I walked with Febril through the vendor’s market. It was a once a fortnight trip made to stock up on the necessaries for running his bread stall. He stocked up on flour and yeast and dried fruits and nuts, not to mention replacements for cracked pans and rising racks. I had never accompanied him on one of these voyages before, but I had a rare day off and Febril insisted I use it to wake up before the sun and hike all the way to the riverfront with him. The jolly baker was in his element, slapping backs with other vendors and swapping jokes with folks I had heard him curse to an early grave during rants in his kitchen after bad days at the stall. For the vendors, it was the one time and place they were able to let loose and relax for a short while before getting back to the grind they had chosen as their life. Few who have not experienced it can understand the sweat and effort that goes into serving good food to the masses.

It was a bright morning, and the breeze off the water kept the temperature pleasant as Febril piled items into my arms to carry for him.

“So you wanted me to come along to be a walking rucksack.”

“I always knew you were smart,” he said, grinning.

“What do you do when I’m not here?”

“Myra used to come along in the old days.”

Myra. Febril’s wife. She did not like me and never had. She was the reason I remained in the orphanage and not under her roof with her children. Febril may not have acknowledged that he wanted to adopt me, shame keeping him at bay, but I had heard Myra hurl it at him in shouted arguments through the years. It took courage for him to refuse to stop seeing me entirely. It would have made his life easier to let me live in the orphanage and grow up on my own, without his visits and advice. I never understood her dislike, but neither did I question her unwillingness to take me in. It was her life and her children and husband and bringing in a stranger’s child would have been an enormous upheaval in their lives. I could understand not wanting to do that. But her rancor towards me cut. I was never anything but polite in her presence, never insisted on being treated as equals with her children, and never monopolized Febril’s time, coming only when invited. But still I received sharp looks and sharper words, though most of the time she took care not to address me at all. She would often come into the kitchen where we sat talking and say “Oh you’re feeding him again. I suppose you’ve never heard of thrift” as if her husband was not the most cost conscious vendor in the city, notorious even. She’d swoop in and out with barbs, trying to get Febril to take the bait and have it out with him. It was not until the day in the vendor’s market that I found out why.

“What is it about me, Feb? What does she hate so much?”

“Ori,” he said, fingering hand carved letters for new signage, setting the f back down on the cloth. “It isn’t you.”

“It certainly seems to be me.”

“You are the recipient of her ire, yes. But it’s me she aims to hurt.”

“And that requires abusing me?”

He sighed and waved off the woodworker coming to wheedle a sale out of him, turning to face me, his human rucksack.

“What do you say we take a break and get a drink by the water?”

I followed him to the makeshift taverns set up on the water’s edge. Benches had been pulled out and we sat with our mugs on one, looking at the river that played a pivotal role in most of my childhood memories. I waited for him to begin. He sipped his ale and looked out at the water with me.

“Your father was the closest thing to a brother I ever had. You know that, but there’s a lot you don’t know.”

My father and Febril met as runners at a tavern called Mick’s. It was a rough sort of place. It was back in the days when the riverfront was a wild and unfettered part of the city, a hotbed of illegal and plain unpleasant activity. Mick’s was far from the worst establishment of the old riverfront, but it was not going to be winning any culinary or cleanliness awards. The two young men were paid as runners, but in reality did cooking, cleaning, running, security, and whatever else old Mick wanted them to do. They had it in their heads they were going to open their own tavern together.

“Figured we had the experience. We were the ones running the place after all. Mick couldn’t do much anymore in those days with his health the way it was. We even thought maybe we’d buy him out some day.”

They shared a garret room above Mick’s together, not unlike the one I’d later live in myself. It was a tight squeeze, but they were so tired at the end of the day, there was not much to do but have a drink on the roof and pass out before waking up and starting over.

“Which isn’t to say they weren’t good times, Ori. Man realizes at some point in his life that there isn’t a hard line between working hard and good times. They go together too. We were too young and too busy to have many worries. I don’t even remember your father and I having a disagreement in those days that lasted long enough to remember in the morning.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

That was until my mother walked through the door. She said she needed a job and would do whatever needed doing around the place. She had experience; had been working at Trippel’s down the river until he decided part of her work duties were going to take place in his bedroom. She submitted her resignation from that position by planting her boot in Trippel’s manhood and stepping over him to the door. Mick liked her style but did not see the need for another employee. My father and Febril disabused him of this notion by listing all of the things around the tavern they could improve if they had the help of an extra set of hands. They were earnest in their desire for help

“But it didn’t hurt that Anna was the most gorgeous woman we’d ever laid our eyes on.”

She was a stunner, to hear him tell it. Anna Praytel was nineteen years old when she started working at Mick’s, with eyes the color of the moon. I imagined Febril was exaggerating, but didn’t especially care. My father could never bear to speak of her. Her eyes were such a light gray the candlelight gave her headaches if there were too many. She was a slip of a thing, coming no further than my father or Febril’s shoulders, with white blonde hair but short just underneath her ears. She surprised them all by carrying a barrel of ale from the basement on her first day.

“She did it on purpose,” He said. “Needed to ease Mick’s mind. Needed him to know she could handle herself. And she could.”

There were customers who took liberties with her, as happens in all taverns, but she never called Mick or Febril or my father to help. She handled her business and had no problem keeping the rowdy in line. She was so popular with the loyal regulars that if anyone came in and was giving her trouble, they’d throw the offender out for her, indignant that someone would dare to do such a thing to their Anna. Their Anna is how both my father and Febril began to think of Miss Praytel. They spent less time discussing their plans for opening their own tavern and more time after hours sitting across the table from Anna, listening to her hard luck story of a drunken father and hapless mother.

“Once I was old enough to understand if my mother wouldn’t protect herself from my pa, she wasn’t going to protect me neither. So it was a matter of time. I got out,” she told them.

Both young men sought to impress her, showing off their skill at tavern work, having nothing else to show for themselves. Who could pour the most and the quickest, who shined a table up best, and who could carry two barrels up at a time.

“It was beneath us, tell you the truth,” Febril said. “I’m sure we looked like right idiots. I know we did, in fact, but we couldn’t help it. The truth of the matter, my boy, is that your father and I loved the same woman. No two ways about it.”

Tale as old as time, the one about two best friends torn apart by love. It started out innocent enough, with the two friends undercutting each other to Anna in small ways, little comments here and there. It did not remain innocent. The comments became sharper, more cruel and close to home, and resulted in a brawl in the middle of service, knocking over tables and chairs, mugs shattering on the floor and ale spitting in the hearth fire. They were broken up by a trio of regulars and the two men stood, panting at each other across the divide, made stupid by their hearts.

“She deserved better, your ma. But we were young and stupid. I wish you could have her tale of the events but…well you know. She’d tell it better anyhow. The truth is, I don’t know what she was thinking or feeling. I can’t give you that, Ori. I would if I could.”

Mick was horrified at the divide between the two men who ran his business and devised a temporary solution. He was making a long-delayed trip across the Empire to see his ailing mother and due to his health, needed someone to go with him.

“I was the one to go with him,” Febril said. “The solution was to separate us. Give us some time to cool off and remember we were brothers. So we set off the next week on a thousand league journey in a covered cart. Your father and mother waved us off from the doorstep of Mick’s that morning in the rain.”

The rest was easy enough to guess. Febril and Mick were gone for two months while my father and Anna ran the tavern together. Two young people in close proximity all the time, one inclined already to love the other, and nature ran its course. By the time Feb and Mick pulled back into town, they were married.

“And you weren’t long behind. Turned out, Mick was right and I had cooled off and found it in me to be happy for them. They were so obviously in love, your parents. You ought to know that. Nobody could have said otherwise. There was an awkward period where your father and I had to feel out our friendship again, set the new parameters, but by the time your ma began to show, we were a team again. The only change in the plan was the three of us were going to open our own tavern, instead of just your father and I. We had big plans. Your father must have checked out every book in the King’s Library about taverns. He had a stack as tall as Anna. He didn’t want us to make any mistakes. Most taverns fail, but we weren’t going to. No we weren’t.”

I did not need to look over at Febril to know there were tears in his eyes. As much as I did not want to, I knew what happened next. A few moments after I entered the world, Anna Praytel left it. My father was inconsolable. Febril and Mick had to keep him alive, and turned over my care for the first few months of my life to a wet nurse they worked hard to find. They forced him to eat and drink and did not let him out of their sight as he was not shy about his intent to follow Anna into death. Time moved on and Febril started bringing me to see my father, making him hold me, see how much I looked like him, my eyes coal dark and skin ochre, the opposite of my mother.

“I think,” Febril said. “That was what saved him. If you had looked like her. If you had her light eyes…I don’t think he could have taken it. Couldn’t have looked at you.”

It took months, but my father did become the man I knew and loved as a young child, a dedicated father. But he never became the man he planned to be with Febril.

“He quit as soon as he was on his feet. Couldn’t stand to look at the place. Didn’t want anything to do with the business. Took on the hardest labor he could find. Punishing himself for something he had not done. Worked himself to the bone so he could forget.”

That was the story Febril told me on the bench by the river that morning as we stared at the glassy early morning water. The reason Myra couldn’t stand to look at me.

“Myra and I, we don’t have any secrets,” he said. “I told her the same story I just told you. All she can see when she looks at you is my love for Anna. I never did stop loving her. I learned to move on, yes. But stop loving? Never.”

“But you said I don’t look like her.”

He patted me on the knee and chuckled a soft, sad laugh.

“Myra doesn’t see you, Ori. She sees the way I look at you, what I feel for you. She sees the reflection of my love for Anna in you. That’s all.”

It was not a unique story, but an old one. It was a story that brought swaths of my existence into a new clarity. I thanked Febril for sharing the story with me. He nodded but was unable to respond. His body shook with sobs. I put my hand on the broad back of the man who had done his best by me out of love for both of my parents.