Read Online Repairman Jack [05]-Hosts by F. Paul Wilson - Free Book Online

very little make-up she did not look like a forty-four-year-old mother of two. She'd always been fair haired, but now she was a darker shade of blonde than he remembered. What a mane she used to have. "I see you've stopped straightening your hair. I still remember watching you use Mom's iron to flatten out your waves."
    "Eventually you get to the point where you have to stop fighting your nature and just go with it." She glanced away. "Look. This was a mistake. If I'd had the slightest inkling you were the Jack I was calling, I never would have…" She let it trail off.
    "Why not? If you've got a problem you should call family."
    "Family?" Kate's eyes blazed to life as she turned back to him. "What would you know about family, Jackie? You vanished from our lives without even saying good-bye! Just a note saying you were leaving and not to worry! As if that was possible. For a while we didn't know if you were dead or alive. Do you have any idea what that was like for Dad? First he loses Mom, then you drop out of college and disappear. He almost lost it!"
    "I'd already lost it, Kate."
    Her eyes softened, but only a little. "I know how Mom's death—"
    "Murder."
    "Yes, you always insisted on calling it that, didn't you. It hit us all hard, and you the hardest perhaps, but Dad—"
    "I've been back to see him."
    "Only rarely, and only after he tracked you down. And I sent you all those letters, invited you to christenings and graduations and anniversaries, but you never responded. Not even to say no. Not once."
    Jack's turn to look away, focus on a painting of a Manhattan street scene, but viewed at a crazy angle. Kate was right. She'd made a major effort to keep in touch, tried hard to bring him back into the family, and he'd snubbed her.
    "Jackie, you've got a niece and a nephew you've never even met. They used to look at the wedding pictures and point to this young stranger who was one of the ushers and ask who he was."
    "Kevin and Elizabeth," he said. "How are they?"
    He knew them only from their photos. Kate was one of those people who sent out an annual here's-what-we've-been-doing-all-year letters with her Christmas card, usually accompanied by a family photo. At least she used to. Nothing at all from her for the last few years. Since the divorce.
    "They're wonderful. Kevin's eighteen, Liz is sixteen, as if you give a damn."
    Jack closed his eyes. Okay. Deserved that. He'd seen her kids grow up long distance, on Kodak paper.
    But after he'd cut himself off and reinvented himself here in New York, how could he go back? He could never explain who he'd become. Tom, Kate, Dad especially—they'd never get it. Be horrified, in fact. Took enough to live his own life; didn't want to have to invent another life just for their approval.
    "Look, Kate," he said. "I know I hurt people, and I'm sorry. I was just starting my twenties and coming apart at the seams. I can't change the past but maybe I can make up just a tiny bit of it to you now. Your friend and this cult you mentioned… maybe I can help."
    "I don't think this is in your field."
    "And what field would that be?"
    "Appliance repairs, right?"
    He laughed. "Who told you that?"
    "Dad."
    "Figures."
    His father had called one of Jack's numbers years ago and heard an outgoing message that went: This is Repairman Jack. Describe the problem and leave a number and Ml get back to you . Naturally he'd assumed his son was some sort of appliance fixer.
    "He's wrong?"
    "I make my living fixing other things."
    "I don't understand."
    "No reason you should. Let's go someplace where we can sit and talk."
    "No, Jackie. This won't work."
    "Please, Kate?"
    He reached out and gently gripped her wrist. He felt at the mercy of the vortex of emotions swirling around him. This was Kate, his big sister Kate, one of the best people he'd ever known, who'd been so good to him and who was still smarting from the awful way he'd treated her. She thought badly of him. He had to fix that.
    She shook her head,