Ms. Smith was the name the guards used for Katrina. It was a simple way to make sure no one who overheard knew who their client was. “Yelled at you?” That was very unlike Katrina. In all the time Jas had known her, he’d never heard Katrina raise her voice to anyone. She was unfailingly polite to contractors and people on her payroll.
“Yes. She said I scared her, that she couldn’t see who I was.” The boy’s eyes widened. “I swear I didn’t mean to scare her, and the exterior lights were on. But I thought you should know. She seemed calm when I left her.”
“Thanks.” He didn’t reassure Richard. He’d talk to Katrina first, in the morning. “Will you be relieved soon?”
“Yes, sir. John’s arriving in about an hour for the night shift.”
“Excellent. Good night.”
Richard all but saluted him. Jas stopped when he was almost at his cottage and looked over his shoulder. From this angle, he could see the dim light from Katrina’s office spilling out onto the patio. It was late. If he wasn’t her bodyguard, if he was someone . . . else . . . to her, he’d go check on her now.
He wasn’t, though.
He went inside and shut his door firmly. If only he could shut the door on his wayward feelings as easily.
His phone buzzed and he smiled faintly when he saw who it was. He put the phone on speaker and toed off his loafers, depositing them on the shoe organizer next to his front door. “Hello, Mom.”
“Hello, dear. How are you?”
“Fine. Just got home.” He went to his bedroom and tossed his cell on his bed. He pulled his shirt off over his head, placing it neatly in the hamper.
“Where were you?”
“I went out with some friends in L.A.”
His mother paused. He could imagine Tara Kaur sitting in the living room of his parents’ small two-bedroom condo. They lived in a more affordable suburb of the City, but nothing in the Bay Area was affordable for the middle class anymore. The fact that they had a second bedroom was a miracle and a product of tight rent control and a generous landlord.
“You went out with who?”
“Uh.” He took off his socks. “Friends?”
“You have friends?” his mother asked, and he tried not to be offended by her skepticism, since he had basically been marveling at the same thing earlier in the night.
“What did he say?”
Jas winced at the booming voice of his stepfather. Oh no, this was about to become a family affair. He crossed his fingers that his stepbrother, Bikram, wasn’t also lurking on the call.
“He said he went out with his friends in L.A., Gurjit.”
“What friends?”
His mom spoke to him. “You’re on speaker. Jas, your father wants to ask you who these friends are as well.”
“I can hear him. That’s what speaker does.” Jas sat on the side of his bed.
“What friends are these, in Los Angeles?” his dad demanded. “We don’t know them.” Gurjit was a high school history teacher and he spoke with the gentle firmness of a man used to handling shenanigans.
“You don’t know all my friends,” he said, and was immediately annoyed by how defensive he sounded. He was thirty-nine years old, for crying out loud.
“Dear, of course we do,” his mom said. She had a sweet lightness to her voice, as if the peach farm she’d grown up on had infused her with the fruit’s essence. “Who is in Los Angeles?”
“Rhiannon’s boyfriend and his friends.” Though his parents had never met Rhiannon or Katrina, they knew everyone’s names. They peppered him with a million questions about his life when he was with them.
“Samson Lima?” There was excitement in his dad’s voice now. “Say, when are you going to get me a football signed by him?”
“I don’t know him well enough for that sort of thing.” Samson would probably happily sign a football for his dad, but Jas wasn’t accustomed to asking anyone for anything.
“Don’t make him hit up his little buddies for autographs,” Tara admonished.
Jas bit the inside of his cheek, amused at the idea of his mom calling anyone who had once been a linebacker a little anything.
“Did you have fun?”
A stab of guilt ran through him at the eagerness in his mother’s voice. They worried over him so much. It would have been easier if he had gone home after he was injured and lived on the farm or in their small condo for the last fourteen years. Easier for them, not for him.
That worry was the reason he hadn’t told them about the potential pardon for McGuire. His mother had wept when Jas had come back home. For his injury, for what he’d seen. He couldn’t tell her now that she might have to relive that. “I did, yes. Thank you.”
“Good. I’m glad you’re getting out. Widening your circle,” Tara said.
“I’m going to get ready for bed,” Gurjit announced. “Good night, son.”
“Good night.”
There was the unmistakable sound of a brief kiss, and though it was his parents, Jas smiled. He didn’t know his biological father. He’d been fourteen when his mom had met and married Gurjit. He was glad his mother had found happiness with a man who loved her dearly.
Tara came back on the line, and Jas could tell she’d taken him off speaker. “I called to ask if you were going to come to the parade,” she said quietly, in a rush, and Jas knew immediately that his stepdad had probably told her not to ask him this exact thing.
He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “That’s a while off.”
“Not that far now. A few weeks.”
“I haven’t gone to the parade in years.” Not since he’d come back from Iraq, for sure.
“I know.” Her voice dropped lower. “They’re honoring your grandfather this year.”
“I’m aware.” He shifted. There it was, that tug of longing followed by fear. How to tell his mom that while he deeply missed their hometown’s annual Sikh parade, and would give anything to attend it again, the event was too big and loud and crowded for him. He avoided such places to the point that he used to have to delegate security detail to other guards back when Katrina and Hardeep had gone to areas where there might be fireworks or intense crowds. “Mom—”
“It would mean so much to him. And to me. But really to him.”
“I see Grandpa all the time.” He kept the emotion out of his tone, which pleased him. He definitely saw his parents more, but he did see his grandfather quite a bit, even went to the farm for monthly dinners with the whole family. He never stayed more than a night, but he went.
“He’s all alone and he’s getting older. This is all he wants.”
“Did he say that?”
The beat of silence told him that his grandfather hadn’t said anything of the sort to his only daughter.
Stubborn old man.
“He would have told me, but our calls have been so rushed lately. He’s out of the country for the next couple of weeks. He had to go to Mexico to work on that school he’s established.”
Is he well enough to make a trip like that? Mexico wasn’t far, but his grandfather wasn’t young. “Does he have someone with him?”