Little Blue Lies by Chris Lynch Read Free Book Online

Ronny Blue.”
    â€œ Ronny Blue.”
    â€œRonny Blue.”
    â€œNot Junie Blue.”
    â€œRonny Blue.”
    â€œRotten Ronny?”
    â€œThat’s the one.
    â€œScumbag Ronny Blue?”
    â€œI think we have identified which Ronny Blue it was, Dad.”
    â€œWhat’s he want with you?”
    I finish the last of the scallops and clams. Dad has been out of seafood for a while now and is social-picking at the fries. The gulls are gathering like a sinister gang around us.
    â€œActually, Dad, it’s what he wants with your wife, more than me.”
    The fry falls right out of his hand and lands under the table, provoking a frightening seagull scrum right there between his feet. In his shorts, with those legs, he could be in jeopardy if there is a nearsighted bird in the crowd, but he is oblivious to them.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYeah, Dad. It’s Mom he’s rooting around for.”
    His face fills with a rush of blood, which then flushes right back out again like in a human head cistern.
    â€œSon, you are absolutely decimating Sunday right now.”
    I stand up and surrender the beachhead—the tabletop—to the seagulls and wave Dad to walk with me. “He wants her to do a portrait of him. That’s all,” I say, laughing as much as I honestly can when Ronny Blue is even part of the subject.
    â€œOh, thank God,” he says, a hand flat on his thrumping heart. My father has a lot of great qualities, and I know I can count on him for almost anything. But if it came down to an interfamily rumble, I think I’d take Mom with me.
    â€œSo, you’re cool with Ronald McDouchebag coming by and putting his feet under your table sometime this week?”
    He keeps walking, keeps that hand glued to that chest.
    â€œSee, I was just calming down there. Really, you are simply slaughtering this Sunday for me.”
    â€œAh, Dad,” I say, putting an arm across his shoulders and pulling him hard into me. “It won’t be a huge deal. We’ll figure out something to get the thing done and over with. I’ll tell you what I’m really upset about, though, if you’re up for it.”
    â€œOh, absolutely, that would be wonderful. Anything to get my mind off that terrible thing you just told me. Shoot.”
    I laugh, shove him away from me. “I’m really glad we can spend this kind of quality time together, Dad, and to know you’re there for me.”
    â€œGreat. Now hurry up and tell me your awful thing so I can forget my awful thing.”
    â€œHa. Well, our awful things are related, as it happens.”
    â€œOkay, tell,” he says seriously. “I’m listening.”
    On the way back to the car, I unburden myself to my father. I tell him how much the whole situation with Junie Blue has been killing me anyway, and how now the thing with the weirdness of her “vacation” is just overwhelming my thoughts completely. Telling him does make me feel a little bit better, even though it will have no practical application.
    â€œShe is a wonderful girl,” he says, looking at me across the new-penny copper roof of his low-slung Mitsubishi. “It’s going to be a lot of work to ever do as well as her again.”
    â€œThanks, Dad.”
    â€œI didn’t say you weren’t capable, just that it will be hard work. Speaking of work . . .”
    He has this vision of me and him in the family business together, shoulder to shoulder spending our days convincing people that really, their money and our money is really all the same thing. I have no such vision, but no competing vision to counter him with, and therefore no stomach for the vision/career/future discussion in any of its forms.
    â€œDad, unlock the car. I’m begging you.”
    â€œBut . . . you have such a great vocabulary,” he says desperately.
    I laugh out loud at him. “Well, whoop-de-shit to that,