Chapter 14 #4
We ate first. He was starving and also nervous about flying out the next day for their game. “Jory’s knee is sore,” he said, and looked up at me.
I had also heard that from Herb and Buzz, who I listened to so much that they now seemed like old friends. “Does that mean you’ll get the start?” It was what those guys had said.
“It depends on what happens tomorrow, but it looks like yes.” He had picked up his knife and was passing it between his fingers. “I’ve never played in a game with so much riding on it.”
“This will be like every other game. You’ll go out and do well.” I put my hand on his arm. “The silverware is rented…”
He looked down at the knife, which he was now bending. It was no longer straight. “Yeah. Oops.”
I walked behind him and rubbed his shoulders, and he didn’t move like it hurt. Then I slid my arms around to hug him, and I rested my chin on his head.
“So, we’re not fighting?” he asked. “I can’t tell.”
“I’m trying to figure out the future. Remember when we were in Indianapolis and you told me to plan?”
“Yeah, I think I wanted you to pick which bus to get on so you didn’t end up hurt and alone in some weird-ass place.”
And that was why he wanted me to come with him now, too: because he thought he had to take care of me. Everything I’d done so far, all the stabilizing stuff, hadn’t been enough to show him that I was not the same junkie idiot who was running down the street.
“What were you texting me earlier?” he asked. “Something about your aunt’s dog but I didn’t understand.”
“I didn’t tell you the truth about why it disappeared.
Like, it didn’t disappear. I was the person who got rid of it—not killing it, but I got it into my grandma’s car and I got it to the animal shelter in the biggest town near where we lived.
I surrendered the dog to them and when Aunt Simone wanted to know where he was, I said that I didn’t know.
I let her think that it had run away but I was lying. I let you believe a lie, too.”
He pulled my arms, tugging me around until I was seated on his lap. “I don’t know why you hid that. It sounds like a reasonable, smart thing to do.”
I sighed with contentment, so glad to be in this exact spot.
“I had to. I wasn’t only thinking of myself, or the poor farm animals.
Or even Simone, because he could have turned on her.
I was trying to take care of her although she didn’t really take care of herself. Because she was going to have a baby.”
“Oh, hell. Wasn’t she old?”
I shook my head. “No. There would have been a big gap between her kids, but she’d had me young. She was eighteen when I was born.”
The only sound was Maverick dragging his water bowl before Callum asked, “What?”
It was a lie I’d lived for years—everyone in our house had. It started and ended with my aunt, Simone, who hadn’t been my aunt.
“She was actually my mother,” I explained.
“She got pregnant but ran away to have me and gave a fake name for my birth certificate. Then she ran off again, back home to my grandma. That caused all the confusion about who I was. Eventually, she admitted what she’d been doing while she was gone, that she’d had a baby and left it at the hospital.
Me,” I said. “I was the first baby that she planned to hide. When I came to live with them, she never let on that she was my real mother. She didn’t want to be, but that came out, too.
My grandma confessed everything to me when she was dying. ”
Callum was quiet. Then he said, “That’s a sad surprise.”
“It was good to know, but there were so many other lies involved in it. They had told me about another sister who died having me, and Simone spun all kinds of stories about growing up with her. Grandma never told me different and it made me realize that I shouldn’t have trusted her, either.
But at least I knew. I still called Simone my ‘aunt,’ because she couldn’t deal with the idea of being a mom.
That was why, when she got pregnant again, she wouldn’t admit to it.
I didn’t know until I actually saw the bump of her stomach.
I thought that I would take care of the baby, my brother or sister.
But she refused to go to the doctor and I couldn’t force her.
” I had to stop and calm down before I continued.
“She had so many health problems already. By the time I realized that something was really wrong and I got her to the hospital, it was too late to save them.”
“I’m sorry, Rainey. Hell, you probably would have been more like the mom to that kid.”
I nodded. “I was really excited for that. Scared, too, but I already loved the baby. I think about it all and I dream about everything, too, because it was so terrible.” I took another breath.
“And that’s the truth. I never told anyone, which I guess was the same as lying, but now you know almost everything about me. ”
Just almost. I hadn’t said the one thing that was all about him. It was that I thought that I loved him. But maybe that was just another lie that I was telling myself, so I could manage to survive if I couldn’t have him.