Free Rock My Heart (Luminescent Juliet #4) by Jean Haus Page A

window eyeballs us over, his
face flushing with each second. “You’re not supposed to walk through the drive
thru.”
    Gabe puts his elbow on the window ledge. “It’s a bet
dude. She”—he tilts his head my way—“didn’t think I’d go through with it. So I
had to, right?” He holds out a twenty-dollar bill. “I mean look at her.”
    The boy glances at me, blushes and nods before
taking the money. “You’re lucky the manager’s on break,” he grumbles.
    “Oh, yeah,” Gabe says. “I’m one lucky son of a bitch.
Been lucky my whole life.”
    His sarcasm and the ‘look at her’ comment, mixed
with the fact that I’m standing at a drive thru window has me shuffling
forward. I move onto the sidewalk past the window as a car comes around the
corner.
    Gabe waves at the car.
    Finally, after what feels like the longest three
minutes of my life, the boy hands over the drinks and a bag. I move to round
the restaurant toward my car, but Gabe decides we need to eat at a picnic table
on a little patio in front of the place.
    I plop on the bench across from him. “We could have
just ordered drinks. The point was to walk through the drive thru.”
    He pushes a burger and fries across the table toward
me. “True, but I missed lunch.”
    I consider his grease stained T-shirt, then recall the
also grease stained pants now under the table that Misha sneered at during
therapy. “Fixing your truck?”
    He unwraps a burger. “Yeah, then there was the ride
thing that took some time.” He takes a huge bite of burger.
    “Your father’s girlfriend who gave you a ride,” I
say, pushing my cheeseburger toward him. “Is she the same one…from when you
were fifteen?” I pluck out a fry, attempting to make it appear like the question is small talk. I’m not sure if I want him to think I’m not that interested or
convince myself that I’m not that interested.
    He nods.
    “So she’s like a mom to you?”
    He swallows, his Adam’s apple a bob. “Suppose so,
don’t know what it’s like to have the real thing.”
    “Oh crap, I’m so sorry. Your mother passed?”
    “Not that I know of. My mother left when I was six.”
    The fry in my hand drops to the table. “You haven’t
seen your mother since you were six?”
    “Maybe six and half.”
    My mouth hangs open until I say, “And she left you
with your father?”
    He pauses unwrapping the second burger. “You know, once
people hear that my father was abusive”—I continue to question the was —“that’s all they can see, but he never left me.”
    My mouth becomes a flytrap again. “You’re defending
him?”
    Gabe sighs. “I know I make it sound like it in therapy
because that’s what people want to hear, but it’s not like the man is just a
fist. It’s not like I wasn’t a little shit. It’s not like he hit me out of the
blue.” He lifts the burger, then sets it down. “Well, most of the time.”
    “Really?” The word rolls out of me in a dry
incredulous tone, thinking no one, but especially a child, deserves to be hit.
    “Really,” Gabe says in a confident voice, but his
hands grip the edge of the table. “Though an asshole, my dad has had a rough
life too. His mother was an alcoholic, and he has become one too—which is why
I’m not in to drinking much. He never graduated from high school, never even
got a GED because he started working at sixteen to support her. A shit job six days a week that he is still stuck in. I
think he met my mom at the diner he’s a line cook at. He doesn’t talk about her
much because yeah, she walked out on him and never looked back. And I could be
a lazy, non-listening shit. Tried to get out of chores. Stayed out way past the
streetlights coming on, even as early as the age of nine. Did stupid shit like
light firecrackers in the basement…”
    “Gabe,” I say softly, patiently. “No matter what you
did, your father didn’t have a reason, or an excuse, to abuse you.”
    “I know that.” He lets go of the