Grimm Tales by John Kenyon Page A

and squeezed back. Better he hadn’t—it was heartbreaking to feel how feeble his grip was.
    â€œFrankie, someone’s got to look after Gato,” he said.
    â€œI know, Dad. We will.”
    â€œNo,” he said. His hand grasped mine hard enough to hurt. “No
we
. It’s down to you.”
    I understood. He knew the others weren’t up to it, and so did I.
    â€œI’ll take care of it, Dad.”
    â€œPromise me.”
    â€œI promise.”
    He seemed comforted by that. Maybe it was the last thing he’d been waiting to do, because not too long after that and before the others returned, he died.
    * * *
    Joe led me out to the shed where Gato was staying. I’d like to be able to call it a studio but if I’m honest, I can’t. If it wasn’t a shed, it was more like a shed than anything else.
    â€œGato!” my brother called out as we approached. “Gato! We got a visitor! Someone here to see you.”
    I wondered if he’d be disappointed. “It’s just me, Gato,” I said. “Frank.”
    There was no reply, but after a moment Gato came out. He had a cloth in his hand and was cleaning a wrench. He was always cleaning something. He looked at me. If he was glad to see me, he didn’t let on.
    â€œGotta shift you, pal,” Joe said, to the background accompaniment of a sledgehammer.
    Gato gave a slight nod that was almost a bow, but said nothing. We waited. I realized that my brother, for all his bluster, was afraid of the man. He had called me here to be a buffer.
    â€œGonna tear down this old shack,” he said—to Gato, to me…to no one. The silence and therefore the rebuff were so deep that he was forced to extemporize. “Frankie here said he has room for you for a while.”
    Gato and I looked at him with what I expect was equal astonishment. My brother had two other properties in town alone. I had a rented two-bedroom flat, and calling it two was being charitable about the thing. I would have laughed at how ludicrous it all was. But I looked at Gato. He looked at me. I thought about my father—what he would have wanted.
    â€œWant to bunk in with me for a while, Gato?” I asked.
    Gato said nothing. He simply turned around and went back into the shed. After a few moments, he returned with a small black athletic bag.
    â€œI’m not sure you understand,” my brother said. “I’m tearing it down. If you have anything you want to keep, better grab it now.”
    Gato gestured toward his bag and nodded his assent, but he did not return into the structure.
    My brother watched him for a moment and then said, “Okay, then.”
    It was all happening pretty fast, much faster than anything I’d expected. “Come on, Gato,” I said. I led him out to my car. He threw the bag into the backseat and got in. I got behind the wheel of my beat-up old Honda. We pulled away to the tune of the jackhammer and the misfiring of a powerful internal combustion engine. I looked at Gato as I backed to a place where l could turn around. His face still told me nothing.
    I’d headed over there without taking the time to fill up the tank, so I stopped on the way home to do this. It happened that just ahead of me at the pumps was a car I recognized, a black Audi convertible that belonged to Marina Reyes. Even rich people have to fill up sometime, I guess. True, she was rich enough to have a driver to do it for her, but I think she liked to drive too much herself to tolerate a chauffeur.
    I had been in love with Marina since we were in kindergarten. She liked me, too, I knew, but we didn’t and never would travel in the same circles. We’d been lab partners in high school chemistry, and gotten along well enough that I’d held out the hope that I might somehow find the courage to ask her to the prom. For better or worse, our classmate Pete Torres, a scion of another long-established and affluent local