I piped up.
“Listen, Lou, he made things clear, now twice, that it was what it was and it’s done. You may be reading it a certain way because you love me and you like him and you like the idea of him with me. But what you saw wasn’t what you saw. Even if it was and he’s got things screwing with his head, I can’t believe it was what you saw because I’ve got enough on my plate, and I can’t take on all of that and how it might play out.”
“Greta, girlfriend—”
I stepped closer to her and gave her a small, not-happy smile.
“He’s a good guy and that’s the reason he came himself. And there was another reason, that being him explaining where he’s at. And I appreciate that, Lou. Because there was something between us and it was good. I felt it and I think he did too. But at this time in his life, he goes there, taking me with him, with Hope being the way she is and him being put through the wringer by her, he’s trying to save me from being put through that wringer too with things up in the air with how that’d play out. He’s protecting me from that. And we only had one night, I don’t know him all that well, but that says a lot about him.”
“I know how it’d play out,” she declared.
“No you don’t. And I don’t. And he doesn’t either,” I replied. “You said yourself, and I saw it too, how he feels about her. It’s too fresh and they’d been together a long time, they have three kids, they live in a small town, anything could happen.”
“Are you saying you think they’ll patch things up?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
Her brows knitted. “Are you saying he told you he wants that?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. She didn’t seem like his favorite person.”
“Well you know what?”
Oh boy.
I knew some whats.
I also knew sometimes I didn’t want to hear Lou’s variety of what.
She was worse than Joyce.
“Lou—” I tried to waylay her.
“Hope Drake is gonna be a lot less than his favorite person when someone stops keepin’ their mouth shut, waiting to see how it’ll play out between them, now that those papers have been filed. Someone is gonna share that the reason she put him through that wringer is because she wanted him to use the inheritance he got from that uncle of his to buy her a twenty-five thousand dollar twentieth anniversary ring instead of what he wanted to do with his inheritance.”
I tried again. “Lou—”
And failed.
“That being save it in case of emergencies. But if those didn’t come around, use it to put his girl through law school and maybe have a little extra to help his other girl with whatever she wanted to be in this life, and use what they’d saved for both of those things to give his daughters the best weddings they could dream up.”
Yeah.
I had a feeling Hixon wasn’t going to be too happy with his ex-wife when that someone got around to sharing just that about Hope.
Lou kept on.
“Probably the person in this town who was most freaked Hixon signed his name to those papers was Hope. She thought he’d cave. He didn’t cave. And now she’s scrambling. She screwed the pooch, and huge. And she’s not as stupid as she seems. She needs to get him back before Hix is the wiser to her bullshit. If they’re back together, no one will say a word. He finds someone worth his time in the meanwhile, she hasn’t just screwed the pooch. She’s plain old screwed.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with me,” I pointed out.
“Honey, you’re wrong. I don’t know what happened at the Dew, or after it, I just know he walked in somehow knowing the time you were on today and arriving at that time so he was the first person you saw, besides me. And he did all that with one thing on his mind.” She leaned into me again. “You. That doesn’t say one-night stand. That says protect your woman.”
Protect your woman.
Your woman.
His woman.
“Please stop,” I begged.
She leaned back.
“It isn’t that,” I reiterated.
She looked at me for a second then advised, “Greta, sometimes to carve some good in your life, you gotta work for it and even fight for it.”
She might be right.
She was still wrong.
“It isn’t that,” I said yet again.
Her voice got gentle. “Love you, honey. You know it. Never doubt it. But you let life happen to you and sometimes it’s a good thing to fight back.”
“You’re right. Definitely. You’re right about that. But this isn’t the time for that.”
“I think—”
“Keith was it for me.”
She closed her mouth.
I felt my eyes sting but pushed through it. “He was my everything.”
“Greta, girlfriend—”
“He was a good guy. He treated me . . . he was with me . . .” I couldn’t finish that. I just said, “And I lost him.”
“Did you fight?”
I couldn’t go there.
“It doesn’t matter,” I told her. “I lost him. Now this man . . . he’s a good man, Lou, you know it. Everyone does. What happens to me if I go for it and I don’t win?”
“What happens if you do?”
I couldn’t go there either.
“That doesn’t happen for me a lot.”
“Maybe it would if you fought.”
“And maybe it would just leave me that much more beaten.”
“I gotta admit, you’ve endured more than most,” she muttered.
“You think?” I asked, trying to be funny.
She didn’t laugh.
She suggested, “Maybe you’re in for a change.”
Okay.
I had to end this.
For both of us.
“You know, I was fourteen when Mom had Andy, and then completely forgot she’d had a kid.”
“Honey,” Lou whispered, her tone quieting, her face gentling.
She knew.
“So it was me who changed his diapers and fed him his bottles and got up when he was crying. And it was me, when he got big enough, who made him his breakfast and got him to school and made him do his homework. And it was me, even after I’d moved out, that got up early to go there every morning to do the same. It was also me who never missed any of his football games and attended his parent-teacher conferences.”
Her eyes started getting misty, but I had to nip her hopes and dreams for me in the bud before I got talked into letting her sweep me along right with them.
I’d become a mother at fourteen to a child I didn’t carry, and I didn’t mind because I’d fallen in love with Andy the minute I laid eyes on him. He was something to love and I’d never had that, not in all my short life, and I gave him all the love I had bottled up and all the love he had coming.
Which was a lot.
But even before that, with the mother I’d been given and no father to speak of, I’d never had any dreams and I’d never hoped for anything, except to spend the rest of my life with Keith from the minute he’d kissed me after our first date.