Chapter 21 #2
His mother’s eyes flash. “How dare you talk to your mama that way?”
“How dare you stand out there making me look weak?”
“I was defending you!”
“You were humiliating me.” Jake releases her wrist with a little shove. Not enough to make her stumble. Just enough to make her understand he could have. “Those women don’t need to picture me howling over my wife like some abandoned dog.”
Kathy rubs at the place where his fingers were, mouth trembling. She looks smaller in here than she did outside. Older, too, under Jared and Brianna’s kitchen lights, all that makeup settling into the lines around her mouth.
For one second, the sight almost does what it’s supposed to do.
Almost.
Then he hears Emily’s little sympathetic gasp in his memory, and Brianna’s hand over her mouth. He imagines the story moving through the entire church ladies’ gossip circle by Sunday morning. Poor, sweet Jake. Such a good man. So heartbroken he cried over his wife.
His stomach turns hot.
“I didn’t raise you to be cruel to your mother,” Kathy says.
“No, you raised me to know better than to embarrass the family in public. Maybe try it.”
Her face changes. In the familiar way, where the hurt dries up and something sharper looks out from behind her hawk-like eyes.
“They understand it’s not you, baby,” she says, softer now. “Everybody understands.”
The word everybody steadies him.
Everybody is useful. Everybody means witnesses and consensus. A world where Lennon can be wrong and Jake can still be the man who endured her.
“She’s sick,” he says. “She’s confused.”
“She’s a whore who fucked your brother.”
His jaw tightens.
The satisfaction of the word hits first. Then the humiliation of it. Then the image, which arrives no matter how hard he tries to keep it out: Lennon looking at August the way she used to look at him, like he hung the moon.
His hands curl at his sides.
Kathy sees it. Of course she does. She sees everything in him she can use.
“That is what she did, Jakey. That is what she chose. You need to wake up and see the truth.”
“She didn’t know who he was.” The defense comes out before he can stop it.
His mother laughs once, sharp and ugly. “Oh, please.”
“She didn’t,” he says, louder.
Because if Lennon knew, then everything shifts. If she knew August was his brother and did it anyway, then it becomes something too humiliating to hold in his mind. Not just betrayal and adultery.
It becomes a verdict on him: Lennon choosing the one person alive who had always been proof Jake was not enough.
No.
She didn’t know.
She couldn’t have known.
“She left you and went straight to him,” Kathy says. “Whether she knew his name or not doesn’t much matter, does it?”
Jake turns away from her and goes to Jared’s fridge. He pulls out another beer because his hands need something to do and because his mother’s eyes are on him and he hates that. He’s always hated when she looks at him so full of judgment.
“Do you really think that’s a good idea?”
He pops the cap against the granite counter and drinks half the bottle in three long swallows just to watch her mouth tighten.
There. That feels better.
This is what he misses about Lennon.
For all her emotions and migraines, and all the ways she could get wound up over nothing, she knew how to make a man feel like a man.
She asked about his day when he got home and actually listened to the answer. She never judged him. She remembered names he’d mentioned once. Took his side against Carlos at work because Carlos was a backstabbing prick and Lennon understood that because Jake had told her so.
She used to look at him like his version of events was the truth.
That was love, wasn’t it?
What was the point of pouring ten years into a woman if she could wake up one morning and decide none of it counted?
“You never liked her,” he says.
Kathy’s mouth tightens. “I could see who she was from the start.”
“She might have come home if you hadn’t made me cut off the accounts.”
“I did not make you do anything.”
“You said she’d come right back when she realized how hard the world is without me.”
“And she would have if your brother hadn’t gotten his hooks in her.”
Jake points the bottle at her. “You told me to make the police report about the cash.”
“I told you to protect yourself.”
“You told me to get it on record.”
“And I was right.”
He hates the flash of satisfaction in her voice. He also hates that her plan worked, but still didn’t manage to bring Lennon home.
Sure, he’d done what Mama said.
He got it on record that Lennon had taken money, so he’d have it to use in the divorce if it came to that. A man had to protect himself from what an emotional woman might claim once she had been coached by lawyers and degenerates and whatever August called himself these days.
But damn it, he doesn’t want a divorce.
He wants his wife back in his house.
Where she belongs.
Kathy steps closer, lowering her voice. “Emily feels terrible for you. She asked me if you were eating and sleeping okay. She has a tender heart.”
“I don’t want Emily.”
“She’s a good girl.”
“She’s boring.”
“She’s clean.”
“She’s not my wife.”
Kathy’s nostrils flare. “Your wife is gone.”
The words land like a slap.
For a moment, Jake doesn’t move.
Outside, someone laughs too loudly. A kid yells and is immediately shushed. The party goes on without him, which feels like its own insult.
“My wife,” he says slowly, “is having a crisis.”
“She’s making a fool of you.”
“She is not in her right mind.”
“She’s spreading her legs for your brother.”
The beer bottle hits the counter hard enough that foam jumps up the neck.
Kathy freezes.
Good.
He likes her better afraid of him. Not much. Just enough.
“Never say that again,” he says, glaring her down. “Don’t forget, mother. I know every one of your sins, too”
“I have done everything right,” Jake continues. “I bought the house. I got the promotion. I stood by her through the baby stuff and I didn’t blame her or make her feel worse than she already did. Do you know how many men would have handled that differently?”
Kathy softens instantly. “I know, baby.”
“I was patient.”
“You were.”
“I was good to her.”
“You were too good.”
He breathes through his nose, letting that settle.
Too good. Yes. That’s right.
He was patient about the baby thing. Heroically patient, if anyone asked him. He sat beside her at appointments, held her while she cried, and even told her it wasn’t her fault.
And after all that grace, after all those years of not saying the thing he could have by all rights said, she had looked him in the face and told him she wanted to leave.
Like she was the injured party.
Like freedom was something she was owed instead of something he had already given her every single day he didn’t punish her for failing him.
“She owes me better than this,” he says.
Kathy’s eyes gleam. There. This is the version of him she knows how to comfort.
“Yes, she does.”
The agreement should soothe him. Instead, some old, ugly thing stirs under his ribs.
Because his mother is always talking about women knowing their place, but look at her. Standing in another man’s kitchen, telling him who he should want instead of the wife that’s rightfully his.
Telling him when to drink, what to say, what to do, like he is still a boy curled up beside her in bed while August screamed from the nursery and Dad’s key scraped drunk against the lock.
He remembers that sound with sudden clarity.
Metal missing metal.
Again and again.
Then the door opening with no way of knowing which version of his father had come home until it was too late.
Dad wild-eyed and grinning, wanting ice cream for dinner. Dad dark and silent, smelling like outside. Dad gone for days. Dad back with presents. Dad asleep on the couch before supper.
And August crying through all of it.
Colicky, needy, red-faced August, ruining the only thing Jake had managed to make stable: his mother’s arms around him. Holding him tight and telling him he was the man of the house now.
He’d been five years old.
Of course he’d believed her.
Maybe that was where everything went wrong. Not because she lied, but because everyone else kept forgetting it was true.
Jake looks at his mother now and the old rage sharpens into something new.
“She’s my wife,” Jake says. “It’s my marriage and my problem to handle.”
For once, his mother has no immediate answer.
That feels better than the beer.
He takes out his phone.
The map loads. There she is. Still at the RV park. Still near August.
Fury burns in his belly. Even if she didn’t know who August was at first, she knows he’s Jake’s brother now. She’s choosing betrayal now.
Kathy looks at the screen and then at his face. “Jakey.”
He closes the app before she can say anything else.
“I’m done asking her to come home.”
“You need to be smart.”
“I am being smart.”
“You need to think about how this looks.”
“I am thinking about how this looks.” He slips the phone into his pocket. “I’m thinking maybe everybody needs to see what I’ve been dealing with.”
Jake finishes the beer and sets the empty bottle in the sink because he is still the kind of man who cleans up after himself in someone else’s home.
Then he turns back toward the kitchen door, toward the yard and the women who have been picturing him crying.
By the time he steps outside, his smile is back, perfect and steady. Downright husbandly.
He kisses his mother’s cheek in front of everyone before letting her go.
“Mama worries too much,” he says warmly, and the women smile because they understand mothers, and they understand good men trying their best.