Page 53 of Second Chance Fate (Hope Falls: Brewed Awakenings #5)

Caleb felt ten pounds lighter hearing her say that, knowing that she had faith in him.

Academically, he knew it didn’t matter what people said or thought, but he couldn’t deny that sometimes it did wear him down.

He did feel like he’d lived his life under a microscope, people watching him, judging him.

Not that he was complaining. How could he complain?

Look at how Taylor was raised. Look at how she’d had to raise their son, not just as a single mom, but in an abusive house.

He’d lived a very blessed life. He didn’t have the right to complain.

“Thank you.” He felt himself tearing up.

“Nothing to thank me for.” Her nose scrunched as she patted his face, then walked out of the office.

He took a few minutes to compose himself before heading out, passing Judy on his way. She waved, and he mouthed that he was going to his parents’ house so she’d know where he’d be. She gave him a thumbs-up.

On the way to his mom and dad’s, the console of his Jeep lit up with a call from Josh. He answered, having a pretty good idea what the call was about. “Hey.”

“Did you hear that Nonna went all Mike Tyson for you today?” Josh asked. “She was ready to bite off Patsy’s ear.”

“I just did.”

“Who knew Aqua Zumba was so gangster?” Josh teased. “Renata said she could barely hold her back.”

Renata Blackstone, who happened to be pop star Karina Black’s grandmother, was a community leader and elder in the Washoe tribe. She was not a tiny woman. She was tall in stature and was more than capable of handling herself in any situation.

“I’m sorry, this has gotten out of hand,” he apologized.

“Sorry? Why are you apologizing? I haven’t seen or heard Nonna this happy since she won five blue ribbons at the county fair that year, do you remember?”

“Oh yeah.” Caleb vaguely remembered going to the El Dorado County Fair with Nonna and Josh. They spent the weekend in Placerville. “Didn’t someone tell her that she couldn’t win?”

“Winifred Minton.”

“Right.” Winifred Minton owned the antique shop downtown. She had a sign in her window that read, NO Smoking. NO Profanity. NO Children. That basically summed up her personality.

“Winifred was at Sue Ann’s bragging after she won the best apple pie or something, and Nonna said that she made a good apple pie,” Josh reminded him.

“Winifred told her that good apple pies don’t win and not to bother entering because she wasn’t ‘from around here.’ I mean, talk about waving a red flag in front of a bull.

Nonna found out every single event that Winifred had ever entered and entered all five of them the next year. ”

Caleb remembered there was a pie, jam, tomato sauce, squash, and, if memory served, some sort of quilt. Nonna spent the entire year devoted to perfecting all of her entries.

“And she did it.” Josh chuckled. “She won blue ribbons in all of them.”

“I remember her putting the blue ribbons on her purse,” Caleb recalled. “She had them on there for years.”

“Yeah, she did,” Josh sighed. “Anyway, that was how happy she was today, so thank you. I think you just added years to her life. I’m not even kidding.”

Caleb doubted that, but he could see Nonna getting a kick out of acting up. “I don’t even know exactly what she said.”

Josh laughed. “I do. I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t know she had it in her.”

“Do I want to know?”

“You know how she sometimes gets phrases wrong, so when Patsy was quoting scriptures to her, she told her to stick it where the moon doesn’t light, instead of where the sun don’t shine.

But then, she really got in the zone, and things got personal.

She told her that she spreads gossip faster than an STD at an orgy. ”

“Whoa.” Caleb couldn’t help but laugh a little, thinking about Nonna screaming that at her.

“Yeah, I’m guessing she heard that one from Viv.”

“That does sound very Viv,” Caleb seconded that.

“She also told her that she looked like the before picture, that she envied everyone who hadn’t met her, that she was proof evolution is bullshit, and that if ignorance is bliss, she must be ecstatic all the time.

Oh, and she went old school, which, I thought you’d appreciate, she told her, even Bob Ross calls her a mistake. ”

Caleb couldn’t count the number of times he’d been over at Josh’s house and Nonna was watching Bob Ross. It was her favorite show. He was famous for saying there are no mistakes.

“Her parting remark was one that even Renata couldn’t hide her amusement when telling me.” Josh’s tone was light, and Caleb could practically hear him smiling.

Renata Blackstone was known for her stoic nature.

“Wow, she got Renata to crack?”

“Yep.”

“Okay, I have to hear it.”

“Renata said while they were dragging Nonna out of the room, she shouted, ‘Your face makes onions cry.’” Josh laughed.

Caleb knew that this was funny; he could see the humor in it, but the truth was, he felt a heaviness.

A burden. This woman was going around causing so much drama that she was inciting people to feel the need to come to his defense.

If it wasn’t him, then it would be someone else.

He needed to address this in a drastic way, in a public way, to make this right.

He sighed as he pulled up to his parents’ house. “Hey man, I’m at my parents’; I’ll call you later.”

“Have you told them yet?”

“That’s what I’m doin’ now.”

“Now?”

“Yep.”

“So Owen knows?”

“Taylor’s talking to him.”

“Oh, okay. Hit me up later. Let me know how it goes.”

“I will.”

Caleb ended the call and got out of the Jeep. His mind was spinning, trying to predict the ripple effect from Patsy’s actions today, the ones he was aware of so far. It seemed her behavior was escalating. He was halfway up the walk to his parents’ front door when it opened.

His mom appeared, donning her retro apron that had a picture of a stereotypical June-Cleaveresque ’50s housewife wearing oven mitts, holding a rolling pin with the words BAKING in bold, all caps, and beneath it in tiny cursive writing: because murder is wrong.

Baking was his mom’s version of letting off steam, of going down to the bar and having a few beers, of escaping.

Whenever she was stressed, worried, overwhelmed, anxious, angry, confused, or basically any emotion that wasn’t happy, she baked.

Most kids had positive associations with the smell of cookies, muffins, and cakes.

Caleb didn’t have negative associations, because it wasn’t like she ever took out her moods on him or his dad, but the first thing he thought when he smelled baked goods was, uh oh, what’s wrong with Mom?

“Well, Mr. Hot Pastor, it seems you’ve been causing quite the scandal.” Her arms lifted to the side, outstretched.

“Looks that way.” Caleb walked into her embrace.

“There you are!” His dad’s voice boomed from the recliner as Caleb shut the front door behind him. “Your mother’s been in the kitchen baking all day. Did you hear about Patsy and Leonora going at it in the women’s locker room?”

“I did, and don’t say it like that.” He lowered himself down onto the couch, and Captain hopped up beside him. He reached out to pet him, and he purred as he nuzzled his head against his palm.

“So, what’s going on?” his dad prompted as he pushed down the footrest of the recliner and sat up. Tennille, who was curled up in his lap, flattened her ears as she nuzzled her face into his dad’s arm, having zero interest in the gossip. “You’ve kept us in suspense all day.”

Caleb knew there were quite a few ways to approach the information he needed to give his parents. He’d gone over all of them in his head and decided on starting from the beginning. “Do you remember when I went to Florida with Josh for his uncle’s funeral?”

His dad stared at him blankly, which meant he did not.

“Yes.” His mom nodded. “It was right around your twenty-first birthday.”

“Yep. That’s right. Well, I met a girl there?—”

“Rebecca,” his mom stated as if it was common knowledge.

“How did you know that?” Caleb asked, stunned.

“Because that trip was right around spring break, and you spent that whole summer staring at that photo strip you took on the boardwalk. The girl had jet-black hair and bright blue eyes. Really pretty. I asked you about her, and you said you only knew her first name, Rebecca, and you didn’t know how to get in touch with her.

You tried social media, but there was no trace of her. ”

“Wow. Yeah, that’s right.” Caleb didn’t even remember having that conversation with his mom. He wondered if that made what he was about to tell them better or not. “So, Rebecca and I hooked up that weekend.”

“Hooked up?” his dad repeated.

“We had sex,” Caleb clarified.

Both of his parents’ expressions remained the same.

He took a breath, then forged ahead. “A couple of months later, she found out she was pregnant. She spent her entire life in foster care and never had any support system. She had no way of getting in touch with me. Even though she was young and had only just finished her freshman year of college when she found out, her plan was to have the baby and raise it on her own because she’d never known anyone who had the same DNA as her.

But then, when she was five months along, she met a man who was ten years older than her.

He was also a police officer.” Caleb did his best to remain calm, but thinking about Owen’s face when he thought that Martin had hurt his mom when she had to go to the hospital had his blood pressure rising.

He spread out his fingers and then fisted them as he exhaled.

“He owned his own home and offered her stability. She thought she would be giving her child everything she always wanted growing up, so she moved in with him and married him. When she had our son, he was born ten weeks premature, and within the first six months, he was diagnosed with asthma, epilepsy and cardiomyopathy.”