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Up at the house, Austin stood in his door, obviously not about to approach but keeping an eye on his daughter.
She rocked to a halt in front of me. “I just want you to know?—”
“Don’t,” Jessie clipped.
Julia ignored her. “Mom threatened to take us all from him if he had anything to do with Javier.”
“Goddammit,” Jessie bit under her breath.
“She can be…nasty,” Julia told me. “She would make it…” She again struggled for words. “A mess and drag it out forever. For Dad, it was lose one child, or lose three.”
“He still could have—” I tried.
“He came from a broken home,” she said fast. “His folks…” She shook her head. “It was bad. He didn’t want his children to grow up shuffled from one bitter parent to the other. After he did, erm…what he did, he tried with her. Mom, I mean. She put him through the wringer. She never let him forget it, she never forgave him for it, and she never stopped punishing him for it. But he stuck it out until we were all through college and starting our own lives because he didn’t want us to live in a broken home.”
“Let me guess, you aren’t close to your mom,” Shanti drawled.
Julia glanced at her but didn’t answer her question.
She said, “He messed up, he really did. I’m not going to defend him for cheating or any of what came after.” Her attention returned to me. “But the punishment, in her case, did not fit the crime. Like, on a day-to-day basis, she made him choose. Ximena’s son, or her children.”
Whoa.
She knew Javi’s mom’s name?
And whoa again.
Austin’s ex seemed like a total bee-yotch.
“Sometimes, I think, and I really wish I didn’t, but I do, she had me and Cath just to have more to hold over him,” Julia admitted in a small voice.
Oof.
Total bee-yotch.
“It tore him up,” Julia continued. “It got to the point we knew if Dad lost track of where Javier was because he was…you know.”
Oh, we knew.
Javi was living on the streets and doing that didn’t come with a forwarding address.
Julia kept going, “We knew because Dad would be…he’d be really upset.” You could tell that was a vast understatement. “And then Mom would turn the thumbscrews.”
Mm-hmm.
She wasn’t close to her mom.
And Tiffany Atherton was a complete and total bee-yotch.
“Then he should have grown a pair and saved his three kids from living with that, and his other kid from living his own hell,” Luna stated the straight-up truth.
“That’s easy for you or even me to say,” Julia replied. “When we’re not living it. When we don’t have his history. When we weren’t the ones who messed things up in the first place by stepping out on our spouse. When we didn’t vow to ourselves that we’d give better to our kids than we had growing up and we screwed that up from the jump.”
Again, she turned to me.
“He didn’t make the right decisions, but at the time, he thought he was doing the best he could. Then Patrick went off the rails. Cath doesn’t speak to Mom. I do my best to avoid her. And Javier…”
She let that trail, but we all knew what happened to Javi.