Page 17 of Secret Baby for Mr. Grump

But I couldn’t regret it as her eyes brightened back up, and a smile appeared on her lips.

“In that case, we can be friends,” I said. It was something I only said to soften the blow of rejection, but she took it seriously, showing up nearly every other day after that with food and conversation. And to this day, I can’t tell you exactly what we talked about. It was everything and nothing, from books to our lives to what we wanted to do in the future. Though I probably only contributed maybe five percent to the conversation, she never got annoyed.

She was a chatterbox, but I liked it. I liked hearing her talk, and it never felt like she talked just for the sake of it. She always said seemingly simple things that turned out to be secretly profound. And when I did speak, she listened with rapt attention even though I didn’t think I was saying anything all that compelling.

All in all, I remembered her as one of the few people in this fucking town who was worth knowing.

So I couldn’t say I didn’t regret the decision to leave.

I knew a brush-off when I saw one, and I wasn’t necessarily hurt by the rejection.

Just disappointed.

* * *

“Ma,”I called out when I walked into my mother’s house. “I’m here.”

I dropped the bag of groceries I bought on the way home and walked toward the garden, where my mother had probably wheeled off to. I’d gotten her the electric wheelchair when it became clear that she had difficulty ambulating. She was also supposed to have a home nurse 24/7, but more often than not, she traumatized the poor girl into leaving early. My mother was not an easy woman to live with, but life made her that way. It caused her to be jaded against most strangers.

There was only one person she trusted in this world. Me.

Which was why I was here with her instead of taking care of and putting out fires that needed me in New York. I was hoping to finally convince her to move to New York with me, where I could keep an eye on her, but my mother was still very much in denial of her disease, insisting she could take care of herself. I already decided that by the end of the week, if I couldn’t convince her to go, I would simply carry her to New York with me whether she liked it or not.

I finally got to the garden to find her staring off morosely.

“You’re not supposed to be out here,” I told her. The wheelchair could get stuck in the mud, and she could tip over onto the ground. Our closest neighbor was about a mile away, so no one would be able to hear her scream. “And it’s cold.”

I fetched her jacket from the hook by the window, throwing it over her shoulders. Luckily, it wasn’t too cold today, but her immune system also wasn’t at its best. “Let’s go back inside.”

“He used to come here sometimes,” she stated, her voice rough from years of smoking cigarettes. “Sometimes, he would just sit here for hours, staring into the sky. I would ask him what he was thinking about, and he would always say, ‘Nothing, darling. Just thinking about you and my boy. The two of you are the proudest things in my life.’”

My body tightened. I knew what was coming. She’d told this story so many times that I barely had a visceral reaction to it anymore. She’d gotten more pensive as of late.

As I rolled her back indoors, she continued, “The lying bastard. He wasn’t thinking about us at all. If he had been, he wouldn’t have stolen all that money from those people and then left us to deal with it. He wouldn’t have left me behind.”

I could hear the pain in her voice even after all these years. Sometimes, I thought my father’s absence hurt her more than anything else he did.

“What do you think was running through his mind when he did that?” she asked in a much quieter voice.

“Don’t know and don’t care,” I told her. I had much better things to think about than what my deadbeat old man wondered.

“I think they did it to him,” she continued. “They ran him out of town without even giving him a chance to explain. The Bestons and all of them can go to hell.”

My mother’s animosity toward the Bestons was misplaced. While the family, like most others, had been angry at my father for scamming them, they hadn’t been the loudest voices, nor had they demanded we pay them back like most other families. They’d understood that it was not our fault it happened, and as far as reactions go, I couldn’t blame them for theirs. I would be pissed, too, if someone stole a bunch of money from me.

“It’s a good thing that resort of theirs is falling apart,” my mother continued. “Must be some kind of karma.”

I glanced at her. “What do you mean their resort is falling apart?”

“Just what I said. They can’t find people to fill the place.” Then she glanced at me. “Where were you yesterday? You didn’t answer my calls.”

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t at the age where I needed to answer to her anymore.

“It’s fine.” She sighed. “I don’t really care anyway, as long as it wasn’t with the Beston girl. I told you the Bestons are all bad news. Even her strange son.”

Shock slammed into me at the statement. I blinked at my mother, digesting it. “Allie has a son?”

“Yeah, with that ex-husband of hers. She married him not too long after you left town.” My mother gave me a sympathetic look. “She didn’t even wait before moving on from you.”

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