Page 81 of From This Moment (After We Fall 4)
“I’m teasing. You know I think you’re perfect.” He moved toward the door again. “Hey, how about piano shopping on Saturday, and maybe dinner out Saturday night? You and me and Abby?”
“Really?” I smiled. “Do you think we can?”
“Yes.”
“I’d love that. I’m sure Abby would, too. I have to work, but I can probably get off around eleven.”
“Great.” He gave me one more kiss and cradled my face in one hand.
I turned my cheek into his palm.
“We’ll get there, Hannah.”
“You think so?”
“Yes. We are not going to be sneaking around in backseats forever. I promise.”
Stop promising me things, I wanted to say.
I was starting to believe in them.
Fifteen
WES
I’d avoided my mother all week. Refused to take the lunches she packed for me to work. Ate dinner at Hannah’s almost every night. Came home so late she was already in bed when I got there. The only time I saw her was in the morning before work, but I never initiated a conversation with her and gave only one-word answers if she asked me a question. I didn’t enjoy the hurt expression on her face, nor did I enjoy freezing her out. And I knew I’d make up with her eventually, but dammit, she owed me an apology.
I didn’t say anything to Hannah about it, because I didn’t want her to be concerned. She had enough to deal with in her own mind. I was kicking myself for even mentioning the argument to her in the first place. I should have just kept my mouth shut.
By Friday the tension in my parents’ house was almost unbearable, and my dad asked me if I’d grab a drink with him after work. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
“Sure,” I said, although I had a pretty good feeling I knew what the something was and I wouldn’t like it.
At least he waited until our drinks arrived. “I take it you had words with your mother,” he said, lifting his scotch on the rocks to his lips.
“Yeah.” I drank from mine too.
“She’s a tough cookie.”
“Yeah.”
“But she’s had to be.”
I let that stew a little. “What do you mean? Because of Drew?”
“Even before that.” He sipped again, his eyes on the TV screen above the bar.
I waited for him to elaborate. I’d never heard anything negative about my mother’s past. Her father, a doctor, had died before I was born, and her mother had died of cancer when I was two. She’d been an only child.
Dad took his sweet old time, as usual, but eventually spoke. “Her father was an alcoholic philanderer who constantly abandoned his family. Her mother coped with pills that knocked her out and left her unable to take care of her daughter. From the time she was five, she had to take care of herself.”
I was stunned. Sickened. “She never said anything.”
“She never wanted you to know. That’s how her family was. Big on appearances.”
Some things clicked into place. Pieces of my mother’s personality suddenly made sense. It occurred to me what mysteries our parents can be to us. We think we know them, but really, we only know what they choose to tell us.
“She loved her Daddy,” my father went on, “and always blamed her mother for their troubles. Said if her mother was more devoted, her father wouldn’t have left all the time.”
