The Set Up (10 page)

I follow.

Surprisingly, he doesn’t start lecturing me right off the bat. Instead, he just walks and keeps looking over at me. Which is even worse. After about five more steps, I think his silence seems to be drawing out.

Just before things turn hot, I stop in front of the red Storm and make a show of looking over the rim of my sunglasses and directly at him. “What do you want from me? Blood?”

“Jasper,” he sighs.

“This is taking too long. He’s taking too many pictures. Asking too many questions. It’s a fucking blog post, not an illustrated book or full-length novel.”

“No. You’re wrong. It’s a series of blog posts. Very expensive blog posts,” Will corrects.

“Okay, I’ll give you that.”

“Thanks. So does that mean you’ll keep your cool?”

“I’m trying. I’m really trying.”

He smiles. “I’ll take that as a yes. One more thing.”

“Yeah, what is it?”

Will looks hesitant.

“What?”

“Cole, another blogger, and . . .” He pauses.

“Charlotte,” I fill in.

“Yes, and Charlotte. They are staying at the Marriott tonight, and Cole was hoping the four of us could meet them for drinks tonight.”

“Hell, no.”

“Jasper.”

“Will, come on, man. I think I’ve been more than accommodating over the past few hours. Besides not causing a scene with Charlotte, I’ve given that asshole plenty of material.”

Will shakes his head at me. “Okay, he’s a little full of himself, but he knows his job. He’s good at it. And he says he needs enough information if he’s going to attract attention over the next three months. You know our startup period.”

I grit my teeth. “Fine. Great. Fanfuckingtastic. I’ll give him everything he needs to know from my blood type to how I like to fuck, but I’m done with the photos and the interviews for today.”

“Now you’re the one being the asshole.”

“Say what you want, but there’s no way tonight is happening. You go. In fact, why don’t you make a list of what he needs, and also tell him you’ll give him everything next week.”

Will’s shaking head and smirk aren’t what I want to be looking at.

“What?”

He crosses his arms. “Oh, if I heard you correctly earlier, you were taking the lead on this advertising
gig
.”

“I am. I will. Right after you give him what he wants. After all, as business manager of Lightning Motors, I think advertising falls under your helm,” I say, my smile wide.

“Convenient.”

“It is. So it’s settled. You’ll go tonight.”

“Jasper, I’ll go, but do you want to talk about her?”

“No, Will, I don’t.”

He raises his hands in surrender. “Anytime you do, I’m here.”

“Sorry. I’m tired and this is dragging out. What’s taking so long to start the ceremony anyway?”

Will scouts the area. “Hank hasn’t come back yet. We’ve been stalling, trying to wait for him.”

“Where did he go?”

“Do you really want to know?”

The sad smile already tells me. “He went to get my mother, didn’t he?”

Will nods.

“I told him I didn’t want her here.”

“He thinks you do and that you didn’t want to admit it in case she wouldn’t come.”

“He’s wrong.”

Will shrugs.

I run a hand through my hair. “You should have stopped him.”

“It wasn’t my place.”

“And what am I supposed to do with her when he won’t be seen with her and she starts all her bullshit?”

“Drew and Jake’s mothers are here. Stick her with them.”

“They came?”

He nods.

“You cool?” I ask.

“Why wouldn’t I be? It’s not like I could get my mother a day pass from the women’s penitentiary to see everything I’ve accomplished, and it’s not like if I could, she’d care.”

“Will.”

“Jasper.”

We both laugh. Too much alike to ever admit it. Walls built so high, neither like to think about all the bricks that formed them.

I might think I had an absent mother growing up, but his mother was truly never present. Even if her body was, her mind wasn’t. She was a drug-addicted prostitute who somehow managed to never lose custody of her son. Although I’m not sure that’s a good thing. Will had it tough. He was born into that life, and he was always taking care of her. Making sure she ate, bandaging her up if someone got too rough. Covering up for her neglect of him.

“Want to tell me about the girl you were with this morning?” I ask.

“The one I was about to take when you barged in?”

“Yeah, that one.”

“Nah.”

“You’re such an asshole,” I mutter.

With a laugh, he shoves his hands in his pockets and heads toward the crowd. “I’m going to grab some food.”

With a raised brow I shout, “I don’t think she’s here.”

He flips me the bird.

I laugh. “I’ll be there in a bit.”

I look around.

Neither my mother nor Charlie is in sight.

The clouds have rolled in on top of the sunny day, holding the warmth in the air and making my blood boil. Quiet for a moment, all I can do is stare up into the ever-growing cloud cover, my eyelids flickering. Thinking. Agonizing. Wrestling with how I know I should feel and how I actually do feel.

About her.

About my mother.

About my father.

My life.

And even about Hank.

It’s my birthday. I’m ten. My mother took me out for pizza and now we’re walking, walking fast. She’s been drinking. In fact, I think she’s drunk. It’s how she copes. The block is dark. All the streetlights are out. And it smells. Trash is everywhere.

“Jasper,” she says softly.

“Yes, Mom.”

“We have to move.”

“What do you mean we have to move?” I ask. “You said you had it all under control.”

“And I thought I did. I tried, Jasper, I really did, but I lost the house,” she babbles.

“How?”

She starts to cry. “I just couldn’t do it alone. We have nothing left.”

“I don’t understand. You sold everything we had. You told me we would be fine.”

She comes to a stop. “I wanted us to be. I really did. But I can’t pay the bills and I haven’t been able to make the mortgage in almost nine months.”

Alarmed, I look around. “Why are we here?”

“Look.” She points.

I look up and see a grimy brick-front building whose upper floors are scorched and boarded up from what had to be a recent fire.

“Here, we’re moving here.”

Cass Corridor.

Fire Alley.

The arson capital of the inner city is our new home?

“Here?” I ask in shock.

“It’s going to be fine, Jasper. Look at it like an adventure.” My mother smiles down at me.

Cass Corridor is in the beginning stages of gentrification, my mother tells me. She says it means the area will be transformed into a nice and safe environment, and we’ll get to be right in the middle of it all and still pay a low rent. Looking around, I’m having a hard time believing it.

She does the best she can to make our apartment nice. She quit the nursery because it was only for the summer months. Instead, she started bartending.

She works nights because the tips are better.

She hates it—I can tell. I hear her on the phone sometimes, saying how she can’t stand the men who put their hands all over her and how she hates that she has to let them or forgo the tips.

I know she’s doing the best she can.

But I’m alone a lot.

I hate it.

I miss Charlie.

Until I remember I hate her.

Then as luck would have it, a boy my age moves in next door. His name is Will. His mother is never home at night either, I think she also works at some kind of bar or club, and Will and I start hanging around together. A year goes by and the top floors of the building are finally refurbished. We have a lot of new neighbors, and Will and I meet Drew and Jake one day while skateboarding on the broken sidewalk out front.

After pounding each other into the ground over who gets the better side of the street, we all become friends.

Four boys who live similar lives. Each with a single mother who can’t cope with life, who can’t seem to figure out how to raise a growing boy, who turn it all off and turn the other way. That is what brings us together, but it is our mutual love of cars that bonds us.

Years pass and as we enter our teens, our mothers can’t control us. We’re bad. We don’t listen. We misbehave. Get in trouble. Skip school. Fight.

Then at fifteen, we get involved with a gang of kids who are stealing automotive parts to build their own engines. They invite us to join them. We do. It’s easy. After a few months, we have a shitload of parts but no car. We look around. Find another gang. They tell us they’ll teach us how to steal cars. Will tries to talk the rest of us out of it. I convince everyone we can do this. We don’t even have our licenses. No one will pay attention to us. We steal our first car and bring it to one of their chop shops, where they disassemble it and put it back together with other car parts to make it their own. We steal another and another and another until finally the last one will be ours. That’s when we get caught. I make Drew, Jake, and Will run, and I stay behind at the wheel. They only care about catching someone. How many isn’t important. I take the fall for all of us. It was my idea, after all.

There’s talk of sending me to juvie. I am a go-nowhere, do-nothing kid who has a penchant for trouble. No one even blinks at the thought of locking me away. Not even my mother, who doesn’t know what to do with me.

In the end, she encourages the judge to send me away. To this day, I still can’t forgive her, even though it was probably one of the best things she ever did for me.

The Wayne County Juvenile Detention Center is at capacity, but they find room for me—the car thief—and I’m squeezed in amidst drug addicts and gangbangers.

The owner of the only remaining privately owned parts plant in Detroit shows up one day and asks for anyone interested in learning how a car works. I raise my hand. Hell yeah, I think. Especially if it will get me the hell out of these four walls. We take a bus to his plant, where he has a shop set up. I go that day and the next and the next one, too. And I keep going. Almost every day for the next year, Hank teaches me everything he knows about an engine. At sixteen, I’m released. Hank helps me enroll in the local trade school and encourages Will, Drew, and Jake to attend, too.

Back at home, I have a new burning desire to build the world’s fastest car. I stay in touch with Hank and he picks me up every Saturday. What I don’t know until it’s too late is that Hank has started to cozy up to my mother. Hank is married and has his own family, but my mother is attractive and he can’t seem to resist her.

When I’m seventeen our building is condemned. The gentrification of Cass Corridor is finally beginning, a little later than my mother thought. Hank buys my mother a small house on the outskirts of town, where she grows flowers in the summer to sell to the local flower shops. I stay with Will most of the time, who moved one block over. His mother is never home anyway.

Another year passes and my mother and Hank are closer than ever. It’s not good for my mother. She cries when he’s not around. It makes her drink more. I hate it and head back to Will’s as often as possible.

Finally, it’s time for me to go to college, but my mother says we can’t afford it. It’s Hank who helps me get the loans and grants I need to get into the University of Michigan. It’s Hank Harper I owe everything to. And yet, because of my mother, I have a love/hate relationship with him. But she’s not the only reason.

“There you are, buddy!” Alex Harper shouts and snaps me out of my thoughts. He and his fancy shoes walk across the plywood laid on the dirt to make a stage for the Storm.

I hop off the hood of the car. “What’s going on?”

“It’s getting late and looks like it might rain. It’s time to do this thing. You ready?”

I glance at Hank’s son, who is only two years older than me but for some reason looks much older today. Maybe it’s the dark hair slicked back or the circles under his eyes. I’m not sure and I really don’t care. “I was born ready.”

With a grin, he hands me a brand-new shovel. “Here you go then.”

We start walking, and within the first five steps he pauses to make a call. Not even ten steps later, an announcement is made and people start swarming toward the roped-off site.

Alex leans toward me. “By the way, I saw that piece of ass following you around today. Who is she?”

Every nerve in my body goes live, and I have to draw in a breath to calm myself down. “Not sure who you mean.”

Alex has a wife and a brand new baby at home but I’m certain that, like his father, having a family will never be enough for him. “How could you not notice her? Tight ass, small but perky tits, long legs that I can just picture—”

With my free hand, I squeeze his shoulder, hard. “You know what, buddy, it’s probably better we refrain from talking about women at a family affair. You never know who might be listening.”

His head practically does a 360, especially when he sees the swarm of reporters catching up to us. “Yeah, you’re probably right, but I wouldn’t mind—”

“Mayor Harper, can we ask you a few quick questions?” Saved by a reporter. Never thought I’d say that.

Alex shoots me a
thanks for saving me
grin. One of those
this stays between you and me, buddy
smiles that makes my blood boil.

No matter how many meals I shared with him around his kitchen table when I was a teen, we are not friends, not family. Sure, Hank invited me to his house many times, but I was always the outsider looking in on their seemingly perfect family. The poor boy who needed a haircut or who could use some new clothes because his were worn. The boy Hank’s wife felt sorry for, whose son secretly taunted, and whose daughter eyed with disdain. The boy they made fun of. Maybe not Hank, but I know Alex and his sister had a laugh or two at my expense. Still, I kept going every time I was invited because I was always hoping . . . hoping that one day the outsider would become an insider.