Once I sprouted up in height, and especially once I started making a name for myself on the gridiron, my dad basically left me alone. Something in the acclaim I received on the football field, and throughout the community, gave me immunity within the confines of our house. I figure, my father couldn’t put me down when everybody else was propping me up, so he gave it a rest.

Either that or he paid attention that one night when I actually swung back. I always wondered if he had even remembered the punch the next day, waking up with a hangover and a shiner under his left eye, which he rightly could have chalked up to another night at the office in his line of work. That was right around the time the abuse stopped, as it happened, but I never really knew if he remembered his kid popping him, and it didn’t seem like polite dinner conversation. One of the many unspoken things that festered among our family.

There was something ironic in the ability I had to make defensive backs miss in the open field, each of them my drunken father lunging at me and finding air. I have a distinct memory, my junior year of high school, taking a screen pass sixty yards or so for a touchdown, dodging two or three defenders in the process, then standing in the end zone and looking up in the stands at my family. My mother and Pete were there, as always, but that particular time so was my father, though I don’t remember him clapping. What I do remember is wondering, at that moment, looking up into the stadium lights on a cool Friday night, several hundred fans screaming with enthusiasm, what my father was thinking and having no idea. My best guess was that my father resented me at that moment.

In any event, when I was no longer a convenient target, Pete bore the brunt of our father’s abuse. He was younger but also smaller and more docile. He wasn’t a fighter, and he wouldn’t avoid my father. He took it, every time. I would listen to it, lying awake, my head inches off the pillow, the sickening sound of open-handed slaps and closed-fist punches, Pete’s muted groans. I did nothing to stop it. To this day, I can’t put my finger on why. No matter how much I hated him, no matter how much I disre spected him, and even when I stopped fearing him, he was still my father.

Pete and I never really discussed it. I broached the topic a time or two, but he always deflected it. As a child myself, I took it as survival instinct, a coping mechanism, but as an adult I can’t imagine what it did to him. I do know he’s had trouble committing to an occupation (three jobs in four years, currently in pharmaceutical sales) and to a woman (three in four months), and he gambles and parties way too much. It doesn’t take Freud to see a connection.

It pained me to watch him at work here, reminding me as he did of our father. A part of me wanted to shake him, because he had all the charm of our dear daddy but none of the underlying malice. He could put up an impressive front, no question, especially in a setting like this, entertaining a flock of women. And it wasn’t insincere. There was a big heart in there. This guy basically rescued me after everything happened with Talia and Emily. Maybe it helped him, in a way, looking out for me instead of the other way around, over these last few months.

Now, here he was, back to sneaking cocaine in the bathroom of a nightclub. He’d never been an addict, per se, at least as far as I knew, but how far removed from addiction could he be? I hadn’t been in a position to know, not these last few months.

I felt a surge of nausea, thanks to the vodka and the mixture of smoke and expensive perfume in the air. I excused myself for the bathroom. I made several wrong turns through the mosh pit of people, then I felt nauseated again and decided to get some fresh air. I didn’t see the point in entertaining these women any longer, assuming they had been amused at any point. I certainly wasn’t entertaining myself.

On the other hand, I wasn’t in a hurry to get home, and I only lived twenty minutes away, so I decided to hoof it. I like the city in predawn, the world in transition, decelerating from the night’s sins, the first glimmer of orange-red warming the sky after the city has recharged its batteries. Plus the streets are pretty much empty, so I don’t have to talk to anyone.

I was thinking about Pete, and about Talia and Emily, when I passed the window of an all-night diner populated with drunken revelers and college kids and law students taking a break during all-night cramming sessions. Good times. Don’t grow up, I silently warned them.

As I stopped at the diner’s window, I felt something subtle change, not so much a sound but the absence of one, a shift in the cacophony of white noise behind me. Nothing I could pinpoint, just a sense that as I had stopped walking, someone behind me had stopped, too.

I tried to use the window’s reflection, looking at an angle to the street behind me, but it was hard to make out anything more than a solitary figure. I was mildly curious, sure, but mostly I just wanted to make sure nobody was closing the distance. I wasn’t in the mood for a fight, and I didn’t feel like canceling all my credit cards and getting a new driver’s license, or breaking my hand on someone’s face.

I started onward again toward my house, listening intently, trying to soften my own footfalls so I could hear those of someone else, but not looking behind me again. From what I could tell, I was being followed, but whoever it was had no intention of making a move on me. I didn’t know if this was someone looking for an easy mark but ultimately deciding I didn’t fit the bill, or someone who never had any intention of approaching, who was following me for some other reason. If I’d had anything left to fear in this world, I might have let it keep me up at night. As it was, I made sure to lock my door, set the house alarm, and let the whole thing bother me for a good thirty seconds, until exhaustion and intoxication allowed me a couple hours of sleep in a cold, empty bed.

7

I WOKE UP at eight o’clock and stared at the ceiling of my bedroom for about half an hour. This constituted tremendous progress, as there was a time when I’d required at least two hours’ examination of the plaster and that one stain on the ceiling from a champagne cork when Talia and I celebrated our third anniversary, before leaving the bed.

Things to do, I had things to do. I had a client coming and I had to get started on Sammy’s case. This would be the second day in a row that I would take a shower.

I got to my office at ten. I share space with an old friend, Shauna Tasker. We have a corner space and double up on a secretary/receptionist. We are, technically, two separate law firms, but we help each other out whenever need be.

Shauna was sitting in our conference room as I passed. We’ve been friends since back in high school. She was a prosecutor for a couple years, like me, but she left the office sooner, moving to a silk-stocking law firm until she got tired of the senior partner putting his hand on her knee.

I put my hand on her knee a time or two, myself, back in high school, but that was a long time ago. We became pals afterward, and at State—where she went on merit and graduated cum laude, while I went on an athletic scholarship—she became one of my closest friends. She’s petite and shapely, on the surface a real feminina, but she could always drink me under the table, and when you got her going, she could cuss like a truck driver.

After everything happened with Talia and Emily, and I quit my law firm and spent almost three months holed up in my house, Shauna cajoled me into renting space from her and hanging a shingle of my own. I thought of putting ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK on that sign but settled on LAW OFFICES OF JASON KOLARICH.