Page 74 of Never Date A Player
“Mother, answer me.”
“Yes,” she whispers. “Yes.”
I’m crying again. Tears streaming down my cheeks. “Why didn’t you tell me?” My voice comes out high and quivery like a child’s. I hate that wobbly voice. I’ve worked hard to be strong.
“Honey, I understand you’re upset, but I was protecting you.”
“How does raising me a bastard protect me? Are you some kind of prostitute?” I’m beginning to think I was all wrong about that, but I want the truth and I’m not tiptoeing around to get it. The filters are off.
“Genevieve,” she says, aghast.
“Well, are you?”
“Why would you think that?”
“A call girl? An upscale hooker?”
“No, none of those things.”
“Then how do you support us? No one in our family has money and you don’t work.”
“Your father. Your father has always provided for us. He insisted.”
What?
“Jeb Kendrick was my high school sweetheart.” Her voice is nasally, like she’s crying. “He left me for his career. It crushed me. My heart, he—I was never…” She pauses, and I hear her blowing her nose on the other end. “What’s done is done. I found out I was pregnant a month later, but Jeb had already moved on.
“There were a string of women, Genevieve. I heard all about them in the tabloids. He was a rising star. Paparazzi, newscasters, they followed his every move. By the time you were born, there were too many women to count. I didn’t want any part of that.”
She lets out a soft sigh. “I told him about you when you were a week old. He had a right to know, but I had every intention of raising you by myself. He asked me to take him back, but I didn’t trust him—the way he was living his life. I swore to be the best mom I could, and protecting you from all that was a part of it.” Her voice is unsteady, raw.
I’ve never heard my mother like this. She is the beautiful, confident man-collector who dabbles in anything French. Not this small-town girl with a broken heart.
“You could have taken him back, Mom. I could have had a father. It’s not like you didn’t parade your own string of lovers over the years. Why did you keep him away?”
“There were other rumors about drugs and addictions. I didn’t want you mixed up with that. I asked him to stay away and he did, but he kept in touch through my lawyer and he always provided for us.”
“He’s married.”
“I know,” she says. “He told me he’d found someone a few years back. He said he’s clean and that he and his wife have a solid home environment. They want you in their lives. I asked him to wait a couple of years until you graduated from college. I worried that the truth would be too much with the stress of school.”
Jesus. My own mother thinks I’m weak. Putting that aside—“I graduated, Mom!”
“I know! I’m sorry. I was going to tell you, but I was worried.”
“About what?”
“Partly that you’d be angry with us.”
“You mean with you. That I’d be angry with you.”
“Yes.”
“You were right; I’m fucking furious!” I sit up. “How could you keep this from me? He confronted me and I didn’t know who he was.”
“That’s not how I wanted you to find out.”
“Then you should have told me.” My voice catches. She lied to me all these years.
