“What’s with you and that girl?”
Kenny took a sip of juice. “I don’t want to see her.”
“Why, son?”
“Because she’s too clingy.”
Justine set the plate with two pancakes and several strips of crispy bacon on the table. “You didn’t seem to mind it when she was hanging onto your arm after your graduation. Or were you too enthralled with her to overlook her body language?”
“Maybe I was.”
“What happened, Kenneth?”
He knew his mother was serious when she hadn’t shortened his name. “She’s just too aggressive.”
Picking up a bottle of syrup, Justine poured it over her pancakes. “Explain aggressive.”
“She’s smothering, Mom. I know if I got involved with her, she’d want to control every phase of my life.”
Justine gave him a direct stare. “I’m going to ask you something, and I don’t want you to lie to me. Have you slept with her?”
Kenny stared at his mother behind the lenses of his glasses. They’d developed a relationship where she demanded complete honesty from him. She’d warned him not to lie to her, even if she didn’t like what he said or did.
“Yes.”
Justine slowly blinked. “How many times?”
“Once.”
“That was one time too many, Kenny. If you knew in advance that the girl was going to be a problem, why would you have sex with her? Sleeping with her sent a message that she was a lot more than a friend.”
“I know, Mom. I messed up.”
“No, Kenny. Youfuckedup when you slept with that girl!”
“Mom!”
“Don’t you dare ‘Mom’ me, Kenneth. No woman wants to be used, then discarded, when a man decides he’s through with her. I’d like to think I raised you better than that. What happened to dating a woman for a while before you hop into bed with her? If you’d done that with Larissa, you wouldn’t need me to run interference for you.”
Kenny’s hand came down hard on the table. “Like you and Frank? You make the man wait five years before you’re willing to not only go out, but go away with him. If he’d been any other man, he would’ve walked away and not looked back.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t I, Mother? The man fell in love with you the first time he saw you. But you made up all kinds of excuses why you didn’t want to marry him when you could’ve been with him when he was going through his cancer treatments. The day I walked into his apartment and saw him looking as if death was waiting to take him, I started crying like a baby. When he saw my reaction, he made me promise not to tell you that he was sick, because he didn’t want to upset you. That’s how much he loved and still loves you.”
Justine stared at her son, who’d turned into a stranger right before her eyes. She knew he and Frank were close, but she had no idea how much Kenny had wanted them to be together.“There are so many things you don’t know that I can’t tell you,” she said in a hushed voice.
“Why not?” Kenny challenged.
“Because it’s not the right time.”
“When will it be the right time?” he asked.
Justine closed her eyes and huffed a breath. There was no way she could reveal that she was a complete fraud. That her life was filled with lies that seemed to penetrate every phase of her existence, and she didn’t know how to stop lying. The web of lies kept growing bigger and bigger until they’d turned her into someone she had come to loathe.
“Soon,” she whispered. She’d waited eighteen years for her son to reach adulthood, and Justine knew it wouldn’t take another eighteen before she revealed the circumstances surrounding his existence.
“I’m sorry for what I said about you and Frank.”
