Page 82 of Thick & Thin

Mom’s cheeks reddened, and she stood, pointing a single finger at me. “You take that back, Josh. I’ll have you know; Jenny hasn’t dated a single person since she’s been home, and furthermore …”

“Please, Mrs. Black, it’s fine,” Jenny spoke up, trying to stop my mom, but Momma kept going.

“All the poor girl does is take care of her son and work. This town’s full of a bunch of backward rednecks who would rather sit around and talk trash about her than help her out. I say it’s a damn good thing she’s not around those old friends. Real friends wouldn’t have written her off so easily. Things happen. That’s life.”

She sat back down, huffing with anger at the way the town was treating Jenny. I had heard everything she said, but the only sentence that radiated with me was the fact that Jenny hadn’t dated once since she came home.

That was three years ago.

“Is that true?” I asked Jenny when the room quieted.

She looked up at me, her green eyes moving over my face like a soft caress.

“Which part?” she asked.

It was nice that we were able to be civil in front of Momma.

“You haven’t dated in three years?”

She chuckled and shook her head. “There’s no one in this town I’d be willing to date anyway. It’s no big deal.”

She was wrong.

It was a huge deal.

I spent the past three years of my life wondering which of my old friends she was fucking. To find out that she had essentially been a saint since she got back to South Carolina had been like a salve on my old wounds.

“But I saw you at Sprints.”

My assumptions were making an ass out of me. When I saw her at Sprints, sitting at the bar alone and drinking, I assumed she was a regular.

“You went to Sprints?” Mom asked, shocked. “You mean you actually went out. That’s great, Jenny.”

Jenny rolled her eyes and sighed. “It was once. And only because Amy Faulkner made me.”

So going to Sprints wasn’t a regular thing for her.

Did she really do nothing but work and take care of her son?

That wasn’t the Jenny I used to know. Old Jenny was loads of fun with friends even though she didn’t like people all that much. She was always on the go and always ready and willing to do something crazy. It seemed these days she was just a single mom who worked too damn much.

Even though I hated myself the second the words left my mouth, I said, “You should come to Player’s. I bet everyone would be happy to see you.”

Her smile was stiff, and I knew I had hit a soft spot.

“That’s unlikely. They see me around. They ignore me.”

I had never known Jenny to give a shit what people thought, but seeing the way she was responding to the current conversation, I could tell she was bothered.

“Fuck them. Since when do you back down from people?” I asked, wishing she would find her old backbone and put it to use.

“Watch your language, Josh,” Mom muttered.

“It’s not backing down,” Jenny argued. “They don’t want to be around me, and I don’t want to be around them. I work. I don’t have time for their childish games and gossip.”

She was bothered. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have called them childish.

“You should go just to spite them.”

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