9. Michael
CHAPTER 9
“Michael.” My father stands in my doorway, his arms crossed. He’s in uniform, about to leave for the night shift, and based on his expression, he’s not thrilled with me.
Closing the book I was reading, I glance up at him.
“Margot, I need to speak with your brother.”
My sister sits up and takes her book with her, giving me an apologetic glance as she goes because we both know what this is about. As soon as she’s out of the room, he moves all the way in and closes the door.
Then, in typical-of-my-dad fashion, he stands there like a statue, letting the tension between us simmer. I know from experience that he doesn’t want me to talk. No, he wants to let the silence draw out because he thinks it makes me sweat.
It doesn’t. Because I’m used to his typical brand of lecturing.
“Your mother said you haven’t applied to any colleges. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“I’m a bit confused about that, seeing as how you’ve received multiple scholarship offers.”
“I don’t see how you’re confused,” I reply. “I told you exactly what I want to do after I graduate.”
My father’s eyes, so like mine, flash with anger. “And I told you that you will do better than working as a grease monkey for the rest of your life.”
The fact that he just insulted Reyna’s father and the business he built from the ground up infuriates me. I push to my feet. “You don’t get to make that decision for me.”
“Actually, I can.”
“No. I have enough credits to graduate, I’m eighteen, you don’t get to control my life. Not anymore.”
My father takes a step closer. I’m already half a foot taller than he is, but he still tries to intimidate me. He may have never put hands on me, but he’s certainly threatened a time or two. “You still live in my house. You are my son.”
“I’m eighteen,” I snap back.
“Do you really think Reyna is going to want a life of struggle? Do you really think she’ll be happy with your mediocre life? And if she’s so intent on you staying here and becoming a nobody, then you shouldn’t be with her.”
Fury radiates through me, and I clench my hands into fists at my sides. “Are you telling me to break up with her?”
“I’m telling you that you need to think long and hard about the decisions you’re making. You have a chance at being somebody. At making a lot of money.”
“Not everything is about money.” I practically spit the words at him because it’s the same old argument.
Be a pro ball player, Michael, you’ll make lots of money.
Be a pro boxer, Michael, you’ll make lots of money.
Go to college and be a doctor, Michael, you’ll make lots of money.
Over and over again.
Money. Money. Money.
“You aren’t going to live in my house,” he snaps. “Not when you refuse to make something of yourself.”
“I’m not going to college,” I yell. “I have my life planned out, and just because you weren’t good enough to go pro doesn’t mean I have to. You don’t get to live your life through me!” I scream at him until my throat burns.
And by the time I’m done, I know nothing will be the same.
“Get out of my house. You have until I get back from my shift or I’ll throw you out myself.” He turns and leaves, slamming the door behind him. I stare at it, half expecting it to open again, but when it doesn’t, I slowly sit back on my bed.
My mom won’t fight him on it. She never does.
But where am I supposed to go?
What am I supposed to do?
Reyna. Emotion claws at my throat and my eyes burn with unshed tears. What do I have to offer her if I’m homeless?
“Ma, you in here?”
“Back here!” Her voice echoes toward me from somewhere in the back of my dad’s shop, so I move carefully through tall towers of boxes, tubs, and other various items he’s collected over the years.
She’s at the top of a ladder, trying desperately to pull down a box with a blue lid. “Want some help?” I ask, brow arched.
Delilah Anderson looks down at me and grins. “If you’d shown up sooner, perhaps I could’ve used it.”
I laugh. “Sorry, Ma, I was busy. Come on and let me get it for you so you don’t break your neck.”
With a roll of her eyes, she climbs back down the ladder and gives me a big hug. Since I get all my height from her, she’s only about six inches shorter than me, and three inches taller than my dad. “You showed up right in time.”
“I usually do.” I wink at her and climb up the ladder, then bring the box back down with me. It’s heavy, though not obscenely. Still would have given her a massive struggle trying to get down the ladder. “What is in here?”
“Old pictures. I told your grandmother I’d mail some to her.”
“You know I can get all that scanned for you and you can just email them.”
“Your grandmother will lose her mind if I email anything, you know that. I don’t think she even knows how to turn on that computer we bought her.”
“Fair enough.” I laugh. “Dad inside?”
“He is.”
I don’t have to ask to know what kind of day it is. The dark circles beneath her eyes tell me everything. Shortly after I’d left for the Army, my dad was in an accident that nearly took him from us altogether and robbed him of his ability to walk.
Ever since, he’s struggled with depression, anxiety, and thanks to the head injury that had him in a coma for three weeks, he has moments where he forgets that he can’t walk and then gets furious all over again.
He’s struggled with his temper his entire life, and although he’s never been physical with any of us, the man can make you feel two inches tall with his sharp tongue.
“I’ll head in, then. This going too?”
“Yes, please.” She falls into step beside me. “How is Reyna doing?”
I swallow hard. My mother adores Reyna. She’d considered her another daughter and had honestly been just as furious at me as Carter was for leaving Reyna behind. If only she’d known that the man she’s married to is the real reason I left. “She hired a bodyguard.”
“One of you boys?” she asks.
“Jaxson.”
“But not you.” She narrows her gaze.
“You know how she feels about me, Ma, and I can’t exactly blame her.” We walk through my mother’s colorful garden and up the back steps onto their porch. The soft music from handmade wind chimes fills the silence as we move into the house.
I can hear the television going, a football game my dad has recorded and rewatches almost daily, since he refuses to do anything else. I cannot even imagine how hard it was for a man like him, who’d spent his entire adult life as a police officer, to go to no longer being able to care for himself, though I wish he’d realize that he didn’t die in that accident.
Sometimes, it seems, he forgets.
“Hey, Dad,” I greet as I step into the living room. He’s seated in his recliner, the wheelchair he uses to get around right beside him. There’s a harness dangling from the ceiling that I installed a few years ago so that he could sit more comfortably whenever he didn’t need to be mobile.
“Michael,” he greets, turning toward me. His eyes are sunken in, his expression hollow.
“How’s it going?” I take a seat on the couch and stare at the game. My heart sinks. It’s a home video of one of my old high school games. He’s standing at the edge of the field, having stepped in to be an assistant coach when Coach Miller was ill.
“Fine, son, you?”
“Going okay. Did you hear about Reyna?” I hate even asking him about her, hate even mentioning her name in his presence, given the final fight we had before I left for the Army, but I know he used to love her like another daughter.
A long, long time ago.
“Yes. It’s good you were there when you were.”
“Yeah. Agreed.” I glance to my right, not at all surprised to see my mother hovering, her expression tormented. Years of watching the man you love all but give up on life has eaten away at the joy she’d once exuded. “How are you feeling? Up for some fishing later? I can take you out on the dock.”
“No. I don’t think so. Maybe next time.” It used to be his favorite thing to do, and now whenever I invite him, it’s the same exact answer. No, I don’t think so. Maybe next time.
“You sure about that?”
“Yes,” he replies, a bit more sternly now.
“Okay.” It’s so hard for me to see the man who’d raised me beneath the shell of what he’s allowed himself to become. The accident was hard, sure, I won’t take that away from him. But God kept him here. He let my father remain on this earth with my mother, my sister, his grandson, me—why can’t we be enough? “Well, I’m going to head over to Margot’s and pick up Matty. I can take you with me if you’d like? Get you out of the house?”
“I’ve already told you, no.”
“All right. See you later, Dad.” I stand up and head over toward my mom. After planting a kiss on her forehead, she walks me out the front door. “Why don’t you come with me? We can get you out for a bit.”
“You know I can’t leave your father,” she replies. I can see the sadness in her gaze, the brokenness. My mother used to be incredibly active in the church. She’d had friends, a life, and now she barely leaves the house. Margot does most of the shopping, and I take care of all maintenance around the place.
“I told you, I can hire a nurse to come in and take care of him.”
“No. He’s my husband. It’s my gift to be able to care for him when he needs me.”
“Ma—”
“Michael, I’m okay. I promise. Please. I love your father, with everything that I am, and even if he has a hard time remembering who he is, I never will.” He’d been a caring husband, a loving and supportive father to Margot, and—well—an active father to me. I know that’s what she’s holding onto. Honestly, it’s what Margot clings to on hard days, too.
“Okay. Just think about it, please? You can take care of him and still have a life.”
“Thank you.” She smiles and stretches up to kiss my cheek. “Let me know if Reyna needs anything, okay?”
“I will.” As I climb into my truck, I look up the street to Reyna’s house. Jaxson’s car is parked right out in front, and just seeing it there—even as I know there’s nothing romantic between them—is like sandpaper to my soul. It should be me in there. Protecting her. Loving her. I should be her husband, her partner, and I allowed myself to be chased out of town.
Forcing myself to look away, I climb in and make the fifteen-minute drive to the Hope Springs Bed and Breakfast across town. My sister has been running the place ever since she and her now ex-husband, Chad O’Connell, bought it from Betsy Lee five years ago.
It had been her dream to own a place like it, so when he left, I’d bought him out so she wouldn’t lose the place in the divorce. Now, we’re technically co-owners, but I’m a silent partner and have been secretly squirreling away my portion of the proceeds for Matty’s college fund. If he ever gets there.
With my nephew’s temper, he may just end up in jail first.
Margot is standing behind the counter on the phone. Her dark hair is up in a messy bun, her large-framed glasses slipping down her nose. When she sees me, she holds up a finger and flashes a quick smile. “Fantastic, Mr. Phillips, I have you down for that reservation. Yes, sir, I will take care of it. Absolutely. Okay. Wonderful. See you then.” She ends the call and plants both palms on the counter. “You are a sight for sore eyes, big brother.”
“Why is that?”
“Two of the lightbulbs in room 2A are out. I don’t suppose you could?—”
“On it.”
She laughs and follows me as I make my way down the hall to the supply closet for spare lightbulbs. “How is Reyna? I tried to call her earlier, but she didn’t answer.”
“She’s shaken up,” I tell her as I retrieve the box and head up the back steps.
“Jaxson told me she hired you guys and that he’s protecting her.”
Since the former LAPD detective hasn’t quite decided where he wants to live yet, he’s been renting the maintenance apartment here at the B&B ever since he got to Hope Springs. “Speaking of Jaxson, why isn’t he changing these out?”
“Busy protecting Reyna,” she replies as she slips past me and unlocks the door to the room. “Which, by the way, you should be doing.”
“She doesn’t want me to.”
“It’s a mistake. You have to know it’s a mistake.”
“I’ll let your maintenance guy know that you think he’s a mistake.”
She rolls her eyes. “You know what I mean.”
After unscrewing the broken lightbulbs, I replace them and then turn to face her. “I appreciate it, Margot, but Reyna made her choice and I respect it.”
“Well. I love her, but it was a dumb choice.”
“I left her behind.”
She crosses her arms. “We both know the reason, though. Have you told her yet?”
Margot is the only person in this world who knows why I left. Why I felt like I wasn’t good enough for Reyna and the life I’d planned for us was not what Reyna deserved.
And her knowledge isn’t even because I told her, but rather because my sister was eavesdropping from the other room when my father told me that I needed to be better than this town. That if I didn’t go off to college and pursue a football scholarship, I was wasting my life.
He’d been insistent on it, and honestly, it was the first time he’d tried to pressure me into anything. Likely because it was the first time I’d gone against what he wanted for me. He was a cop. His entire life was this town. And he’d wanted more for me. Trouble was I’d never wanted anything but Reyna.
Our fight drove me out of Hope Springs, though, and convinced me that I would never be good enough for her.
“The reason doesn’t matter,” I tell Margot, “because the end result was the same. I left, and Reyna will never forgive me for that.”
“It’s not fair.”
“I messed up.”
“And you’ve apologized.”
We head out into the hall and she locks the room up behind her.
“If Chad came back today and apologized for leaving town, would you forgive him?” It’s a low blow, but I don’t know how else to get her to see it.
“That’s different.”
“How’s that?”
“Chad got me pregnant, married me, then took off and left me with a thirteen-year-old to raise on my own. You joined the military, served your country, and nearly died for it.”
I chuckle and wrap my arm around her shoulders. Margot has always been my biggest supporter. Out of everyone, she’s who I wrote the most when I was overseas, and she’d always written back. Even when she and Chad started having problems and she’d caught him cheating on her the first time, she’d written to me as though all was right in the world. She’s strong, maybe too strong for her own good because she refuses to lean on anyone. “You paint me as a hero, but to Reyna, I?—”
“Should be a hero,” she interrupts. “Yes, you messed up. Yes, you suck for that. But you’re a human and it’s in our nature to mess up. And you came back. I just—I love her like a sister, but I wish she’d see.”
I want to continue the conversation, to convince Margot to see it from Reyna’s perspective, but I know she never will. Because even though Margot can see my many, many faults, she is the first person to offer forgiveness for them. Anyone’s faults, really. It’s why she stayed with Chad as long as she did.
“Is Matty ready to go?”
“Matthew,” an annoyed teenage voice calls out from the kitchen. “And yes.” He steps out wearing dark jeans, a black T-shirt, and a black leather cuff bracelet. His dark hair is long and shaggy, and he has to brush it out of his face.
“There’s my boy.” Margot wraps her arm around his shoulders and kisses his cheek.
He groans. “Stop, Mom.”
“Why? Uncle Mikey is the only one here.” Margot grins at me.
“Mikey?” I can’t hide my grimace.
Matty grins. “Actually, you know what? You call me Matty, so I think Mikey is actually fair,” he replies with a grin.
Margot laughs. “Be good, Matt. And get your homework taken care of before you do anything else.”
“Yes, Mom. I promise.”
“Good. Dinner tonight?” she asks me.
“Sure thing. Tell me what to bring, and I’ll be there.”
“Just my son.” She points to me. “And hopefully all in one piece.”
“That was one time,” I reply. “And it was just a few strands of hair.”
“A few strands of hair? He’d used your clippers to shave half his head.”
Matthew grins at me, and I roll my eyes.
“Fine. But if you ask me, he could use a haircut right about now.”