Page 32 of His Best Friend's Baby

“Perhaps he needed a diversion out there in that desert. Maybe he needed to be distracted from the fact that he was so far away from his family. Maybe he was under too much pressure having to support a wife he hadn’t planned on.”

Julia could only blink at the venom in Agnes’s voice. There was no way Julia could battle a mother’s untarnished image of her dead perfect son.

“Perhaps, you’re right,” she lied in a vain attempt to restore the peace. She bent to the task of rebuilding unstable towers for her son.

Agnes left the room, slamming the door behind her. Julia shut her eyes as the vacancy surrounded her. It seemed as though Agnes had sucked all the vitality from the room with her blind defense of a man who didn’t deserve it. Julia’s heart felt too heavy to be borne.

The one person who would understand the burden of Mitch’s memory, the man who she longed to talk to, refused to see her.

AMANDA CAME BY Jesse’s house on Wednesday afternoon. Again. It had been a little more than a week of Amanda stopping in after church and after school. She was like lice. Lice that never shut up.

Oddly enough, when she wasn’t there, however, he missed her.

“So, Uncle Jesse?”

“Yes, Niece Amanda?”

They were in his backyard cleaning up the last of the old roof. He’d stripped it of the ruined shingles and it was now ready for new ones. He’d worked himself raw getting to this point and still managed to take the painkillers only every other night.

“Considering I’ve been working my butt off for a week now and not getting paid…” she said.

He smiled.

“I think it’s time we start talking about how exactly you are going to reimburse me for my efforts.”

“No interview, Amanda.”

“Okay, we can talk about something else.”

He looked at her over his shoulder. “No more stories about your friends’ love lives. I can’t take any more.”

“Fine.” She arched one eyebrow and picked up a shingle. “But there have been some very interesting developments between Christie and—”

“Enough!” he cried.

“How about you tell me about your love life.”

He shook his head.

“Well, I heard that when you were in high school—”

“I already told you I never got anyone pregnant in high school and I never beat anyone up for their shoes and I never sent anyone to the hospital.”

“Fine.” She harrumphed and silence filled the lawn. He waited patiently for her next effort to get him to talk about the war. Fending off her clever and wily attempts to engage him in conversation.

“Let’s talk about your dad.”

Jesse paused for a moment, stunned. Never expected that one.

Wain barked at his ankles and Jesse took the opportunity to stall as he winged the board in his hand toward the garage. Wain, old but still game, trotted after it.

Jesse’s father, the memories of him, no longer hurt—those scars were old and faded. But the times with dear old Dad were not things he ever talked about.

“Why would you want to talk about him?”

“He’s, like, my stepgrandpa.”

“He’s dead.” Jesse pointed out the obvious.

“Would he have liked me? Eva liked me a lot.”

Jesse almost choked on the sudden wave of emotion. Of course Eva had liked Amanda. He’d been trying hard to not like Amanda and had failed pretty miserably.

But his father would have been a different story.

“Dad didn’t like much of anything.” That was a ludicrous understatement.

“Mom said he drank a lot.”

Jesse nodded.

“She said he was mean.”

“I can’t really argue with that,” he muttered, grabbing shingles from the grass with a bit more speed than he had before.

“She said he hit you two.”

“I think I’d rather talk about your love life some more.” He tried to joke, but she didn’t laugh. And he didn’t, either.

“My mom was mean, too,” she said. “Not Rachel, but my birth mom.”

Jesse realized again with a sudden pang that despite her bold words and bravado, she was still young and, therefore, frail, this niece of his. He hated the idea of her being hurt by a callous parent. He knew first hand how painful that could be.

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