Page 67 of Sunny Skies Ahead
“How are things at the farm?” Carmen asked, flashing me an awkward, tight smile that had me cringing a little from second hand embarrassment. I knew she wasn’t talking about the homestead.
“Winding Road has several businesses all housed in the same place. I’m actually handling more of the administrative tasks for the non-profit. Lucas, Kameron’s close friend, mostly handles the farm and for-profit side of things.”
My mother let out a disinterested hum, and my shoulders tensed.
“Administrative work?”
I clenched my jaw. “Yeah. I’ve been revamping their website with pictures I’ve taken around the property. I’m also in charge of their social media. We’re trying to expand our reach, since the new barn venue just opened up. We’re trying to getour name out there. So far it’s going well. We’ve had several inquiries for weddings in the next year.”
“That sounds right up your alley.”
A blonde woman I didn’t recognize arrived with our drinks and food, and I was grateful to have something else to do with my hands.
“Wow, that was almost a compliment,” I said, taking a sip of my coffee. My mother sighed, putting her face in her hands.
“Come on, Imogen, I’m trying here.”
“Let’s cut the crap, Mom, shall we?” I said, tired of playing the small talk game. I didn’t want to be here any longer than I had to be. “Tell me why you’re really here.”
“I wanted to see my children,” she huffed. “Why does that make me a criminal?”
Here we go.
“It doesn’t make you a criminal, but it does make me question your intentions. The last time we spoke. . .”
A lump formed in my throat as I recalled her words. Carmen’s eyes flashed with something that looked like regret.
“I’m more sorry than you can understand about the things I said on the phone that day. When Abbie called to say you were back in Watford, and without Jacob, I. . . granted, assumed the worst.”
I scoffed.
“What you actually assumed was that your no-good daughter had cheated on her husband with another woman,” I said.
My bisexuality was not something I advertised. Not because of the people in Watford, or because of the biphobia in the media, but because I knew myself better than anyone else. Ididn’t need to advertise my sexuality because it was mine. It wasn’t up to anyone else, and I didn’t need other people’s input into it. I knew who I was.
Now it was my mother’s turn to shift uncomfortably.
“You can’t blame me for suspecting that something like that might have occurred,” my mom said, and it felt like she slapped me across the face. “Especially after the string of girls you dated in high school.”
She spat the word girls as if it was something dirty, something to look down upon.
This is how it had always been with my mother. My mother would never dare to look me in the eyes and spew anything outright hateful, but she would toe the line of disrespect. She walked right up to the edge of too far and hovered there. The only thing that gave away her distaste for my dating history was her facial expressions and the tone of her voice.
I’d heard far worse from her as a teenager.
But after everything that had gone down with Jacob, after everything that man put me through, looking at this woman, entertaining her thinly veiled vitriol, made me sick.
“Jacob almost killed me that night,” I said, quietly seething. All of that anger and frustration I’d tried to bury came bubbling back up to the surface as I looked at my mother, the one person in the world who was supposed to love and protect me, the one person who looked at me and saw a problem child. A mistake. The lowest of the low. “Did Abbie tell you that? Did you even try to listen to what she had to say?”
The tendon in my right elbow ached, as if remembering the distant echoes of an injury long healed. I instinctively wrappedmy arm around myself, cradling my elbow, protecting myself from whatever blow came next.
Carmen at least had the decency to look pained.
“I didn’t—when she called, your father was in the middle of signing a massive contract, and our attention was elsewhere. Iamsorry, Imogen, that we didn’t stop to understand.”
Oh, my father. As little as I’d seen my mother in the years since they’d left Watford to build a shinier, bigger life in Los Angeles, I hadn’t seen my father in person once.
All’s well that ends well. My father and I were never close. That had been my choice. Cassie, Kevin and I were trophies to him, rather than children. We were to be seen and not heard, constantly carted off to booster events and town council meetings, showed off wherever and whenever it was necessary for my father to be seen as successful.
