Page 20 of Mistletoe Dreams
"So yeah, I started acting out, started doing some things I shouldn't have."
"Like what?"
"Well, I didn't pull any fire alarms," she said, lifting a brow at him. He had the grace to look abashed and wouldn't meet her eyes.She looked back down at his wrist, continuing to clean around the wound so she could suture it without risk of infection.
"I skipped school some. I fell in with the wrong crowd. I went to some parties that I shouldn't have, and my parents—my mom and stepdad—were worried about me. So that year when school let out, my parents sent me to live with my grandmother."
"Where'd she live? Antarctica?"
Maybe he was being sarcastic, but she laughed. "Hardly. Although that probably would've been good for me too. Sometimes when you're struggling to survive, you forget the things you're angry about, and you develop a camaraderie with the people around you." She paused for a moment. He was probably too young to understand that. "But no, she lived here in Mistletoe Meadows. Where I live now, in the farmhouse."
"So you just moved in with her and stayed there?"
"No. I was just here for the summer. And then I liked it so much, I came the summer after that and the summer after that and the summer after that. And every summer until I graduated high school."
"So they thought they were punishing you, but it ended up being a reward." He was smart.
"No. It was hard at first. Grandma made me work. But I respected her. She was honest—not that my parents weren't—but she demanded a higher standard for me. She wanted me—expected me—to be a better person than what I was. It took a bit, but eventually I wanted to live up to what she thought of me. I didn't want to let her down. Because I knew she loved me. And she was making sacrifices in order for me to be able to have benefits that she didn't have growing up."
Mason didn't say anything, and Hannah focused on putting the Novocain in and numbing the area around the jagged cut.
Mason reminded her a lot of herself. Of course, he was a boy and she was not, but the signs were there.
Maybe there was something she could do to help.
Chapter Ten
Ben sat back, watching the interaction between Mason and Hannah.
He vaguely remembered Hannah being around during summers back when they were kids and teens, but he didn't realize why.
It was obvious Mason related to some of what Hannah was saying, and he kept his mouth closed, amazed that someone was actually reaching his son.
There was still a faint trail of guilt that it wasn't him.
But sometimes a parent could only do the best they could, and God sent someone else to help out.
Mason was actually giving responses that weren't sarcasm or belligerent, and Hannah acted like it was totally normal for her to be bandaging his hand he'd cut by punching the wall.
Maybe she did that all the time. Although it was obvious his son had a lot of suppressed anger. Probably because of the divorce, but he really didn't think that anger was focused on him, was it? Surely he was angry at Peyton for leaving the family and breaking it up. But maybe he blamed Ben for not trying harder or being a betterhusband, for not being able to keep his wife, although he had no idea how he would have been able to do that.
"All right. You're going to need to take it easy on that hand for a bit. In about ten days the stitches can come out."
"Should I bring him back here?"
Hannah started gathering up her tools. "You can. We can take them out. Or, honestly, stitches aren't hard to take out. You just need a pair of fingernail clippers. You clip them, and then make sure you get them all pulled out. If you leave a little piece in, you'll need to bring him back in, and we'll have to dig it out, and that won't be very pretty."
"That makes me feel like maybe we should bring him back in."
"We can do it, Dad. That actually sounds kind of fun."
Ben blinked at his son. He wanted to take his own stitches out? He couldn't even believe Hannah had suggested it.
"Didn't you hear her? If you miss a piece, she's basically going to have to do surgery on your wrist."
"But there's not too much of a chance of you missing a piece. It's all one piece of string, so you clip it, then just make sure you pull both ends out."
"That sounds really cool. I'm definitely doing that."
