Libby snorted. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you look at a woman that way. If she’s not your girlfriend now, she will be soon.”
My eyes jumped back to Penelope, the memory of her kiss burning through my body. I’d so wanted to take her back into the bedroom the moment I laid eyes on her in that dress. It took more willpower than I ever knew I had to just kiss her and stop at that. But now I kind of wished I had taken her to the bedroom. Then we wouldn’t be here and Randy wouldn’t be falling all over her.
“Talk to mom,” Libby repeated.
I shook my head. “I’m not ready.”
“Yeah, well, if you wait too long you’ll never do it. But your son is falling in love with her, so if you want them to have a relationship that includes you, you need to do it.”
I looked over at JT where he was sitting beside my mother. His face was more animated than I think I’d ever seen it. Mother was saying something to him I couldn’t hear across the wide table, but it was obvious he was eating it all up.
Libby was right. As usual.
“I’ll talk to her,” I said. “But you need to keep Randy occupied.”
Libby’s normally easy going expression tightened. She looked over at Randy, something like anger snapping in her eyes.
“What’s he doing here, anyway?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. He was here when I arrived. Mother said something about him just passing through town.”
“Yeah, passing through town to beg for money.”
“Probably. Last I heard, he was in Seattle living in an abandoned apartment building with a bunch of other addicts.”
That didn’t surprise me. Randy had spent the last twenty years in and out of drug rehab. Father fought with him for years, trying to clean him up. But his tactics only sent Randy deeper into the drugs. When Father died, Randy managed to clean himself up long enough to see what he got out of the will. But then he took what little Father left him and burned through it in less than a few months. After that, he disappeared off and on, only showing up when he had nowhere else to go. I tried, the first few times, to get him cleaned up. I put him in program after program, but he always fell off the wagon. When I gave up, Libby tried until she came home one day, nine months pregnant with her first child, and found Randy ransacking her house.
Once an addict, always an addict.
He looked okay now. He wasn’t as thin as he was the last time I saw him. He looked rested. Clean. But that could just be our mother’s generosity. It didn’t necessarily mean anything had changed. And I learned long ago not to trust Randy.
But Penelope didn’t know that.
As if on some sort of cue, she laughed.
The sound was like music. But at this moment, because I knew she was laughing at something Randy had said, it grated on my nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard.
Suddenly my appetite disappeared.
I grabbed my glass of wine and walked out of the room, stepping out onto the lamay that overlooked the back garden. I was only there a moment when my mother spoke behind me.
“He’s got quite the personality. Reminds me a little of you at that age.”
I took a deep swallow of my wine, willing it to take the edge off of this night.
“I’m glad you were able to find him.”
“No thanks to you.”
She moved up beside me and lay a hand on my arm. “I know it’s difficult for you to understand why I did what I did.”
“You hid the fact that I had a child for sixteen years. You took my choices away from me.”
“I protected you from making a choice that would have sent you on a path that would not have made you happy.”
“And you think the path I ended up on was the one I wanted?”
“No. But I think it’s made you the man you are. The man who was able to locate his child and bring him home after all these years.”
“You don’t get it.” I pulled away from her, turning to confront her. “It was my life. My choice.”
“Then tell me this: if some girl came to you and told you that JT had gotten her pregnant, would you tell him? Would you allow it to alter the course of his life?”
“That’s different. JT’s fifteen.”
“It’s not different. He’s your son, just as you are mine.”
“But I was twenty years old.”
“You were still my child. And I’d do the same thing today.”
I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, to shake some sense into her. She was never going to see things from my point of view. And I was never going to see it from hers. I simply couldn’t understand how she could keep something as important as a child from me.
“I just wanted to protect you, Harrison. If your father had learned the truth, he would have cut you out of the family in a heartbeat and I never would have seen you again. I’d rather have you angry with me than to see that happen.”