shopping list.”

  “I know. I think it’d do you good to expand your diet a bit, so every week, I’m going to bring you one new item. I’m starting easy.”

  “I don’t want it. Take it away.”

  “Don’t fear the fruit, Zan.”

  “I don’t fear the damn thing, I just don’t want it in my kitchen!”

  “Tough. I’m not taking it away.”

  He knit his thick brows at me as he crossed the room and plucked the orange sphere off the counter. He then strode to the back door, flung it open, and chucked the tangelo outside. Zan looked pleased with himself when he turned back to me, until he realized the tangelo had been immediately replaced with another. That fruit met the same airborne fate.

  “You’re totally acting like a child right now,” I pointed out as he turned toward me again and found yet another tangelo in the spot previously occupied by the other two.

  “Bloody hell. Are you shitting those things out?”

  “Now there’s an attractive visual.” He grabbed the latest fruit and I did, too, leaning over the kitchen island to get in his face. We were the same height, about six-two, and I held his gaze as I said, “Stop throwing these! You’re not six. Actually, that’s beneath even my six-year-old nephew.”

  “I’ll stop throwing them if you promise to stop improvising! There’s a list. Just stick with it!”

  “It’s not good to be so rigid. You need to open yourself up to new experiences, or else what are you going to be like five or ten years down the road?”

  He let go of the fruit and straightened up, his green eyes flashing. “I don’t recall asking your opinion.”

  “I don’t recall needing to wait until I’m asked.” He’d had enough of me by that point and started to return to the den. I called after him, “I’m going to be doing yard work for a couple hours, just so you know. If you decide you actually want to have a conversation with someone, you know where to find me.” The door clicked shut behind him and I frowned at it.

  I gathered up the grocery sacks and went back down the long hallway leading to the side door. The walls were lined with a couple dozen gold and platinum records. Zan Tillane had been a famous pop star, one of the biggest in the world. But that was a long time ago.

  He hadn’t left his house in more than a decade. His son and I’d had long conversations about how much of this isolation was voluntary, and how much might stem from some kind of mental illness. Zan was definitely bipolar, ther
e was no doubt about that. But was he also agoraphobic, paranoid, or any of the other diagnoses that doctors had tried to assign to him over the years? I really didn’t know.

  When Zan first disappeared from the public eye, it had set off a firestorm of publicity, far more than he’d probably ever anticipated. All kinds of stories sprang up, in the form of urban legends, movies, documentaries and countless rumors. Whatever his goal had been when he tried to walk away from it all, the end result was this. He lived his life totally cut off from the world and if he ever tried to go back, the paparazzi would pretty much swallow him whole. Given that, it might be a good thing that he seemed to have no interest in ever leaving his home.

  But how could he stand so much isolation? The only person he spoke to regularly was his son, and he kept a lawyer on retainer to deal with anything that cropped up. That was the sum total of his social interaction, not counting me. And I really didn’t count, since he had very little interest in speaking to me.

  After stopping off in the tool shed, I started working around the perimeter of the house. The sprawling ranch-style behemoth was partially built into the side of a hill. It appeared to be one story when you drove up to it, but around back, two lower stories were revealed. The house sat by itself amid rolling, tree-dotted grassy hills, as far as the eye could see.

  It was early spring, and the grass had been growing like crazy. Every other week I was out with the riding lawnmower, trying to keep it down. There was a significant firebreak around the property, a wide, dry creek bed separating the grassy hills from the minimalistic landscaping that ringed the house. It still made me nervous, though. If a wildfire broke out, what exactly would this man do? This wasn’t just a house, it was his whole world.

  No one else seemed terribly concerned about this, but I was, so I spent a lot of extra time on the landscaping. I’d recently begun trimming dead branches from the trees closest to the house. I wasn’t much of a gardener though, and wondered how Tillane would react if I asked to bring along my brother Vincent, who had a natural affinity for that kind of thing.

  From my vantage point up in an oak tree, I could see Zan in his den. His back was to me and a movie was playing on the big TV mounted to the wall. He was facing away from the screen though, sitting on his brown leather couch and staring at the closed double doors leading to the kitchen. He was probably waiting until he knew I was gone before he came out and made himself some lunch.

  I felt sorry for him, except for the part where he was choosing to be completely obstinate. Deciding I was the enemy didn’t make a lick of sense. It wasn’t as though I was purposefully trying to replace Christian.

  Still though, my heart broke a little as I watched him sitting there all by himself. It was always like that for him, day after day of that sameness and loneliness. I had absolutely no idea how he could stand it.

  *****

  Progress on the trees was slow. By late afternoon, I was exhausted and decided that was all I could do for one day. I went to the toolshed and put the handsaw away, then washed up in a utility sink in the garage. The structure was built for three cars, but held only one: a dusty, long-forgotten vintage Jaguar convertible with four flat tires. The car was a thing of beauty. What a waste.

  When I went inside the house and knocked on the door to the den, Zan swung it open and stared at me. “Do you care if I bring my brother to help me with the landscaping?” I asked him.

  “Why are you doing all of that?”

  “To keep your ass from burning down if there’s a wildfire.”

  “There’s never been a wildfire here,” he said.

  “Well, in case Mother Nature didn’t get the ‘no wildfires here’ memo, I thought I’d go ahead and take care of some of that shit.”

  He stared at me for a long moment, a muscle working in his jaw as he ground his teeth. Finally he said, “Tell me about your brother.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Anything.”

  “Well, let’s see. Vincent’s a newlywed, he’s married to a sweet guy named Trevor and they have an adopted son named Josh. Christian was at their wedding, you can ask him about my brother if you want. Vinnie’s been studying landscape architecture and wants to start a business, but for now, he just does work for our family. He’s really smart, too, and good at fixing things. If you have any projects around here that you’ve been wanting to get done, he could take care of them for you.”

  Zan mulled that over, then said, “Bring him,” before closing the door in my face.

  I sighed and muttered, “Good talk,” before turning and leaving him to his solitude.

  Chapter Two

  “What’d you bring us, Uncle Johnnie?”

  I’d gone home to shower before heading to my brother Mikey’s house and had put on a clean t-shirt and jeans. As I hung a garment bag with a change of clothes for later inside the hall closet, away from sticky little fingers, I asked, “Who says I brought you anything?” I turned to my nephew Markie and ruffled his dark hair.

  The six-year-old knit his brows. “You always bring us something, and you always pretend you didn’t,” he told me flatly.

  “Sounds like I’ve become predictable, I’d better change things up a bit,” I said and he sighed dramatically. His older brother appeared on the stairs to my left and I called, “Hey Mikey Junior. What’s shaking?”

  Now it was the nine-year-old’s turn to frown at me. “Remember how we talked about this, Uncle Johnnie? I don’t want to be called Mikey Junior anymore, I want to be called MJ. Is that so much to ask?”

  I grinned and told him, “Sorry, I forgot.”

  “Everyone keeps forgetting. It’s just like the whole family calling you Johnnie when it’s not even your name,” he said. “Don’t you want people to stop doing that?”

  “I’m used to it.”

  “Why does everyone call you Johnnie, anyway?”

  “It’s his fault.” I pointed at my brother Mikey, who was coming down the stairs carrying Mitchell, his seven-year-old. “When your dad was little he couldn’t say Gianni, so he called me Johnnie. Somehow, it stuck.”

  “Could be worse,” my brother said, depositing his son in the hall. “I’ve totally given up on getting the family to call me Mike instead of Mikey.” He began fidgeting with his dull, dark blue tie.

  “You’re right to give up, it’s a lost cause.”

  My brother really wasn’t a ‘Mikey’ by any stretch of the imagination. He was eleven months younger than me, but you’d never know it. At six-four he had almost two inches and probably forty pounds of muscle on me. That big build was an interesting contrast to the tidy hair and the Clark Kent glasses that made him look like an accountant (which he was).

  Between his size and the fact that he had the same dark coloring as most of my Sicilian family (which had skipped me for some reason), we looked nothing alike. That didn’t stop our family from calling us the twins, though. It wasn’t just because we were close in age. Mikey and I had been inseparable growing up. Our parents died when we were just three and four, and we’d totally latched on to each other when that happened. He’d been incredibly important to me throughout my childhood. Even though he was younger than me, he’d brought a sense of security to my life at a time when I desperately needed that.

  But then, soon after high school, Mikey decided to get married and start a family of his own. That shouldn’t have hurt, but it did. Sure, I’d been happy for him. But at the same time, I missed my brother when he moved out and started a new life.

  He’d married Jenny, his high school sweetheart, and they had three beautiful boys. Then Jenny was killed by a drunk driver and Mikey, who’d already been a great father, evolved into Superdad. His whole life was about his kids. I admired the man he’d become, even if a pathetic little part of me still missed him sometimes.

  Mitchell came up to me and I scooped him up and gave him a squeeze as I said, “Hey, big guy. What’s new?”

  “I have a loose tooth. MJ keeps threatening to ti
e a string around it and yank it out. Don’t let him,” he said gravely.

  I grinned at Mitchell. He was my favorite, partly because he was quiet and studious and took everything way too seriously. “Your tooth is safe with me. Which one is it?” He curled back his lips and pointed to a tiny little Tic Tac of a tooth in the center of the bottom row.

  Someone knocked on the door and I told my brother, “That’s probably Yoshi, he was finding a parking spot. We’re going out later, so he’s going to hang out while I babysit.”

  “Awesome! He can give us all tattoos!” MJ exclaimed. His father rolled his eyes almost imperceptibly. During our last visit, Yosh had brought a set of nontoxic markers and drawn temporary tattoos for the kids. Even though they washed out with the next bath, they’d still made my straight-laced brother a bit twitchy.

  Mikey answered the door, and he and my friend greeted each other with backslapping hugs. Yosh hadn’t thought to dress down and was wearing head-to-toe black, topped with a slick motorcycle jacket. That was going to go well.

  “I ordered pizza,” my brother told us, “it’ll be here soon. Boys, please go set the table.” I put Mitchell down and the kids headed for the dining room. My brother turned to Yosh and me and said, “Can I ask your opinion on something?”

  “No to everything you’re wearing,” I said.

  “How did you know what I was going to ask?”

  “Are you going to a funeral?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  “Then what’s with the dark suit and boring tie?”

  Mikey said, “I wanted to make a good impression.”

  “Who are you going out with?” Yosh asked.

  “A woman named Bonnie. We met at the grocery store,” he said embarrassedly.

  “First date?” I asked, and when he nodded I said, “Where are you taking her?”

  “I made reservations at Fonte.”