Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 91783 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 459(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 306(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91783 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 459(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 306(@300wpm)
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only honest one I’ve got. I haven’t spoken to him since I signed the divorce papers. I left. Him. Beaumont. If the triplets didn’t live here, neither would I. My Paige loves Los Angeles. She loves my childhood home.”
My mom’s right. Paige, even Josie, loved the house in Los Angeles.
I can still feel the flat of his hand between my shoulder blades. Funny what sticks. Not the yelling—there was never much yelling—he didn’t need it. The hand. Steering me into a room and out of one, away from Josie and onto a field, always where he wanted me to be.
My mother spent the best part of her life as a piece of furniture in that man’s house. He told her where to stand and what she was feeling. He told her, once, that her own mother was dead before it was true, and let her grieve a living woman across the country, because a wife who’s mourning is easier to keep than a wife who might pack a bag. I’ve known all of it for years. It’s why there isn’t a soft feeling left in me for him, and why I never expect there to be.
“I’m not going to tell you to call him,” she says. “I’d be the last mother on earth that should. He took my mother from me with one sentence and I never got those years back and I never will. You want to let him talk to your voicemail till the day he dies, you’ve got my blessing.”
“But.” Because there’s a but. There’s always a but with her now. Getting sober made her honest, and honest is a pain in my ass.
“But the Sterling I lived with never once asked for a thing he could take instead.” She holds my eyes. “Not from me, not from you, not from God. And the man you just described got down on his knees in front of strangers because he couldn’t find the nerve to do it in front of you. I don’t know what that is. I know it isn’t nothing. A man like your father doesn’t crawl unless something’s run out on him.”
Something’s run out on him. I sit with that, and I don’t like where it leads.
“So what do I do,” I say. It comes out smaller than I’d like.
“Nothing.” She kisses the top of my head like I’m eight years old. “Today you drink your coffee with me, and you let it be. It’s taken him thirty years to reach out. He can sit on your timing for once in his life. Don’t dwell, Liam. You don’t owe him anything. No one does.”
My mom cleans her mug. “I’m off to spend the morning with my grandbabies.”
She leaves me in the kitchen with all of this weighing on my shoulders. Bex is doing her part, she’s screening callers, but she doesn’t know Sterling from the next guy. And maybe it’s not Sterling. Maybe I’m grasping because I’m at this crossroads where I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.
The house is quiet, too quiet. It gives my mind a clear space to think about what I don’t want to think about. I miss Harrison and JD. I miss our jam sessions, even if they turn into gripes about aches and pains.
Out the front window its an ordinary day, a recycling truck picks up at our curb, our neighbor is backing out of their driveway, another neighbor running by and waving even though I doubt they can see me. My community—a place that I love being—going on about their business while I reel from what could be the most unsettling realization that Sterling may have tried to reach out.
Over the air is cowardly. Saying those things so listeners can feel sorry for him is cheap. He doesn’t deserve forgiveness or pity from people on the other end, people with their own issues.
I don’t know what I can do to keep him off air. It’s something I’ll have to talk to Bex about. Sterling could lie—he would lie—to get what he wants. He always has. He doesn’t let something stand in his way, if it’s something he wants.
THIRTEEN
Ihaven’t planned a date in so long I fumble the reservation on my own phone, three tries before it takes, and then I refuse to tell Josie where we’re going just to watch her work me for it all afternoon. She tries everything. Sweet, sly, bribery, a threat involving the good knives. I hold the line. It’s the most fun I’ve had keeping a secret in years.
She comes down the stairs in a dress I’ve never seen, deep, dark purple, her hair up off her neck, and I forget what I was about to say. All these years and she can leave me speechless.