A Long Time Coming (28 page)

Smiling up at him, she spoke.
Her confidence in him was always beyond impressive. Out of everyone in his
family, she was the only one who made him really think about things in life.
Think about moving on, being the brother, son, and now boyfriend and father he
was always meant to be. She may not have known it, but his sister was his hero.
“Yeah, there is no doubt in my mind, David. You’re strong and stubborn—you
won’t give up on people, even though you did kind of gave up on yourself once
upon a time.”

Guilty as charged on that one
, he
knew it. But the most important part was that he was willing to push through
it, whether he’d make it or fail, it didn’t matter. He was going to try.

A knock sounded on the door,
and they looked at each other, shrugging, popping up from their positions in
unison. “David, Harley? God, kids. Are you two in there? Open up!” The voice
grew frantic—terrified—it was their father. The hinge flipped opened, his dark
eyes were almost crazed. His hair stood on end and tears were in his eyes. He
found each of their gazes, seemingly unsure who to look at as he spoke.

“Get dressed, both of you. We
have to go. Something happened…” The air in the room seemed to still at their
dad’s words. David clenched his hands together, staring back at his sister’s
face, seeing her eyes widen and her mouth completely set in the same matching
grim line as his own.

Fuck. Something had happened
to their mom.

* * *

“Sweetheart, wake up please.”

Her mom had some serious
suicidal thoughts if she was waking her up before the sun actually rose.
Snarling, Abigail flipped over to the other side of her bed, taking note of the
lady in her skimpy, white, silky bathrobe. Her hair was all done up in some messy
bun–looking thingy that looked pretty damn killer for a woman who’d just rolled
out of bed. That could only mean one thing: Mr. Bob–the–younger–man–builder had
stayed over again.

Her mother was not a morning
person, but with the new boyfriend in the picture, she sort of had turned into
one. Making breakfast, getting lunches in order—Abigail couldn’t deny the fact
that her mom was actually happy, too. But the way she’d gotten to this supposed
happiness point was not impressive by any means.

Groaning at the thought, she
rolled back over, pulling the blanket over her head. But then her mom pulled it
back down, harrumphing at her, hovering. Dammit—the lady just needed to step
away, especially after the night she’d had.

Foreboding dreams, death, lots
of crying…yeah, not a pleasant trip to dreamland, that was for hella sure. Not
to mention the fact that her eyes were burning something fierce and her nose
was plugged beyond belief as well. Her head felt full of something wicked
nasty, and would most likely split down the center soon for all her luck. Crap.
She couldn’t be getting sick. She didn’t have time to get sick, dammit!

“You need to get ready for
school. You didn’t set your alarm, and if you don’t get up now, you’re going to
be late.” Snarling, Abigail reached over and grabbed the phone. The screen was
black. Nice—dead again. Hadn’t she just charged the stupid thing?

“What time is it?” She
groaned, staring over at the curtains. The light wasn’t even flooding through
the windows like it usually did, which meant only one of two things. A: It was
raining out, or B: Her mother was seriously messed up with her timing today.

“It’s almost seven, honey.
Marcus and I overslept too.”

“God Mom, can you just not…say
his name to me, especially in the morning? It makes me wanna hurl.” She was
being stupid, and more than childish, she’d be the first to admit that. But
dammit, she wasn’t exactly ready to accept another man sleeping in the spot
where her dad…fuck, he wasn’t even her dad anymore, so what did it matter?

She flipped off the covers,
and swiped the jeans she’d worn yesterday off the floor. She had to safety pin
them together due to the fact that they were no longer buttoning, and it wasn’t
exactly flattering, so to speak. She’d asked her regular doctor about her larger
than normal preggo size for being only eleven weeks along, but he reassured
her, saying that there was only one heartbeat in there—not two. But he did
mention that she’d probably get larger fairly early in her pregnancy because
she was so petite. Not what she wanted to hear… But on the other hand, it
strangely made her giddy inside to see the way her belly protruded, knowing
that there was a good reason for it.

“Hey, I wish you’d talk to me,
sweetheart,” her mother whined from behind her, touching her shoulder. “We’re
worried about you.”

Rolling her eyes, she pulled
on a sweatshirt, and threw her own hair into a very craptastic ponytail. “Who’s
worried—you and my supposed
father?
”

“Abigail, please, you need to
know what happened. You need to know we never planned on keeping this from you
for so long.”

Yeah…right. “So, you mean to
tell me that my real father is gone, so my pseudo
gay
uncle–dad stepped
up to take that spot? That’s about right, isn’t it? I mean, come on Mom, how
generic can you get? This is like shit in the movies, not real life!”

“Yes…no…oh crap, I don’t know
how to explain this right.”

Two seconds, that’s all it was
going to take for her to all–out snap on this woman if she didn’t get her ass
out of there. But part of her
wanted
to know the truth and apparently
that
part was going to win out today. Before she even realized what she was doing,
she was already sitting on the foot of the bed, gaze focused fully on her mom
as she waited to hear the rest of her life story.

“Talk. Five minutes. That’s
all I can give you this morning.”

Gaze practically begging for
forgiveness already, her mother began to speak, her eyes watering already as
she sat down next to her again. Her voice cracked like the emotion was eating
her up the closer the words crept out onto her tongue. It was the strangest
thing to see and hear, because Abigail had never once seen the lady act
so…nervous, if that was even the right word for it.

“When you were almost a year
old, your father—your
real
father—was staying at home with you. He
was…out of sorts, I guess you could say. He had lost his job, and he couldn’t
find another, so he agreed to stay home with you while I worked at the salon.
Then, when I didn’t work, he would go out and take on a few side jobs.” Her
head was down; her hands were twitching in her lap. Abigail’s mother looked
broken. And for the first time in years, Abigail felt the strangest urge to hug
her. Unfortunately though, the two of them never had that sort of relationship.
Sadly, it wasn’t something she really missed.

At that thought, she pressed
her palm over her stomach, vowing silently to hug her baby every single day for
as long as she lived.

Shaking her head, her mom
broke their gaze, staring down at her lap. “Anyway, we lived in this house we
live in now, grandma and grandpa paid the mortgage, so we didn’t have many
bills to worry about, just everyday expenses. We were taken care of. So when I
explained that he didn’t need to worry about getting a job right away, he got angry
at me. Told me he was going to leave if he wasn’t allowed to
earn his keep
around here. So I apologized, thought we were good. Then when I got home from
work that same night, I found you in your crib, crying, soaked through your
clothes, wet. That’s when I knew he’d left us. I’d pushed him away. I made him
leave,” she sobbed, crying so hard that the bed shook under her.

Abigail had no idea what to
do. No clue what to say, how to respond—couldn’t really feel much though
because she didn’t know any better. Nor did she really care. How could she,
when she had no idea who the man was? She didn’t care where he went, or what he
did. She didn’t know him—had no desire to. But with her mother’s tears and
sobs, a sense of clarity took hold of her senses. Her mother painted the
perfect image before her. The constant unhappiness she exhibited as Harley grew
up. The distance she always put up between everyone—her and her father included
in that. The lady had been broken. Utterly and completely broken.

“Then your dad—er,
Jonathon
—came
over to visit from Alabama. He was always so good to you, loved you since he
first held you. He had the intuition your biological dad missed out on. So I
asked him to take on the role of your dad, begged him actually. Told him I’d
pay for him to move back here. I couldn’t raise you alone. My parents, they
would have been so angry that their only daughter was a
harlot,
living
alone as a single mother. So Jonathon agreed to play a role, until I could get
out on my own, not live under my parents’ rules… But then he never left and
things just got…comfortable, so to speak. No stress of finding love, no worries
about telling people that he was
gay
and that
I
was now a
single
mother
. And he fell too much in love with you to leave, Abigail,” her mother’s
trembling hands pressed against her face as she spoke. Angry tears fell from
Abigail’s eyes. She took in the honest face of the most un–honest mother alive
and had absolutely no idea how to respond. But no matter what, she couldn’t
back away, couldn’t stop listening either.

“So, what, you guys just kept
up this façade? Told the world you were married, when you—”

“We’re not married, Abigail.
In fact…we never have been married. For almost seventeen years, we’ve been in
this sort of agreement with one another. Neither one of us have ever dated
anybody, at least…not until just recently. We wanted you to have as normal a
life as possible, sweetheart, so that included making these sort of…sacrifices
in our own lives.”

Shaking her head in utter
disbelief, Abigail stared down at the strings of her hoodie, pinching the knots
at the end between her nails. “Our family has
never
been normal, Mom.”
Her voice grew low, quiet as she spoke. Her energy level for the day was
already washed away. “I mean, I always knew there was something different. I
never saw you hug, or kiss, or anything remotely close to what a marriage
should be. And then you fought,
all
the time. I could hear it from my
room at night, and I hated it. No child should ever have to live through that.”

“I’m sorry, honey. I really
am…” Nodding her understanding, Abigail stared at the extra lines around her
mom’s eyes, the crinkles lying in rows on her forehead—they were two visual
proofs that the guilt she felt over everything had been plaguing her for way
longer than just a few weeks.

“I’m not going to let this
go…I need to talk to Da…I mean
Jonathon,
” man, that sounded awful. He
would always be her dad, no matter if he’d been the sperm donor or not. It
would just take her a while to get past this.

“Do you want to know where
your real dad is, Abigail?”

Thinking about it for the
shortest of moments, Abigail turned to her mother, her eyes sharp as she stood
and walked backwards towards the door. “Honestly, I don’t care where he is. He
doesn’t matter to me.”

“He did love you…”

Shrugging, she grabbed her
purse and slung it over her shoulder as she headed towards the hall,
“Apparently not enough, Mom.”

* * *

It was a rainy, humid mess out
there, and of all the days for her defogger not to work on her car, it had to
be today. Lightning shot overhead and she jumped as the thunder crashed around
her seconds later. Jesus, leave it to Nebraska to experience thunderstorms at
the beginning of October.

The wipers were at their peak,
doing a fairly decent job of keeping the steam away. She’d cracked the windows
too and that helped—but just barely. The small parking lot surrounding her tiny
school was jam–packed today, so parking along the street was the only option
she had left. But damn—parallel parking was not her thing. Admittedly, it took
her ten minutes just to get it right.

Her nerves were shattered when
she reached into the back seat to grab her umbrella. So cussing the stupid
ridiculous thing when the water dripped down onto her lap and soaked the denim
of her jeans seemed like the perfect stress reliever. She didn’t mind getting
wet usually, but she didn’t have the time to grab any extra clothes on the way
out of the house. All she’d been able to think about was getting to class when
she’d left—getting out of the insanity that was her life.

Her real father had abandoned
them. Her father now—her
uncle
—had stepped up to take on the job, no
questions asked, apparently. Sure, the two of them had forgone a lot in their
lives to try and make
her
life as
normal
as they could. And she
appreciated the hell out of that too. But in the long run, she had to wonder if
it had been worth it, for any of them? In a way it had because yeah, they had
their occasional awesome family moments. Family vacations, holidays… Hell yeah,
things
definitely
could have been worse.

She smiled to herself, shaking
her head, lifting that umbrella above her. Raising her eyes to stare up at the
dark sky up above, she reveled in the coolness as the water slipped over her
cheeks. She needed to call her dad—needed to tell him that she was sorry for
flipping out that night in the kitchen. Needed to tell him thank you for doing
the job his brother was apparently not man enough to do. Yeah, the truth
hurt—the lies especially—but the grudge would be painstakingly more annoying
than forgiveness ever would.