“John, will you stop and talk to me?” she pleaded.
He whirled around. “How dare you come and spy on me.”
“I wasn’t spying.”
“It’s none of your damn business.” He pulled out his keys and got into his car. She jumped in.
“Get the hell out of my car.”
“I’m not budging until we talk about this.”
“Bullshit!”
“If you want me out, throw me out.”
“Damn you!” Fiske shouted, before climbing out of the car.
Sara followed him. “Damn you, John Fiske. Will you please stop running away and talk to me?”
“We’ve got nothing to talk about.”
“We have everything to talk about.”
He pointed an unsteady finger at her. “Why the hell are you doing this to me, Sara?”
“Because I care about you.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“I think you do. I know you do.”
They stood there staring at each other.
“Can’t we go somewhere and talk about this? Please.” She slowly walked around the car and stood next to him. Touching his arm, she said, “If last night meant half as much to you as it did to me, we should at least be able to talk.” She stood there, convinced that his response would be to climb in his car and drive out of her life.
Fiske looked at her for a moment, dropped his head and wearily leaned against his car. Sara’s hand slipped down to his and tightened around it. Fiske looked beyond her to a car parked on the road and the two men inside. “We’ll have the Feds along for a ride.” His manner and tone were now resigned. At least it wasn’t McKenna back there.
“Good, I’ll feel very safe,” she said, her gaze refusing to leave his, until finally she saw she hadn’t lost him, at least for now.
They climbed in their cars and Sara followed Fiske to a small shopping mall about a mile away, where they sat at an outdoor table and sipped lemonade in the heat of the late afternoon.
“I can understand how you could hold that against your brother, although it’s not his fault,” Sara said.
“Nothing was ever Mike’s fault,” Fiske said bitterly.
“It’s not like your mother can help herself. It could just as easily be that she called Michael by your name.”
“Yeah, right. She chose not to remember me.”
“Maybe she calls you that because you visited her a lot more than Michael did and that’s her way of reacting to it.”
“I’m not buying that.”
Sara looked angry. “Well, if you want to be jealous of your brother even now that he’s dead, then I guess that’s your right.”
Fiske settled a very cold gaze on her. She expected him to erupt. Instead, he said, “I am, was, whatever, jealous of my brother. Who wouldn’t be?”
“But that doesn’t make it right.”
“Maybe it doesn’t,” Fiske said, his voice tired. He looked away. “The first time I visited Mom and she called me Mike, I thought it was a temporary thing, you know, she was having a real bad day. After two months of it . . .” He paused. “Well, that’s when I cut Mike off. For good. Everything that had ever ticked me off about him, no matter how stupid, I just blew up into a huge picture of this evil sonofabitch with no heart, nothing good. He had taken my mother away from me.”
“John, the day we came to see you at trial, I went with Michael to see your mother.”
He tensed. “What?”
“Your mother wouldn’t even talk to him. He brought her a gift, she wouldn’t take it. He told me she was always like that. He assumed that it was because she loved you so much, that she didn’t care about him”
“You’re lying,” Fiske said in a hushed tone.
“No, I’m not. It’s the truth.”
“You’re lying!” he said again, more forcefully.
“Ask some of the people who work there. They know.”
A few minutes of silence passed. Fiske’s head was bowed. When he looked back up, he said, “I never really thought about him losing his mother too.”
“Are you sure about that?” Sara asked quietly.