Brenna launched out of her seat. “Nathan, you can’t leave me alone with her. I know we agreed on divide and conquer, but that was before—”
“I know,” I cut her off. Allison would eat Brenna alive if I left them alone. I knew it before Brenna came home twisted in knots over a couple of snide comments. My dad’s girlfriend was not a nice person. If I hadn’t already suspected she stuck it out with my dad to get the business, I did now.
“We’ll have to pull double duty. Café during the day, house at night.” Because my life wasn’t fucked enough—Brenna Quinn would haunt my days and my nights, and I had no idea how to survive it.
She nodded, looking the picture of defeat—shoulders drooped, lips in a tight thin line, forehead creased. “Okay.”
Her less-than-enthusiastic response twisted the knife deeper.
Her right hand reached for her left forearm, and she held it across her body. “Allison said you came back… at the end. I’m sorry. That must have been hard.”
Hardwas an understatement. My father moved in with Allison in his final months. I visited as much as I could between games. There’d been a wedge between my dad and me since high school. We talked periodically and saw each other on holidays—never in Middlebury—but we never got back to the closenessfrom before he betrayed my mom. It all fell away at the end though. And it hurt, to lose him. He was a flawed man, but he was my dad and I loved him.
“I gather he never told you.”
She shook her head. “No, and with everything going on those last few months, we hadn’t been in touch. I tried a couple of times, but we never connected.”
“It’s not your fault. He wanted to go quietly. We had time, in the end… to just watch baseball like we did when I was a kid. It was as nice as it could be, I guess.” I stood from the couch and motioned to the stairs. “I’m going to head to bed. I moved your bag into my dad’s room. Probably not your first choice, but I changed the sheets and aired it out this afternoon. He turned the old guest room into an office. And obviously, I’ll be in my room.”
She nodded. “Okay, thanks.”
“Oleander’s is in the fridge.”
Her eyes grew wide. “But you hate Oleander’s.”
Like a fucking jackass, I ordered from Brenna’s favorite diner because I knew how today must’ve affected her. She stepped out of the café because of our fighting. Extreme emotions were always hard for her. I thought the food would lift her spirits.
And then she didn’t come home. I didn’t want to think about where she’d gone.
I tapped the wall with an open palm. “It was convenient. And it was better than I remembered.”
One day with her back in my life, and I was already feeling my control slip. With that thought in mind, I headed to my room and continued sorting through my stuff, desperate to complete our work as quickly as possible, to put the woman downstairs behind me for good.
I slept like shit, tossing and turning all night, waking up and falling back to sleep at half-hour clips.
I waited until a decent hour to call my mom—four a.m. my time, but nine a.m. for her in London. After I graduated high school, she moved there to take a job as a business management professor. Before she met my dad in college and got pregnant with me weeks after they graduated, she’d planned to pursue an MBA. She sacrificed her dreams to move to Middlebury, to raise me, though she wouldn’t describe it that way.
The phone trilled twice before her warm, eager voice came through the line. “Nathan! This is a surprise. I’m so happy to hear from you.”
There wasn’t even a tinge of resentment in her voice, but guilt tightened my chest all the same. How long had it been since we’d talked? Weeks? I hadn’t known what to say about coming back to Middlebury for the will reading, so I didn’t say anything. Something else my father took from her, but I wouldn’t let it continue. That was why I picked up the phone, to explain what had happened and where I’d be the next couple of months.
“Mom, hey,” I said, sinking into my pillows. “I’m sorry to call early.”
“You know I’ve always been an early riser.” A fork clanged in the background. “Wait—is something wrong, sweetheart?”
“No, no, nothing’s wrong. I just haven’t talked to you in a while. How’s school?”
My mom laughed. “You’re calling me to ask about school?”
“Yes.”
She laughed again. “All right, if you say so.” She spent the next ten minutes telling me about three classes she was teaching this semester, complaining about an asshole student in her operations management course and the annoying head of her department who insisted on forced bonding time among the underpaid and busy professors.
“Other than that,” she concluded, “it’s going well.”
“And Louis?” I asked.
“Still married.”
