Page 85 of Then You Happened
The urge to clean this up and purge the bad memories it represents takes hold like never before. One scrap of photo paper after another, one image after another, depict a life I no longer live and wouldn’t want to go back to if I could.
Because I’m not the same person anymore.
I’m stronger.
And instead of diving into the pool and screaming in the deep end, I dust off my camera.
27
JACK
“Lauren,” I say for what feels like the millionth time since I called her back. The ten messages in my voicemail and five texts told me it was urgent, my ability to only put out one fire at a time making me pace myself. “Did you call your sponsor? You haven’t answered that question.”
“How am I supposed to know how to be a mom, Jack-Jack? How? Our mom didn’t love us enough to stick around, so how in the hell did I think I could be one?”
I rein in my sigh of frustration and fight the droop of my eyelids caused by the couple of beers at Axe’s and too little sleep.
The hysteria in her voice warns me she’s on the edge again, and neither of us can afford to allow her to fall the fuck off.
“Did you call your sponsor?” I repeat the question.
“Why did I—”
“Lauren.” My voice is a little firmer this time, my directness about to be even more so. “Don’t do this to yourself. You’ve worked too damn hard, only to pick up that bottle again.” And I don’t have time to come home and pick up the pieces. “The kids need you. Everyone at the ranch needs you.”
I blow out a sigh at the silence on the other end and picture her. She probably has her long hair pulled atop her head in a messy knot and her glasses pushed high on her nose. There is probably one kid asleep on her lap and the other beside her on the couch because her need to prove to them she isn’t going anywhere has created this codependence that is probably unhealthy.
But it works.
“And Mom did love us. It was Dad and his . . . shit she couldn’t handle.” I have no idea if our mom loved us, and the pain still stings regardless of how much I say it doesn’t, but Lauren needs to hear this. She needs to believe it.
Fuck, I’ll lie to her all goddamn day if this is what it takes to keep her sober.
“Did you call your sponsor, Lauren?”
“Tell me about you, Jack. What’s going on with you? Is the job what you thought it would be like? Is she what you thought she would be like? Are you finding the closure you need? You better be because I’m telling you, when you get back, it’s my turn to run from this place and find some myself.”
“I understand.”
And I do.
“Don’t do it.”
Her warning catches me off guard. “Don’t do what?”
“Don’t fall for her. Besides the obvious reasons, you can’t do that. You can’t fall in love with her and not come back home.”
I snort at her absurdity, but at the same time, my eyes flit out the window and over to the light on in the windows at the main house.
“I’m not falling in love with her.” I laugh and get up to grab another beer from the fridge.
“Said with such conviction,” she teases, sounding a bit more like herself.
“We aren’t doing this. We aren’t turning the subject off you and on to me so that you don’t have to tell me what’s going on.”
“I’ll talk if you talk.”
“Jesus. This isn’t—”
