Chapter 40
CHAPTER FORTY
HUDSON
I sat at my momma’s kitchen table, swirling the lowball of whiskey in front of me. Lilah had brought a bottle over—to numb the pain, if I knew my sister at all—and I sure as hell wasn’t going to say no.
By the time she and my mom had managed to drag me home an hour ago, Kenna had still been elbow-deep in the situation she was attempting to defuse between Edna and Earl. I’d hoped she’d call me when she was done so we could finish our discussion, but so far, my phone had stayed silent.
Lilah and Caleb had escaped to the living room—they’d been doing a lot of escaping these past few days now that I was actually around to notice. And I was pretty sure I was going to have to have the you better not break my baby sister’s heart or I’ll break your face talk with my partner.
“You wanna tell me what’s on your mind?” Momma asked, taking the seat next to mine and pouring herself two fingers of whiskey.
I’d only seen her drink hard liquor a handful of times in my life, but I supposed she needed numbing most of all. Couldn’t be easy sending your only son to war when your husband died at its hands.
As for what was on my mind… Where should I start? It was a fucking maze up there, my thoughts and worries all jumbled up with what I needed to do. Which, naturally, conflicted with what I wanted to do.
I sipped my whiskey before placing my glass back on the table and lifting my gaze to meet hers. “What would Dad have wanted for me?”
She smiled, a soft, contented grin that spoke of lost love but not of mourning. Sometime in the nearly twenty years since my dad had passed away, her expressions had turned from pure sadness to something softer. Something fonder. An undercurrent of melancholy, sure, but nothing like it used to be.
“He’d have wanted you to be happy. And he’d be real proud of you, sweetheart.”
I nodded, tipping my glass toward me as I stared down into the amber liquid. I’d had no doubt my dad would’ve wanted me to be happy. And that he’d be proud of me doing what I was doing. Hell, that was the whole reason I was doing it in the first place.
Sure, I’d felt a calling for adventure when I’d been young and had enlisted because of it, but the truth was, I could’ve fulfilled that hunger any number of ways. I’d chosen to follow in my dad’s footsteps specifically and join the army because I’d thought that was the best way to honor him.
“Well, now that we got that generic question out of the way,” she said with a wry lilt to her voice, “why don’t you tell me what this is really about?”
I breathed out a laugh and slid my eyes to hers. If there was one thing Marianne Miller was good at that didn’t involve pastry, it was reading her children and sussing out what was really bothering us. She’d been doing it as long as I could remember, and apparently her children’s ages were no factor in her ability to do so.
“Lately, I’ve been…” I scrubbed a hand down my face and over my coarse beard. For the first time in ten years, I resented the fact that I’d have to shave it off tomorrow. I’d been resenting a hell of a lot recently, and I didn’t want that. Didn’t want that emotion to sully a career I’d loved with my whole heart. “I’ve been wonderin’ if maybe my place isn’t in the army.”
“What would make you think that?”
“I don’t know, Momma. And I feel selfish for even considering leavin’. It’s always been my plan to retire from there, you know that.”
“I do.” She nodded, her focus trained intently on me.
My place was in the army, and I had an unspoken promise to fulfill to my father. To finish the career he’d never gotten a chance to.
Didn’t I?
Fuck, it was going to be hard to verbalize something I’d only ever known in my heart. But I had to try. If I had any hope of working through the clusterfuck of my mind, I had to try.
“What you don’t know is that I was doin’ it because Dad never got the chance to.”
Her breath hitched, but that was the only outward sign she gave that my words affected her. She had the best poker face I’d ever seen—something she’d no doubt perfected thanks to my shenanigans with Kenna during our teenage years—and it was nothing but a mask of serenity right now.
The lack of judgment shown there allowed me to continue. “I feel like it’d be disrespectful of me to throw away what Dad could never have just because I’ve tired of it.”
“Hudson…” She hooked her fingers over my hand which still gripped my glass, squeezing them tight until I met her eyes. “You don’t have a disrespectful bone in your body. I made sure of that.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her lips quirked up at the side. “Your dad would be proud of you, no matter what. I think you could’ve grown up to do nothing but play video games and eat potato chips in our basement, and he still would’ve puffed out his chest and talked about you any chance he got.”
It’d been a long time since I had cried over missing my dad— years , actually—but listening to my momma’s words, I couldn’t deny the familiar tightness in my throat and the stinging at the backs of my eyes.
“He’s been gone a long time now, but there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about him. He loved the army with his whole heart. Loved his career something fierce. The only thing he loved more than either of them was us.” She lifted her hand to cup my cheek and patted it lightly. “He’d be honored that you wanted to pay tribute to him this way, but I’m gonna tell you what I think he probably would’ve said himself if he were still here to do so.”
I leaned forward, actually holding my breath as I waited for whatever wisdom my mom was about to bestow on me. Something to hopefully get me unstuck from this island of uncertainty I’d stranded myself on.
“Don’t be a dumbass.”
I barked out a surprised laugh, and then tossed my head back and laughed without restraint. It was times like these that made me wish desperately that I’d known my dad as an adult instead of just as a kid who saw him as my hero and not the flawed human he actually was.
“That’s…well, that’s…”
“The truth,” she said. “He was very wise.”
“What’re y’all laughin’ about in here?” Lilah asked, strolling into the kitchen as if nothing was amiss. Someone should probably tell her that her shirt buttons were done up askew and that Caleb’s shirt was on inside out.
I narrowed my eyes. Yep, I was definitely going to be having that chat with my friend.
“We were just talkin’ about your daddy, actually, and how he’d tell Hudson not to be a dumbass.”
“Smart man,” Caleb said, taking the seat next to Lilah and across from me.
I simply held my friend’s gaze and then very pointedly glanced to Lilah’s shirt while lifting an eyebrow. I could be an intimidating guy, and though Caleb was tall, I was taller and had about twenty pounds on him. Caleb coughed into his fist, but he didn’t back down. Didn’t shy away from my questioning stare. He met it head on. I admired the hell out of that.
Now I just had to figure out how to approach my own issues the same way.