Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 131387 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131387 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
“She didn’t even tell administration?” I asked, shocked.
“Lisa Hutchison did whatever she damned well pleased.”
Bitter had crept into his tone, and not a little of it.
And it didn’t leave when he kept talking.
“As it goes, I got even older. But it was only much later, when I was an adult, when I realized she was a performance mom. Going through the motions. Making them memorable. Because for the most part, she wasn’t around. She was a vague memory of the scent of her perfume and the sight of her red lipstick. Only when that memory started fading would she show up again and make a big show of being the best mom ever. I didn’t know if it was so I wouldn’t forget her when she took off or if she thought she was making up for something. I still don’t know.”
“She took off?” I asked.
“All the time,” he answered.
“Um…where would she go?” I asked.
“Roll the wheel, May,” he answered. “She could be staying with her sister and taking a break, ‘Because this isn’t working for me, John. You know this isn’t working.’ She could be staying with her girlfriend, both of them doing their best rendition of barfly, acting like one of them wasn’t married with a kid. She could be shacked up with her latest fuck buddy. She had it all. She had whatever she wanted. She could be single, footloose and fancy-free. She could be married to a good, decent man with a son and a home. She could be the tragic woman who no one understood, taking her time to sort through her feelings. Whatever it was, was whatever she wanted it to be.”
“And your dad put up with this?”
Hutch shook his head. Speared some eggs. Ate them.
Then put his fork down.
“He loved her. She was beautiful. She was so damned full of life. I didn’t only get performance mom, Dad got performance wife. May…fuck.”
The explosion of the last word made me jump again.
Once I got over being startled, though, I put my coffee cup down and reached for his hand.
He held on tight.
And then he put his other hand to mine, smoothing it out, watching as he flattened it on top of his.
It was then I knew.
This was bad.
This was really bad.
I didn’t even know the full extent of what it was, and it was already killing me.
“He thought she might be sick,” he told our hands before he lifted his gaze to me. “It tore him up. He asked her to get help. He begged her to go to therapy. If not on her own, couple’s therapy. She refused. ‘I’m just me, John. There’s nothing wrong with me,’ she’d say. ‘And I can’t even believe you’d suggest such a thing.’”
“You heard all this?”
“My dad was a cop. My mom worked jobs like she lived life, doing whatever the fuck she wanted, and when she didn’t want to do it anymore, she quit. So it wasn’t like we were rolling in money. We had a nice house, but it wasn’t large. I was a kid. Once I got older, I could sense something wasn’t right. So I not only heard, I listened.”
“Of course,” I whispered.
“Then I got older, and I got pissed.”
“Of course on that too,” I said.
“Dad told me, patience. Dad told me, try to understand. He dealt with a lot of people in a lot of fucked-up circumstances. He told me there were some who were just bad seeds. But most of them, whatever they did wrong, there was something in their life that drove them to it. They were poor and needed food. They’d been abused or neglected, so they were acting out. They’d been beat down and didn’t know how to rise up, so they kept finding situations that would beat them down so they could be in a place they understood, even if it wasn’t a safe place to be. He was a good cop. He ended his career as Chief of Police. And under his tenure they had great close rates and lots of community involvement, and that meant crime was down. He knew what he was doing. He was like Harry. Harry gets fed up with the shit, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t lead with compassion.”
I sensed this about Harry.
But in that moment, I just nodded and said, “Your dad sounds pretty awesome.”
He slid his hands from mine and sat back again. “He was.”
“So he never left her?” I asked.
“Oh, he did,” Hutch answered, taking a bite of his toast. “After I was gone, in the Navy. He waited until I couldn’t in any way be considered a kid anymore before he called it quits. And I say it like that because he didn’t want to. He wanted to keep trying. Keep fighting. He loved her. He didn’t want to lose her. But in the end, he fought as long as he could so his son would have some semblance of mom and dad together, even though we both knew that was a joke, but when he reckoned it might not hurt me, he ended it.”