“I figure it’s better to acknowledge the elephant in the room sooner rather than later.”
I carefully pulled the car into traffic and turned onto the country highway that would take us to the small town that was JT’s home. I was buying time, pretending that this route I’d taken hundreds of times over the last six weeks or so was more complicated than it really was.
“Finn wants Mom to testify.”
“I have to admit, I was a little surprised you didn’t talk to her about it.”
“I don’t think I want to know what she did. Then I would have to acknowledge to myself that it was her who created this mess.”
“Mom was never an angel, Harry. Dad just outdid her because he was louder and more aggressive.”
An image of my mother, beautiful and frail, flashed through my mind. My mom was always the person I could run to when my father was on a tirade, the one who let me hide behind her skirts when I was little and my father decided I needed a spanking to get me back on the right track. Later, she was the one who came into my bedroom with a peanut butter sandwich when my father sent me to bed without dinner, or who helped me sneak out when I was grounded but there was some party I wanted to go to. She was my coconspirator, my confidant. She knew about the tattoos, the drinking and the questionable behavior. She knew how desperately I wanted to be a teacher, how much I wanted to shape young minds. She knew how difficult it was for me to give up my dreams when my father passed away and the complete mess he’d left behind was revealed.
My mom was my saving grace. To know now that she was also the one who stole my son’s childhood from me was almost unbearable. I wasn’t ready to face it.
“JT is supposed to come over right after we get to my place. You’ll get to meet him.”
“Finally.” Libby smiled. “I’ve been looking forward to this moment ever since you told me about him.”
“Me too.”
I reached over and squeezed her hand. Her smile widened as she tugged my hand against her thigh and ran her other hand over the back of it.
Libby was…Libby and I had a complicated relationship. She was a child when I went off to college, only fifteen when our father died. She was a responsibility, someone else I had to watch over and care for in my father’s absence. Not only did I have to fix everything to protect our mother, not only did I have to keep my older brother from interfering in something he was never prepared to deal with, but I had this child I had to watch over, keep from trouble. I had to keep her from walking down the same road my brother and I had walked.
And then she walks into my office one day, all of twenty years old and fresh from her college graduation, and she wanted a job. I nearly laughed her out of the office. Seven years later, I can’t imagine what I’d do without her.
Now she was coming to meet my fifteen year old son with me.
It felt almost poetic.
We pulled up to my little house and I waited for the comment. I waited for her to pop off and make some remark about how it wasn’t anything like the elaborately designed and built house I had back in Ashland. But she didn’t say a word.
Sometimes I forgot that Libby wasn’t a snob like so many of the people I surrounded myself with back in Oregon.
I carried her bags inside and set them inside the guest room. I was about to offer her a drink when there was a knock on the door. Right on time. JT was like clockwork with his visits. He arrived every afternoon at four, paced the living room and asked me seemingly unconnected questions, and then left just as quietly, but punctually, as he’d arrived.
I opened the door.
“Hey,” he said, looking down at his shoes.
“My sister’s here,” I said, wanting to give him some sort of warning. But then I felt Libby’s hand on my back. I stepped aside and watched as JT’s eyes came up to take in her welcoming expression.
“It’s nice to finally meet you, JT,” Libby said. “Harry’s told me so much about you.”
“Harry?” JT glanced at me and a smile burst like a bubble on his face. “You call him Harry?”
“Doesn’t he look like a Harry?” Libby jabbed her elbow into my side. “I always thought he did.”
JT nodded as he regarded me with the most open curiosity he’d displayed all week. “He does, actually.”
Libby slipped her arm around JT and pulled him into the house, the two of them laughing and joking like old friends. Leave it to my sister to win my son over that quickly!
I felt like a third wheel, watching them get to know each other. I think I learned more about JT in that hour than I’d learned teaching him literature for a month.
Was this what it was like to be a parent?
Chapter 15
Penelope
“Go home, Penny,” Nick said, coming up behind me and rubbing my shoulders a little too roughly for a long minute. “You look exhausted.”
“There’s no point. I can’t sleep, anyway.”