“Yeah. They are. But in a very fun way.”
“Or something.”
“I like your parents,” he said.
“And West?”
“He might take a little longer to warm up to.”
She huffed a laugh. “He likes you.”
“Does he? Well. That’s nice.”
He kind of meant it. After all, who was harder to win over than the brother of the woman you were …
Well.Sleepingwith.
“How did your parents meet?”
He was curious about that. Because William Hancock was very charming. And Lucinda had her own charm, for certain. But she was definitely the sort of person people would call quirky rather than personable.
“Oh, they went to school together. My mom is from here too. But not part of any notorious family. Her parents moved away a while ago. I don’t remember them. My dad called her his sparrow. Like she had fallen out of the nest, and he picked her up. He just always wanted to take care of her. He always says he really likes how easy it is to know what she wants. Because she speaks her mind. You got a little bit of that.”
“Yeah. That is true.”
“It was hard for her, though. Having to take care of the house and kids. Participating in the chaos of the show. But not all of the glamor around it.”
He opened the front door and gestured for her to go in.
“I see.”
“When they were trying to get the show off the ground, we didn’t have any money. I mean none. It’s been in our family for several generations, but when I say it has gone through feast and famine many times in those years … I mean it. My dad isn’t the best businessman. He has big dreams and big ideas, but it’s hard for him to execute them. He’s interested for five seconds, and then he moves on to something else. Conversely, my mother can’t let go of anything. So that’s always interesting. Between the two of them, it’s … amazing that they get anything done. But they do. And I’m proud of them. Truly.”
“You said that you do a lot of the behind-the-scenes organizing.”
“Yes. I do. And actually, West handles a lot of things. My parents are dreams people, idea people. The doing part, though …”
“Got it.”
They were both silent for a moment, standing there in the entryway of his house. He flicked the lights on. “My dad was really imperfect. Like, really. He was kind of a mess. And definitely more than a little bit self-serving. I really miss him. If you’d asked me when I was thirteen what my life would be like without him, I would have said that he didn’t matter. He would forget to pay the electric bill, and the lights would get turned off. He would forget to buy us food. Three teenage boys up at a house that only had beer in the fridge. He was doing his best, though, I think. It just wasn’t good enough. And he never got the chance to become good enough, because he died. Because his bullshit killed him. I know what it’s like to have a parent who actually loves you quite a bit, but isn’t like everyone else’s parent.” He paused for a moment. “Though your parents seem a little bit more together than my dad.”
“Oh, we had some adventures. Sometimes the power got turned off, and we had to pretend we were camping.”
He laughed. “Well, we have that in common.”
He didn’t judge, because he’d experienced many of the same things. She didn’t judge him either. They just knew how it was. Other than his family, he couldn’t remember ever connecting in the same way with another person.
“We always had food, though. Even if we had to go down to the Wesleyan Church to use the food pantry. My parents always took care of that.”
She wrapped her arms around herself. “Embarrassing, though, when we would see classmates who were volunteering with their parents at the food pantry, and we had to use it.”
He nodded slowly. “Yeah, you know this kind of stuff is hard enough without everybody else making it harder. Your dad saidsomething to me earlier today. Just that he thought the town might let us down in regard to the election. And I’ve been thinking on that. My dad is at fault for some things—but not everything bad that happened to me. Some of it was the small-minded people in this town who made everything worse. Who want to rub things in your face.”
“Well,” she said. “That is true enough.”
It was a very strange realization that maybe Jessie Jane understood him best of all. They could’ve been having these conversations for years, but hadn’t. Because he had pushed her away. And she had pushed him away.
He’d only known one way of doing things, and it wasn’t this. It wasn’t talking to the woman he’d slept with. Sharing deep emotional wounds.
