I nodded again.
“Your mother never tried to stop him? Or leave him?”
I made a sound of disbelief at the back of my throat. “She might have tried a long time ago when we were young but I can’t ever remember it. She’s not a bad mother, per se, but was broken down by his verbal abuse long ago. She would stick up for us or try to keep us out of trouble from time to time.”
“Then why do you call her a social climber?”
“Because as much as she might have disliked my father’s treatment of all of us, she had no problem putting on a smile for all of her friends, throwing the most lavish events at Townsend Manor and all that shit.”
It was silent for a few moments.
“Jason got it the worst, though.” I looked up at Deborah. “My father targeted him.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “Who fucking knows. Jason always had trouble in school. He hated reading, got terrible grades, and our father never let up on him about it.”
My chest tightened over the guilt I felt. Academics, sports, making friends had always come naturally to me. It was almost too easy, so much so, that I turned things like making friends or getting girls into a game just to make it fun. But Jason struggled in every area. He was almost my total opposite.
“My father died when I was just eleven years old.”
It wasn’t her words that surprised me but the way she’d said them. The tenderness she used when speaking the wordsmy father.She’d loved him.
“How?”
“On the mountain there was very little work except working in the mines.”
The mountain. It was how she referred to where she grew up.
“But it was dangerous work. I remember when the layoffs started happening. My mother was terrified Daddy would lose his job. But he got lucky … or so we thought. After the first round of layoffs, he still had a job. We were grateful. Unfortunately, it was short lived. A month later, there was an accident. My father and two other workers got caught in a collapse. It took them two weeks to dig their bodies out. We were comforted by the fact that he probably died immediately in the collapse, and didn’t suffer.”
Lifting my head, I pressed a kiss to her lips. Not from passion but to comfort her.
She blinked away the tears that had accumulated in her eyes and laid her head back on my chest. My hand rose to her hair, stroking it. This was the most intimacy I’d ever shared with a woman, and our being nude had nothing to do with it.
“What about your mother?”
“She was devastated after my father died. They’d been together since they were seventeen. But she knew she needed to take care of me. So she searched and searched for extra work, eventually getting a job at a store in the next town over. It took her forty-five minutes to walk there each day but she did it. She also took any odd jobs she could find. Babysitting, cleaning houses, selling things she’d made. Whatever she could do to make extra money for us, she did it.”
“She sounds like an amazing woman.”
I felt Deborah smile against my chest. “She was. She and my father always put me first. When I was really young, they would beg, borrow, or steal books they could find to help me learn to read. They always made sure I went to school because they saw it as a way off the mountain, as they used to say. It wasn’t until just before the end of my junior year of high school that my mother revealed the biggest secret she’d kept for years.”
“What was it?” I inquired, intrigued to learn about this obviously remarkable woman.
“After my father’s death, every family member we had started coming around asking my mother what she was going to do with the life insurance money. She told them that they’d never gotten life insurance. A few weeks before the summer after junior year my mother told me the truth. She told me that they had in fact had a policy—albeit a small one, and when she’d received the check, she’d taken it to a bank to open a savings account in my name, depositing it all. For six years it just sat there. My senior year I did a sort of exchange program where I moved in with a family in a wealthier part of Kentucky to go to their high school. There I had access to guidance counselors who walked me through the process of applying to college and for scholarships.
“Once I was accepted to Stanford my mother told me I was going come hell or high water. The money from the insurance policy paid a monthly stipend to the family I stayed with, and was just enough for my plane ticket and incidentals to move to Palo Alto.”
“I bet she’s proud of you.”
Deborah shrugged. “I hope so.” She sat up again, peering down at me. “She died last year of lung cancer. I didn’t even know she was sick. A relative of mine told me she made them promise not to tell me because she didn’t want me going back home for anything.”
I reached up and wiped away the tear that’d landed on her cheek. Swallowing I lifted my head and pressed a kiss to her forehead, pulling her back against my chest. Her silent cries against my chest tore me apart. I’d give anything to make her stop hurting. I didn’t know what it was like to have parents who loved you so much they’d sacrifice their own happiness and well-being, but I was glad she did.
She deserved at least that much.
I held her until she stopped weeping, wiping away the tears on her cheeks. And because I needed to be inside of her again, I rotated our bodies so that she was on her back underneath me, her arms raised, clutching at my shoulders. She needed me as much as I needed her. Our second round of lovemaking wasn’t hurried or rushed in the least. Once I sheathed myself with a second condom from my wallet, I slowly slid inside of her, watching her with every movement.
