May the Best Man Win (25 page)

That's what he was doing out in Oak Park. Sitting three-quarters of a block down the street from his father's house, lurking like some kind of stalker. Watching the front windows and trying to gauge who was home. He hadn't been back since he'd found his mother there. Instead, he'd met his dad at restaurants, or that one time at Home Depot where they'd spent an hour and a half sorting through lumber before going their separate ways.

Man, that had sucked.

And no matter how adult he tried to be about it, it just wasn't fucking fair. For twenty years it had been the two of them. Jase and Joe taking care of each other. The Foster men against the world. And for twenty years, if Jase had ever needed anyone to talk to, he knew down to the depths of his soul that his old man would be there to listen. Just the way Jase would listen when Joe needed someone to talk to.

They weren't just father and son; they were friends.

Or that's how it had been until
she
came back.

Now Clara was ruining everything. Straining every conversation and getting in the way of the things that had always come so easily between them.

And more than ever, Jase needed his dad. He needed to talk to someone who knew him better than anyone else on the planet. He needed a man with experience and perspective. He just needed to talk, damn it, and he didn't want to have to set it up through email so that they could meet in some neutral location.

He wanted to clean the gutters while he told his dad about the woman who was making him lose sleep. He wanted to help fix the dry rot on the garage door. And then he wanted to go inside and have a beer, or maybe some banana bread, and sit in the living room that had been theirs and theirs alone for so long
it mattered
. He wanted the comfort, the familiarity. He wanted—

Two quick knocks had him jolting in his seat, jerking around to look to the passenger window where his mom was peering in, her lips pressed into a firm line.

He rolled down the window, refusing to feel like a kid who'd just been busted stealing. “I was thinking I might see Dad outside. Catch him to talk for a few minutes.”

“Your dad's not home. He's over at Bear's house, installing a new stove.”

“Got it. I'll catch him another time.”

“Jase, turn the car off and come inside. It's time we talk.”

* * *

He didn't know what made him do it. Why he hadn't offered a simple “pass,” peeled out of his spot, and driven home. But for whatever reason, he did what she told him. Turned off the car and walked up to the house and waited. At any other time in his life, he would've let himself right in. But now that she was back—this stranger who had a hold greater than his own on his father—it suddenly felt like the house wasn't his.

His mom opened the door…at which point Jase let out a string of obscenities, the potency of which surprised even him.

But what the fuck?

This was not his house.

Gone were the feather-duster paint job and the botanical wallpaper border in the living room. The floral-patterned couch and coffee table with the beveled-glass insert too. Along with every brass accent item he'd been grimacing at since they'd gone out of style God only knew how many years ago. The figurines had been cleared away, along with the clustered knickknacks that had haunted their shelves and tables for as long as he could remember.

“What did you do?” Jase demanded, his outrage building by the second.

His father had loved all that crap. And now it was all gone.

“Jase, sit, will you?” she said, waving a hand toward the new dining room chairs.

When Jase just stood there, she sighed and sat down herself.

“I know you're upset. You have every right to be. But this”—she gestured to the freshly decorated space around her—“it's not what you think, Jase.”

He was fuming. “Then what is it?”

“It's me trying to help your dad. When I got back here and saw the way he preserved everything from before I left, it broke my heart. In two decades, he hadn't changed a thing. He'd been living in a house surrounded by painful memories.”

“And so you come back and the first thing you do is to tell him it's not good enough? God, you're some piece of work.”

His mother stared up at the ceiling and shook her head. “It wasn't anything like that. Jase, do you really think your father's first pick for color themes would have been fuchsia and teal?”

Jase crossed his arms. Because he knew where she was going with this.

His father had been trapped in a house he refused to change so that if his wife ever came back, it would be just the way she left it.

“Does he think you're staying?” Jase asked, knowing the answer but needing to hear it just the same. Waiting for her reply so he could rip into it and show her how wrong she was. For everything.

Only then he saw the look in his mother's eyes. It wasn't calculating or entitled. It wasn't even cold. She looked vulnerable. Sad.

She looked like someone he couldn't bully.

And when she replied, it wasn't with what he'd been expecting.

“Jase, do you know how old I am?”

The question threw him off guard. And even more than that, he realized he didn't know. But rather than clarify that he'd spent most of his youth trying to forget her, he answered instead with a simple no.

When he'd shown up and first found her there, he'd barely been able to look at her. And this afternoon, he'd been too surprised when she knocked on his car window to pay much attention to her face. Hell, he hadn't really looked at her since she'd been back. But he was now.

She looked tired maybe, with a sort of weathered softness to her face and sadness in her eyes that made him want to look away.

But her hair was still the same chestnut brown he remembered, with only a few grays streaking her temples. She was fit, her back straight, her shoulders and arms toned. Her blue eyes still bright.

She actually didn't look that old at all.

“I'm forty-six, Jase.”

Some of the air left his lungs as the math presented information he didn't quite know what to do with. He pulled a chair from the table and sank into it. His mom had been eighteen when he was born.

“It's not an excuse,” she went on. “I made decisions I'm not proud of, choices I wish I could take back.”

Jase's head snapped up, but she shook her head.

“Probably the only thing I wouldn't change if I had it to do again was leaving you and your father.”

Her words shouldn't have been able to touch him. So why did he feel like he was standing a hundred yards away from the woman who'd given him life, watching her throw her last bag in the back of a pickup with barely a backward glance? He cleared his throat. “It doesn't matter.”

“It matters to me, Jase. Knowing that I did that one thing right matters. I wasn't a mother to you. Even when I managed to be a wife to your father, I didn't have it in me to take care of my son the way I should have. I couldn't even take care of myself. And I'm sorry for it.”

“Eighteen,” he groaned, because,
Jesus
.

“Seventeen when I got pregnant. Not that your father knew.” Her eyes went distant. “I thought I was so mature. So grown up. I looked it, and of course I liked the attention I got from the older guys. So I snuck out, got into bars with a fake ID, and let guys like Joe buy me drinks and tell me jokes and make me feel like I was really something. Your dad thought I was twenty-two when we met. He had a good job working as an electrician, money, charm, and all those good looks. The way he treated me…” Something softened in her face.

His dad had been good to her. Of course he had.

“I wasn't used to being treated like that, and I fell for him hard. We were together for six months before I found out I was pregnant with you.”

“But he still didn't know how old you were?” Jase asked, unable to imagine his dad—the guy who'd busted him at fifteen for having friends over when he wasn't supposed to because the carpet had been
too clean
—not catching on to something like that. “He hadn't met your family or friends?”

“No. I was careful about who he met. And my family… He knew we weren't close.”

And it was always easy to believe what you wanted to be true.

No matter how farfetched it might be.

Jase closed his eyes, his thoughts circling back to Emily for what might have been the hundredth time that day, the guilt that never quite went away spiking hard.

He'd wanted to believe the worst about Emily, while letting her believe the best about him. What kind of a man did that?

He looked back at his mother. What kind of a woman did what she'd done?

“Joe had already been talking about marrying me, but I was terrified that once he knew the truth, that I'd been lying to him and I was only seventeen, he wouldn't want me anymore. But that's not how it went. Sure, he was mad I'd deceived him, and he beat himself up pretty bad about my age. But he said he loved me, and if I loved him, we'd get married.”

Jase couldn't imagine. But suddenly he had a new insight into his father's sense of responsibility toward the woman in front of him.

“Did you love him?” He didn't know why he'd asked. She could say anything, but as they sat across from each other, he had the feeling this woman had put her lies behind her.

“I thought I did. I thought I was getting everything I wanted. And then I had you. I'd turned eighteen two weeks before, and while most of my friends were going off to college, reveling in boyfriend drama, and trying to decide which party to go to, I was trying to figure out why this baby cried so much. Why he wouldn't sleep. Why he wouldn't let me sleep.”

She was looking at him, studying his face, and Jase imagined she was searching for traces of the child she was telling him about.

“My parents weren't any kind of help. Your dad, though, he was amazing. He'd work as many hours as he could, since we needed money, and then the minute he walked through the door he'd take you in his arms and suddenly everything would be okay. He'd tell me all the things I needed to hear but could only believe while he was saying them. That I was doing a terrific job. That he was the luckiest man alive. That everything was going to be great.”

It hurt Jase's heart to hear that his mother had actually cared about his dad. That things might have been good between them, even for a short time. Because it had been so much easier to see her as a villain from the start.

“I wasn't ready to be a wife or a mother, Jase. No matter how good your father was to me, it couldn't change that fact. And pretty soon I started acting out. I'm not proud of the things I did, or the way I treated your father. How I disrespected him and the vows we took. And I'm not proud of the fact that I couldn't be a real mother to you. But I wasn't ready for the life I'd signed on for. You were small and helpless and so dependent on me. I should have cherished and nurtured that bond.” Her head bowed and she looked away. “Instead, I resented you. I'm so sorry, Jase. You deserved better. Your father deserved better than what I did to him. And when I left, I thought—I hoped—you both might find it.”

This was the part of the story he knew. The part that had shaped the man he'd become.

“We didn't. You broke him when you left. It took almost a year before he was able to pull himself back together. And then every time you called, it would be the same thing all over again. Weeks of heartbreak.”

“I'm sorry about that. I didn't want to hurt him. I wanted to hear that he was okay, that you were.”

Jase let out a humorless laugh. “Right. Look, I can buy into the fact that you were young, and you made some mistakes. But don't try to convince me you cared how I was doing. At best I registered as an afterthought, even when you were living here. But in twenty years, in all the times you called Dad, never once did you ask to speak to me, send me a card, or come back to visit. You couldn't even bother to say good-bye that last day when you left.”

Jesus, he hadn't wanted to say any of that. Hadn't wanted her to know her actions had made any kind of impact on him.

His mother stared across the table at him, tears filling her eyes. “I didn't say good-bye because I was afraid if I did, I wouldn't be able to go. And I needed to. I didn't know how to be the things you needed. And every time I looked into your eyes, I saw the same pleading that was there in your father's, begging me for something I didn't have within me to give.”

She shook her head and looked away. Wiped her eyes before turning back to him. “I loved you, Jase.”

He should have laughed. Told her what a lot of good her love had done him. Only he couldn't toss the words back at her. He couldn't let them go at all.

They sat in silence a moment before Jase braved his next question. “What made you come back?”

“Your father asked me to. Though I think you know it wasn't the first time.”

He knew. He remembered the aftermath of every call.

“You always said no.”

“It was hard. I knew what I was missing. I'd look at the families around me. The moms scooping up their little boys for hugs, haggling with their teens about haircuts, stepping into their husbands' arms.” She shook her head. “But I was afraid I wasn't ready. And by the time I was, you were eighteen, going off to school, starting a whole new phase of your life. There was a part of me that didn't want to disrupt that. I thought it wouldn't be fair to show up after I missed all of the years that mattered for you. And I was scared. The mistakes I'd made in the past had been so terrible that I didn't believe I had the right to ask for or deserved another chance with the family I threw away.”

The air hissed out of his lungs as his hands fisted against his thighs.

Ten years.