Page 72 of Kiss My Glass
“Come on, I’ll help you with the rest of dinner,” she says. “Pasta’s not great when it’s cold.”
I look at Nate, and though he’s trying hard to keep it together, I see the plea in his eyes. Cam’s waiting for me to decide. He’s not going to ride roughshod over my wishes. These are good people I’m surrounded by. I should trust them.
“Okay,” I say, abruptly, and hope I’m not making a huge mistake.
Cam starts for the stairs. I let Ava hook her arm in mine and lead me back to the kitchen.
ChapterThirty-Nine
FRANKIE
Iknow I’m overreacting. No one needs to tell me! But the sheer unfairness of it all just getsto me. It’s like when I was a kid, everyone worshiped Mom. In their eyes, she could do no wrong. She was the serene, flame-haired goddess and I was the chubby little ball of anger. The difficult Armstrong kid. The picky eater. The annoying baby sister who always wanted to tag along. The one everyone was too busy to spend time with.
It hurt then and it doesn’t take much for me to feel that hurt now. And though I know I should shake it off and not make my sister’s life harder, I can’t. Not right away. So, I’ll sit here in the room that reminds me of my childhood until I’ve worked this out of my system. The way I’m feeling right now, that could very well take another twenty-six years.
There’s a soft knock on the bedroom door, and my heart leaps. Danny. Coming to see if I’m okay. I rush to open the door, desperate for comfort, desperate to see the one person who puts me first.
It’s Cam. I’m so furious with disappointment that I could hit him. Not that he’d notice; it’d be like a flea smacking an elephant. Even though my expression must be pure molten rage, he doesn’t flinch, which only makes me angrier. How dare he be calm? How dare he not be Danny?
“Can we talk?” he says.
“No!”
I try to slam the door but, of course, he takes hold of it, and my strength is no match for his.
“I owe you an apology,” he says. “It’s about a decade overdue.”
My brain takes a moment to process what he just said, because it’s the last thing I expected to hear. Curiosity does battle with anger, and after a short scuffle, wins out.
“An apology for what?”
“Can I come in?” he says.
“Fine,” I say, ungraciously, and let go of the door.
Cam enters my childhood bedroom, which suddenly feels twice as small. I sit cross-legged at the head of the bed and hug a pillow to me. He pulls out the wooden chair I used to sit on to do my homework. I’m worried it’ll crumple like matchwood beneath him, but he tests its sturdiness before sitting down. I forget Cam knows all there is to know about wood. He’s a master cooper now, one of the world’s elite barrel makers. He built the whole house that Danny’s been staying in.
I realize I’ve known Cam for twelve years, nearly half my life, but I don’t really know who he is. To me, he’s the big guy, the ex-army veteran that Dad brought home one day. He looked like a homeless person, and barely said a word. Despite that, Mom and Dad let him stay in the workshop, which I found very weird. I was used to people coming in and out of our house all the time, because Mom and Dad were so hospitable. But Cam I was wary of, for reasons I couldn’t work out when I was fourteen. Looking back, I think I instinctively knew my parents treated Cam differently from anyone else who worked in the winery. That Mom, especially, paid him more attention than most. I saw her and Cam develop a bond that I knew she and I didn’t have, and the way I dealt with that was to shut them both out. To build a wall between us, of anger and distrust and hurt. I don’t know who Cam is because I’ve never wanted to get close enough to him to find out. That’s why I’ve got no clue what he wants to apologize for.
Talking doesn’t come easy to Cam, so he always takes his time before beginning. While I wait, I look closely at him, noticing him properly for the first time. His face is much more handsome than I’d realized. Despite being six-feet-five, Cam has the ability to blur into the background. You get the impression of quiet bulk and shaggy blond-brown hair. But his features are strong and regular and bring to mind a Michelangelo statue. His eyes are dark brown, and despite his low-key demeanor, there are laughter lines in the corners. I can see why Ava fell for him. Maybe I can see why Mom did, too…
“I took your mom from you when you needed her,” says Cam.
That’s one heck of a beginning. I hold my breath, hug the pillow tighter.
“I was hanging on to life by my fingernails, and that made me selfish. I could use the excuse that I didn’t know what I was doing because my head was so screwed up with PTSD, but that’d be a lie. I came to depend on your mom, and I didn’t want to let her go. Even when I knew she had other people who needed her time and love. You, in particular.”
I can see a faint flush under his outdoor tan. Cam swallows. This is hard for him. Not sure yet if I feel sympathy or not.
“Your brothers had left home by then,” he goes on. “They were independent. Shelby was busy learning the ropes from your dad. You were in that in-between stage, not quite a kid, not yet a grown-up. That’s when a girl really needs her mom, and I took her from you. And I’m so very sorry, Frankie. I am.”
Goddamn it. I feel like I’m going to cry. I hate crying. I hate Cam for being here and saying all this. Why now? Why couldn’t he have said this yearsago?
Corner of Cam’s mouth gives a wry upward twitch. “They say better late than never, but that’s a crock.”
Did I say my thoughts out loud?
“I took way too long to summon the courage for a good, hard look at myself,” he says. “And if it hadn’t been for Ava, I might still be hiding from the world. Being selfish. Asking for more than I was prepared to give in return.”
