Chapter 37 - Johnny - Change is Coming
“Becca, my girl. Come and try this new cream ale I’ve found.” Dad takes Becca’s hand as soon as we get in the house and pulls her away toward his beer cave. He’s been more excited lately to show her his new beers than he’s been to show me. It makes my heart swell.
I can’t help but notice the smile on Becca’s face, and how different she looks compared to several weeks ago when we tried to have dinner with her mother. She was just so tense with her mother, but here, with my family, she’s so relaxed. Every time I bring her here, it becomes more obvious that she is meant to be here with me. I only hope she realizes that before our fake relationship ends.
I’ve brought her here once or twice a week since our fake relationship started. In that time she’s completely won my dad over, dazzled my mother, met all my sisters and their husbands and boyfriends, and met all of my nieces and nephews. Everyone loves her.
I love her. But if I were to tell her, it would just scare her away, so I keep it to myself.
“Johnny? Where’d you go just then?” Mom asks. “You were gathering so much wool I was beginning to wonder if you’re planning on taking up knitting.”
She gestures for me to follow her into the kitchen. Tonight’s dinner is simple; a hearty stew with fresh-baked dinner rolls, and it’s already bubbling away on the stove, so Mom doesn’t need any help. That can only mean one thing. She wants to talk.
“Sit.” She points to a chair at the kitchen table. “Now, tell me what’s going on with that lovely young lady you keep bringing around. You two seem to be spending an awful lot of time together for people who are just friends.”
She’s not wrong. Ever since we started this fake relationship, we’ve spent as much time together as we would if it had been real. I usually spend the night at her place after a day in the studio. Her bookshelves are becoming overloaded with all the rocks I bring her from her front door. The guys give me shit because I run out of Connor’s studio every day grinning like a fool because I can’t wait to see Becca.
I drop my head into my hands on the table. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I tell Mom, knowing I’m not going to get away with not talking.
“Oh, my boy,” she says, ruffling up my hair, making my curls fluff up. “It can’t be all bad. She’s a smart, beautiful, talented woman, and you’re spending all your time with her. That sounds like a pretty good deal to me.”
I slouch back into my chair, giving a quick look around to make sure we’re alone. “I’ve offered to help her with her mother. She kept setting Becca up on dates with horrible guys, so I said I would pretend to be her boyfriend to get her mom to back off.”
“And you hoped it would turn out like one of the romance novels you like to read. That the two of you would fall in love and you’d live happily ever after?” Her eyebrows are raised in question. “Did you really expect that to work?”
I huff out a breath. “Not in so many words. But yes, I did. I’m a great boyfriend. Women love me.”
“I’m sure you are, son. And I’m sure most women do. But that woman has been through trauma. Has she talked much about her accident?” Becca told my family about her accident, and even about the Freddy story. Compared to when she first told me about them, she is so much stronger now. She used to talk about both things as though she were the one who should be ashamed and now she knows her accident was just that, an accident, and the Freddy thing was just that dickhead Milo’s doing.
“She told me a little. Just what happened and how old she was, mostly. Why?”
Mom gets up and starts pulling bowls and side plates down from the cupboard and passing them to me. “Has she told you what healing was like? What happened to her family after? An accident like that can do emotional damage to everyone around, besides the physical damage that was done to her.”
I stand and start setting the table with the dishes Mom has passed me. “She said her dad left when she was little, but she didn’t get into it. I didn’t think to question it. Do you think he left before or after the accident?” Could a man really leave his little girl after a terrible accident like that? Or had he left before?
What if Becca’s mother drove him away, and he didn’t leave on his own at all?
I grab the cutlery from the drawer and begin adding them to the place settings I’ve already laid out.
“I wouldn’t know,” Mom says, setting a trivet in the middle of the table. “But maybe you should ask Becca. She might remember.”
“Might remember what?” Becca says, coming back into the kitchen with Dad. She hands me a pint of the cream ale Dad must’ve been talking about.
“What song Ryder and Denise danced to at their wedding,” I blurt off the top of my head. “I can’t remember.”
“Oh, umm,” Becca taps her finger against her lip. “I think it was that Etta James song,At Last? Does that sound right to you, babe?” She turns and looks at me, her eyes widening as she realizes what she’s done. “I mean—”
“Sure does,kitten,” I say with a laugh, turning her slip into a joke. Maybe I can make it look like an inside joke to the rest of my family, who have started pouring into the kitchen for dinner.
It seems to work because everyone busies themselves with finding seats and talking amongst themselves. They either didn’t hear Becca call me babe, or they don’t care enough to comment.
“Alright kids,” Mom sets a giant pot of homemade stew on the trivet and turns to get the trays of dinner rolls. “Dish up and don’t be shy. There’s plenty more on the stove still for when this pot is empty.”
Becca and I slide down the side of the and sit near the end, in the spot that has become ‘ours’. It’s a comfortable family style dinner, with two of my sisters here with their kids, and Finley from across the street with her three kids.
I can hardly even eat because my brain is spinning with thoughts of Becca’s mother. I overhead a little of what she was saying to Becca the day we went over for dinner, and I’ve been obsessed with it ever since. I tried to talk to Becca about it, but she just shrugged it off, saying that’s how her mother is.
But if my mother ever said someone’s feelings for me weren’t real, that they were only pity, I’d be pissed. Mom’s are supposed to support you and lift you up, not tear you down.
