A few minutes into the drive, Victor cued to Max to remove her headset by pointing to hers as he removed his. She got it right away and with their headsets off he could speak freely. "I know it sounds like a crazy plan Max," Victor said calmly, "but I have reason to believe that I have to handle it this way and I want to be sure I have your full support."
Max was noticeably undecided. To anyone other than Leer she may have appeared to be upset by the change of plans or the restriction against calling her father but he knew better. He knew better for several reasons, not the least of which is because he could remember her telling him what she was about to say, thirty years ago. "I don't know Victor," she said reluctantly,"I mean, you do, it's just," she hesitated as if she was trying to pick her words like poorly formed parts from a far too quickly moving assembly-line conveyor belt,"I can't seem to, I mean, I don't know why, but I absolutely do think" she paused again,"sorry, I know, you're right." She continued,"Something is absolutely wrong about this whole thing. I felt really weird the moment we woke up, something inside of me, telling me to watch out, telling me to be careful, that I was going to be betrayed by someone close to me." Max looked directly at Victor, her eyes searching him for any reaction. Leer felt her eyes and turned his from the road to meet her gaze. He knew that he was not whom she thought he was and certainly that was a betrayal of sorts. He also knew that it was not the betrayal of which she spoke. He looked back to the road as she continued,"The moment you pulled those boots from Abe I thought, that's it, it's him, it's Abe! but the feeling hasn't left me. Her eyes, still drilling little holes into the side of his head, rather than taking the less destructive route through his ear hole to his brain, returned only feelings of trust, warmth and an ease she hadn't felt with another person in a very long time, not since her mother knew the difference between a dog and a Life Quality Care Specialist. "I know it's not you," Max said to Victor, her voice growing fainter," so it must be," her voice a strained whisper,"my father." Her forearms slunked into her lap and her shoulders drooped forward. Leer said nothing. Max looked over at Victor, realizing that by his silence he was acknowledging her fear, she fell backward in her seat and putting her hands to her head gasped,"oh, daddy, you really are an asshole!"
The next twenty minutes of driving was fairly silent with only the sound of the road to fill up the emptiness Max was feeling. Leer let Max sit with her realization, each moment of silence filling her mind with another example of why her father should not be trusted to do anything but look out for himself, like the day he told her that he had decided to enroll her in an immersion school for the fighting arts and that her previous three years of rigorous dance instruction was a perfect base upon which to build the skills she would learn to master at the school. Then there was the year of her eleventh birthday when he invited the guests and told her that it would be better than if she had chosen, that the guests he chose were better sorts of people, only to discover that he had invited well over a hundred guests of which only six were children, two of whom she did not even know. In fact, he had not even purchased a cake, nor did he have any intention of sharing that cake with her mother whom he promised they would visit to celebrate his little girls birthday. Anything that he had gotten for her would somehow serve him. Her education with a major focus on the history of war and the essentials of business, her diet, highly nutritional, healthy, athletic, her cars, motorcycles, boats, all fast and well armored and even her clothes, attractive enough so her looks were admired but functional, militaristic and no-nonsense as if to say "you can look but don't touch, or that hand of yours, I'm going to snap the arm it's attached to in half, like a little twig".
Her eyes had welled up with tears and her spirit had been crushed. She knew that it was unfair to blame Victor for any of this but he just sat there, driving. Driving her father's JumpJuice in a big dumptruck out in the middle of nowhere. She began to think of how he was just like her father, that they were going to be stuck in this life, just as it always had been, on Sal's terms, doing Sal's dirty work. She turned to him filled with hopelessness. "Here we are,"Victor said with a gentle smile as he turned the dumptruck down a tree-lined road toward a lovely little cottage. Max wiped the tears from her eyes as she began to notice just how beautiful the land around the cottage truly was. She had been so deep in thought that she hadn't noticed the landscape through which they had been driving.
"What is this place?" she asked breathlessly as Victor pulled the truck into a large, rustic and slightly weathered barn.
Victor turned toward her as the vehicle came to a stop , reached into his left breast pocket and pulled out a set of keys which he held out to her with a smile and said,"home".
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