Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
AUbrEY
“Ma, you gonna eat that?” Benji asked, reaching slowly for the bacon still on my plate after the boys devoured a week’s worth of groceries in one meal. I was still shocked they’d woken up before noon.
“No. Go for it.”
Benji snatched up the bacon I hadn’t been able to stomach and stuffed both pieces in his mouth.
“Hey!” Micah grumbled. “What if I wanted more? You’re so inconsiderate.”
Benji shrugged and snickered. With a mouthful, he said, “You snooze, you lose.”
The house was a cacophony of laughter and arguments again, and funny TV shows the boys wanted me to watch. In fact, they left the TV on every minute of every day, even when they listened to music or watched videos on their phones.
Gone was my peacefully silent reading time, with nothing but the wind rustling the leaves in the trees outside or the far-off calls of my jays.
And just like it used to be when they were teenagers, my house was a disaster zone. As I set my empty plate in the sink, it balanced dangerously on a stack of coffee-ringed mugs, milk glasses, and more dirty plates. They couldn’t use one cup for the day. No, they had to empty the cupboards for every sip they took. All the silverware was dirty. I’d had to wash three forks for the pancakes. It wasn’t like either of them would’ve done it. They would’ve eaten the damn pancakes with their hands before they washed a dish. I should’ve let them.
Dirty laundry littered every corner, hung from the couch and chairs, the hall bathroom looked like a grown man had exploded in there, and there was already a stain on my plush Oyster Dove-colored carpet in the living room that I hoped was chocolate and not something else, like dog shit from the neighbor’s yard because my boys wouldn’t think to take off their shoes when they came in the house, even if I tattooed a reminder on both their foreheads.
A memory came crashing forward from the recesses of my mind, of Tommy and the boys coming home after two days of camping and fishing. The twins couldn’t have been more than nine years old. I’d heard them pull into the driveway, so I stopped vacuuming and waited for them by the front door.
When they came in, Tommy dumped his tackle box on the floor. He hadn’t even smiled at me or kissed me hello. He stepped out of boots covered in dried mud and kicked them to the wall. Dirt went everywhere. The boys watched him and then did the same. And then all three of them, still dressed in dirty, damp clothes, plopped on the couch and complained about how hungry they were. They sat there, waiting for me to kick it into high gear and cook for them.
The boys had learned to disregard me from their father. He did it, so that made it okay, right?
And now, neither one of them had mentioned anything about what they might be planning to do since they’d lost their jobs and their apartment and had hauled most of their belongings back home, which were still packed under a tarp in the back of their dad’s old truck in my driveway. It had only just occurred to me that maybe they’d been waiting on me to unload and unpack their crap.
As soon as they’d stepped foot inside the house again, I’d turned into the same woman I’d been when their father was alive.
While my newfound happiness seemed to be leaking out of my pores, the boys kept eating, blissfully unaware of the heartbreak I felt or the fact that their lives falling apart meant mine would too.
I loved them. Nothing would ever change that, but did that mean I couldn’t love anyone else?
Didn’t I deserve to be loved? Didn’t I deserve the kind of love people had been writing about in books for centuries? Now, here it was, courting me and knocking on my door with flowers, lighting me up in ways I’d never even imagined, but I wasn’t allowed to claim it?
But as I wandered around the house, picking up dirty boxer shorts and stray unmatched socks, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Calla had said to me before she left my shop.
God! I wanted to slap her for telling me Ryder’s future was up to me. It wasn’t!
How the hell was being in a relationship with me going to ruin his chances of making his business a success? I hadn’t missed the way her eyes had darted around Your Local Bookie. She thought I was a failure in business, so what? That meant I’d bring Rye down with me?
And although she hadn’t said it outright, her meaning had been clear: I was a mother before all else, and if my kids still needed me, then it was my job—no, my obligation , even though the boys were old enough to vote and buy beer—to mother them and attend to them until they were ready for me to be something else to someone else.
Which might be never.
Rye had stayed away all week. He was busy at the ranch, and he thought giving me time with the boys would help us all deal. He texted me several times a day and called to say goodnight, but last night I’d missed his call because I’d been refereeing an argument and didn’t hear my phone. And I didn’t call back because telling him what his mother had said to me felt wrong, like I was some gossiping teenager, but the words stayed on the tip of my tongue all week.
And not saying it created a space between us that hadn’t been there before.
Micah called out for me. “Mama? Where you at?”
“What! I’m busy.”
“Sorry,” he said softly as he came up behind me in the living room. “Am I botherin’ you?”
Great. Now my mom guilt had really been activated.
I sighed. “No, Micah. I’m sorry I snapped. What do you need?”
He followed me to the laundry basket I’d left next to the boys’ bedroom door that they hadn’t yet used. “I just wanted to know if you’ve seen my tablet. Benji had it and now I can’t find it.”
Dumping an armful of socks and dirty T-shirts in, I said, “Haven’t seen it.”
“Shouldn’t you be at work?”
Lovely, another person to point out my 5,786 th failure of the week.
“Oh, what’s the point?”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means I haven’t been sellin’ tons of books. Maybe I should start lookin’ for a job.”
“You love the bookstore.”
“I do, but it seems there are a lot of things I love that I can’t have.” As soon as it came out of my mouth, I wanted to take it back.
Had I fallen for Rye too? Was that why I felt so fucking sad and defeated? It felt like the realization had stopped my heart. I lifted my hand to press against it, trying to hold it together so it didn’t break into pieces.
Micah touched my arm as I turned, intending to head back to the kitchen to start the dishes. “What’s wrong? Is this about that cowboy?”
“It’s about a lot of things.” None of which I was willing to go into with my children.
“Ma, don’t you get it? This is hard for me. I miss Dad. Benji does too. No one can ever live up to him.”
Arghh! I wanted to tear out my hair. Live up to their dad? Please. Rye had already surpassed Tommy in every real way. But the boys would never see that. They’d only see that Rye wasn’t Tommy.
Looking into my son’s eyes, I did see it, the hurt and longing for a man he grieved and would always yearn to be able to look up to. Yet, here I’d been for ten years, busting my ass, trying to build a life they could be proud of me for, but all the twins had done was take me for granted.
It was my fault. I raised them. I shouldn’t have let them have ice cream when they hadn’t finished their chores.
I snorted at myself. Yeah, right, like that would’ve made a difference.
“Micah, I’m sorry you miss your dad. I know it hurts.” I shook my head. I couldn’t tell him what I felt in my heart, that there were things he didn’t know about his dad that I didn’t want him to look up to. I couldn’t ruin his dad’s memory just so I could have unlimited cowboy booty. “Listen, I need some time. I can’t talk about this with you right now, okay?”
He nodded and dropped his arm.
“Besides, you’re right. I really should go and open up the shop. I’m gonna grab a quick shower and head over there. I’ll see you tonight.”
“Okay. Sounds good,” he said, happy with the way the conversation was ending—in his favor, just like his dad had always won our arguments, basically dismissing anything I’d said. “Oh hey, would you make chicken pot pie for dinner like you used to, with the green beans, potatoes, and corn inside?”
Oh yeah, ’cause you know, whipping up a homemade crust and basically baking a pie is what I truly look forward to after a busy day of being a failing bookseller.
But old habits really were hard to break. I said, “Sure.”
And maybe it wasn’t the boys’ fault so much as it was my own. I saw the habit that needed to be broken, but here I was adhering to it instead of smashing it. It was the same thing I’d done with my business.
But keeping things status quo certainly hadn’t earned me anything besides a sink full of dirty dishes and a ridiculously expensive tax bill I couldn’t have paid on my own.
“Awesome!” Micah pumped his fist in the air like a little kid, and then he turned and called out for Benji. “Ma’s makin’ my favorite for dinner!”
Benji’s voice echoed back to us from the kitchen, where he was no doubt licking every last crumb from his breakfast plate. “Ew, it’s not that chicken-pie thing I hate, is it? Ma! I want short ribs.”
Fuck my life.
When I drove past Your Local Bookie to turn into the alley to park because I’d been too depressed to walk the five blocks, I saw Rye sitting in his truck out front, waiting for me, and my heart dropped into my stomach.
My legs felt like they’d been filled with lead as I got out of my car. I unlocked the loading-dock door and realized I’d forgotten to bring my lunch— shit —and when I walked through the dark store to unlock the front, I found Rye on the stoop. He’d seen me pull in.
“Hey, Spitfire. Good mornin’.”
I didn’t feel like a spitfire. Not even close.
Rye was every dream I’d ever had, with his soft brown curls that seemed to do their own thing no matter how many times he tried to tame them. He’d groomed his beard. It was a little shorter than he usually kept it, but still, he was a sexy vision standing before me in his worn-in jeans and his hat in hand.
“Mornin’,” I said while doubt clawed at me.
I knew what I needed to do, but actually doing it was a different story.
I couldn’t break his heart.
I didn’t want to. I wanted to wrap myself around him and forget the rest of the world. I’d become addicted to his kisses and the way he always made me feel like his princess and how everything seemed brighter when he was around.
“How’d you sleep last night?” he asked, dropping his hat upside down on the counter as he followed me to the back room, and he reached out to touch my shoulder.
“Rye,” I said, flipping on the overhead lights, “we need to talk.”
When I turned to face him, he saw the defeat and sadness on my face, and he took a step back.
“Naw, Spitfire. Don’t you do it.”