And behind me, in Mr. Cooper’s car, had been Ripley in his truck.
Rip who hadn’t said more than a handful of words to me since he’d first shouted for someone to call an ambulance. Who had stood there to the side while the EMTs had loaded Mr. C up. Who hadn’t made a move to leave, which was why I had taken his car since mine was at home.
Rip and I had sat there, three chairs apart, in silence the entire time. I wasn’t sure what he had been thinking, or what he’d felt. And I sure hadn’t known what to say.
I didn’t know what to think, if I was going to be honest with myself.
Mom.
Twenty-two years.
All that anger…
It wasn’t the time to think about it, but it was hard not to let my mind wander to those words and what they possibly meant.
I wasn’t stupid.
I’d had my heart in my throat for the last two hours. My stomach felt off and tight and hot, and I genuinely felt sick with worry over a man I loved and cared for. It didn’t help that I had been blowing up Lydia’s phone and she hadn’t answered. I’d left her voice mails on her cell and their home phone telling her to call me, but she still hadn’t.
Was it normal for whatever they were doing to him to take so long?I wondered.I wasn’t sure. I had tried looking up things on the internet, but the information was so broad, all it did was make me sicker.
Which was why I knew I needed to get up and move around for a little while, even if it was just a short trip to the cafeteria. Being helpless was one of the crappiest things in the world.
Rip stared straight ahead at the television playing an episode ofLaw and Orderas he answered in a voice I had never heard before. “No.”
He had barely moved in the hours we’d been sitting there. Was he worried too? Did he feel guilty for getting into an argument with Mr. Cooper—his maybe-possibly-I-think-Dad—right before? I couldn’t blame him if he did.
I felt guilty for not doing more. For not stopping them. For not opening my mouth and complaining about that little jerk when Mr. C had first stuck him with me.
A small part of me, that honestly wasn’t so small, felt dumb for not putting the dots together.
Another small part of me felt a little betrayed that, if it was true that they were related, that neither one of them had ever said a word.
Especially not Mr. Cooper, who had been a better father figure to me than my own dad had been. This man that I genuinely loved hadn’t even hinted at the fact that the forty-one-year-old man I saw five days a week, if not six days a week, might be his son.
If I thought about it… if I really thought about it… they both had the same tall, broad builds. Wide shoulders, big chests, they were tank-like. Ripley didn’t have his eyes, but he did have his chin. And if I hadn’t met Mr. Cooper after he’d gone completely gray, they might have the same hair color too. They liked their coffee the same way, had a couple of the same tics….
If they were related, then their hostility toward one another made so much sense it was annoying.
If anyone knew what it was like to be resentful toward a relative, it was me.
And I hadn’t known.
I hadn’t even had a clue after nine years of knowing the older man.
Maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe I had misunderstood, but I seriously,seriouslydoubted it. Why else would Rip use the “mom” word around Mr. Cooper? If they were related by any other means, I bet it would have been brought up by that point. And the years made sense. Hadn’t Rip said he was eighteen when his mom had died? Hadn’t Mr. C remarried a year later and been with Lydia twenty-two years?
They were related.
They had to be.
And they had kept it a secret.
Secrets, secrets are no fun. Secrets hurt someone.
It wasn’t the time to focus on that, I tried to tell myself. It was time to worry about Mr. Cooper. This had nothing to do with me.
Sometimes, it was a lot easier to accept things when you realized that at the end of the day, you were just an innocent casualty in a train wreck that had been caused by something that had slowly rusted and fallen apart over decades.
