Page 63 of Now to Forever (Life on the Ledge Duet #2)

Forty-Five

“Glory,” I call as I open the door. “You in here?”

She appears from the short hall wearing a pair of grey sweatpants cinched at the waist with a white string and an oversized blue sweater. “Where the hell else would I be?” she snaps, looking all over me. “You look like shit.”

“Trying to fit in,” I say dryly, not moving from the doorway.

While I usually come to Glory’s from work, today I’m in my Sunday best of yoga pants and a thick sweatshirt. Looking like shit.

“Let’s sit outside.”

Her eyes narrow slightly then she swipes a pack of Lucky’s off the coffee table and follows me to the steps of the small porch, taking a seat on the top one next to me. A balmy breeze blows my hair and makes it difficult for her to light a cigarette.

“What’s this all about? You need money?”

I almost laugh.

“It’s been brought to my attention that I’m fucked up. ”

She scoffs. “And? You here to blame it on me or something?”

“Maybe.”

The word stretches between us as she takes a long drag.

“You were a shitty mom,” I tell her.

She looks at me. Opens her mouth then closes it—twice. “I was.”

Her admission hits like a frying pan to my face and she notices.

“God, Scotty. You lookin’ at me like that lets me know how stupid you must think I am.

Think I don’t know what a good mama was supposed to look like?

” She scoffs, taps the ash of her cigarette off the side of the porch. “Men liked me, your daddy was garbage.”

She says it like that explains everything and I give her a try again look.

“Fine.” She huffs. “My parents never liked Lyle. Told me not to marry him. I did it anyway. Not sure I ever loved him, but I loved the idea of proving ’em wrong, you know?”

I make an agreeing sound. If my mother has taught me anything, it’s stubborn.

“Then he took that job on the road, gone all the time, drinking more when he came home. Angry as sin after that. I got lonely.” She shrugs.

“If he was gone, I was goin’ too. Wasn’t gonna be strapped into a life neither of us wanted.

” She doesn’t say it to be mean, it’s honest, and as much as I know the abrasiveness of that truth should hurt, it doesn’t.

At least not as much as I would expect. My mom got married and stayed married to the wrong man for the wrong reasons; Zeb and I were collateral damage.

“I knew he was gettin’ head at every truck stop from here to Tacoma sure as I was doing the same to any man who’d buy me a vodka and tonic and flirt with me over a game of pool. ”

“Your inability to show up for a school function was because you were giving retaliatory blowjobs in the bathroom of the bar?” I ask dryly.

“God, Scotty Ann, for such a smart-ass you’re dumb as shit,” she snaps. “Do I have to spell it all out for you?”

“Apparently.”

“Fine.” She rolls her eyes. “People knew. Hell, everyone knew. That day at the playground when I told you not to call me mama?”

I pull my chin back, surprised she remembers.

“I heard one of the other moms talking about me. Calling me a whore. I was embarrassed. Not for me—for you. I didn’t act it, but I’m no idiot.

You deserved better than me. Zeb did. Thought if nobody called me mama—if I pretended not to be one—I wasn’t.

Convinced myself you’d be better off. Orphans.

” Her lips press into a flat line that feels a little remorseful.

“It’s easy to not show up when you think you’re doing everyone a favor. ”

A cardinal lands in the brown grass and pecks at the ground; I wonder if it’s Zeb.

“When I was pregnant with you,” she continues, looking up at the sky as she exhales smoke, “I took Zeb to one of those play gyms at McDonalds. You remember those? With the ball pits?” I nod.

“He was crawling around, too little to really do anything, I just needed to get out of the house. It was raining. Having kids makes you damn stir crazy. Anyway, a grandmother was there with her grandson. She noticed my belly. ‘ What are you having?’ she asked. ‘A girl,’ I told her. She put a hand to her heart—just like this.” Glory spreads her bony fingers wide across her chest. “Then she said, ‘ You’ll have a best friend for life.’ And I cried right there in that play area at the thought of it.

My best friend growing right inside my body.

It wasn’t the life I wanted, but I thought I could change. Be better. Happier.”

For the first time in my life, I see tears in my mother’s eyes.

“Then I cared more about myself and getting even with your daddy than being your best friend. I’ve come to terms with it.

” Another drag of her smoke, another shrug.

“Probably why I’m so mean to you. You have a business and a house—a whole damn life I’m not part of, and that’s on me.

It’s easy to be mean when being nice stings like a bee’s ass in your eye after things don’t work out. ”

I snort a laugh. She’s not wrong.

“Why didn’t you try to find me when everything happened with Zeb?”

She laughs, it’s unamused.

“You ever make a mistake you didn’t want to fess up to?”

I hum in agreement, thinking of Ford and what I did.

“How you think it feels to tell someone their brother is dead because they were a piss-poor excuse for a mother?”

I look at her. Exactly the same as she always is but different.

Human. The whole narrative of my life shifts slightly.

Again . Glory, in her own twisted way, did her best, even though it sucked.

Just like I can’t escape the pile of shit I was born into, neither could she.

And she pushed us away because of it. Like I’ve spent my whole life doing to anyone who tries to get close .

I swallow through the thickness in my throat as a car drives down the lane of the trailer park and Glory waves.

“And your parents?” I ask. “You married my dad and just, what, never talked to them again?” We never discussed them; she said they were worthless, and the context clues of my life never led me to believe otherwise.

Never encouraged me to ask anything about them.

Knowing they didn’t like my dad is no surprise. Nobody did.

She stills, taking a long look at me. The kind of look like she’s trying to see something or say something without doing either. Abruptly, she stands, goes inside, and returns with a stack of photos I’ve never seen before held together by a rubber band.

“When you get as good at lying to yourself as I am, it’s easy to lie to everyone else.” The ease of the words is at odds with the significance of them. “So I did. Starting with my maiden name.” My jaw drops. “Told you it was Joplin because I always liked Janis Joplin.”

I don’t mask an ounce of my shock. “You what ?”

She shrugs. “My parents hated Lyle from the second they met him. Said he was worthless. He wasn’t at first—least it didn’t seem that way.

The more I saw they were right, more mad I got.

More stubborn. More distance I put between them and me.

They didn’t control me—nobody did. You know how kids are.

Either way”—she lifts her chin, eyes on the sky—“I did what I wanted. They met you once, when you were a baby. Lyle berated me to hell and back in front of them and they begged me to leave him—especially my daddy—but I refused. Never talked to them again. They weren’t bad, there just wasn’t space for them and my pride.

I’d be damned if I was licking my wounds in front of them. ”

I’m speechless; she hands me the stack of faded pictures. On the first page, every bit of remaining air is squeezed out of my lungs. There, a smiling couple stands holding a faceless baby at the lake . . . in front of an A-frame. My A-frame.

The world stops spinning.

“Archie and Lydia?” I whisper.

She smiles, and it’s sad. “Wasn’t a Joplin, Scotty Ann. I was a Watkins.”

The tablecloth of my life is snatched right out from the dirty dishes stacked on top of it. Archie Watkins was my grandfather.

“I made my choice, you paid the price.” We sit in the enormity of that for seconds or minutes or hours. “You and Zeb both.”

Archie was my grandfather, and Lydia my grandmother.

Her behavior at his cremation. The A-frame.

Bailing Zeb out. All of it there, making sense, clear as a sunny summer day.

I press a hand to my chest as if I need to feel my own beating heart to know this is real.

As robbed as I was from years I never knew them, there’s a wave of relief.

A feeling of being loved out of nowhere.

Archie didn’t show up to watch Wanda remove metal pins and hips, he was there for me.

Because he cared. Because we were family.

Another cardinal lands, this time, I wonder if it’s Archie. If all of them have been.

“One of these months I expect you’ll stop showing up here,” Glory says, matter-of-fact. “Wouldn’t blame you. ”

It’s the closest to an apology I’ll ever get from my mother, and I take it.

“I’ve thought of it,” I admit, glancing at her sideways. “But why deprive myself of the warm, fuzzy feelings you give me?”

She snorts a laugh, takes another drag.

“You ever think of talking to your parents after Dad died?”

She shrugs. “Made too many mistakes at this point. Wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

Another car drives down the trailer park lane and I feel her flawed mentality rattle my bones. A bullseye mark of my very own thoughts.

“Archie was pretty incredible,” I tell her.

She makes an agreeing sound. “You still planning on selling that house and moving west?”

I blow out a long breath. Before right now, as much as I had grown to love it, it was just a house. That simplicity has been shattered. It’s not just some house on a lake anymore; it’s a family house on a lake. From my grandparents I never knew about. Selling is wrong; staying is complicated.

In my silence she adds, “You still seeing the Callahan boy?”

“The one who’s only with me because he felt guilty?” I raise my eyebrows, and her lips twitch. “His kid hates me, and I got in a bar fight last night. Not sure how well that fares with a cop.”

She looks at me with what I would dare call admiration. “You win?”

“Can’t remember.”

Her eyes dart around my face. “Probably means you won. ”

A laugh tickles my chest but doesn’t meet my lips. We sit long enough for her to smoke another entire cigarette, in silence.

“You really were a shitty mom.”

“Meh,” she says, looking at me with a small smile. “You didn’t turn out half bad though.”

On the side of the road where the bridge starts over Crow Creek, I park the Bronco.

For the first time in twenty years, I squat in front of the abandoned cross, pulling at tangled vines, which have long since wrapped around the near rotted wood.

RIP Lyle Armstrong is all that’s written in faded and chipped white paint.

My dad drove off the bridge, my brother washed away forever.

Lyle got a funeral, a headstone, and a cross memorializing his stupidity; Zeb got erased.

Staring at the cross, it strikes me that maybe it’s why my records are his, my car is his, my job is his.

Everything I’ve done in the last twenty years .

. . it’s been to remember him because nobody else will.

Except now I know: Ford has. In his own way, he’s lived and breathed Zeb’s loss as much as I have.

With a sniff, I wrap my hands around the arms of the cross and tug. The earth releases it easy, like it never wanted it to begin with.

I walk to the bridge and watch the water rush under it, the current steady and swift around the boulders.

The trees on the bank are bare now; they would have been thick and bright green that spring twenty years ago.

Swap Shop was probably on the radio. The box holding Zeb was probably in the passenger seat.

My dad was probably smoking a cigarette.

I’ll never know if he was drunk because he’d lost a son or if he was drunk because that’s simply who he was.

“Dad,” I say, hoisting the cross up to the guardrail. “I wish you would have loved us better.”

Before I talk myself out of it, I toss the cross over the edge and it hits the water with a splash.

It takes less than a minute for it to get swallowed by the current.

A wave of relief washes over me.

And then, I cry.