WPFAAT
Well, this chapter was a lot different in my head, but somewhere in the writing process it turned out...like this. And I had planned on actually trying to write some smex, but it didn't happen. Maybe in the next chapter?
While the chili was simmering, filling the house with a smell that was…interesting, to say the least, Jack very pointedly said that he wanted to wash up a bit after his long drive. He went upstairs, and then Ennis cleared his throat, eyes darting around, flush making its way up his neck and across his wide face. He opened his mouth as if to make his own excuse to go upstairs, then closed it and instead just turned tail and ran. Junior laughed a little, amused that he was so embarrassed about it. And then she wrinkled her nose, because…well, gross.
Ennis had the presence of mind to close and lock the bedroom door and then he was gone, grabbing Jack and setting upon him. They kissed wildly, hands scrabbling and scratching, desperate, as if they’d been apart for months, or weeks at the very least, instead of mere days. Jack was moaning into Ennis’s mouth, the way he had a tendency to do, and it drove Ennis wild, just as it always did. Finally, neither of them could stand just kissing, and the clothes started coming off.
Jack moaned some more as Ennis sucked at his neck, and that nearly ended Ennis right there. He push-walked Jack over to the bed, whimpering a little himself as Jack’s hands went to all the right spots. They were well practiced with each other’s bodies; knew all the right buttons to push and all the tricks to pull.
“Missed you,” Jack mumbled against Ennis’s lips. Well, actually, it came out sounding more like “Mgnh oo.” because his tongue was otherwise occupied, but Ennis got the general idea.
“Uh huh.” Ennis’s sounded right, because he didn’t need his tongue for that phrase. Then he added, “Oo oo.” Jack could’ve taken it simply as a compliment to his kissing abilities, but he knew it was supposed to be “You too.” Jack entertained a little fantasy of them somehow losing their tongues in some sort of freak accident and still being able to communicate, but then oh God, that fantasy disappeared as he realized Ennis was going to need his tongue if he was going to keep doing that. And he definitely was going to keep that up if Jack had anything to say about it.
Ennis pulled away, making Jack whine a little. Ennis nuzzled at Jack’s neck, then pushed their foreheads together and looked into those blue eyes that drove him wild.
“God, I love you.” He mumbled.
That was it for Jack. He grabbed Ennis in a fierce kiss, and there was definitely no more talking after that.
-----------------------------
Bobby stalked away blindly, anger burning so fierce he wandered up stairs and around corners and down halls until he’d burned down some and realized he didn’t know where he was. Hmm. Probably not a good thing.
Judging by the amount of large, cranky women and frazzled men, Bobby’d wandered to the maternity ward. That was helpful to know, he supposed, but he didn’t know how to get back to L.D.’s room. He didn’t really want to go back, but he didn’t really have a choice at the present time, unless he wanted to spend the rest of his life at the hospital. He blew out a frustrated breath and, out of the corner of his eye, spotted a pay phone. Score.
His anger started to peter out as he waited patiently for the man using the phone to finish exclaiming over his new baby girl to whoever he was talking to. “Seven pounds even! Most beautiful thing you’d ever see!” Yeah, yeah. Whoever they are, buddy, they don’t agree with you, so just wrap it up. Okay, so maybe he was still a touch cranky.
Finally, the new daddy hung up. He had a wild grin and even wilder hair. He had some seriously nasty looking stains on the scrubs he was wearing. Nasty enough for Bobby to reconsider children. But the huge grin, paired with tear tracks, made Bobby think maybe it was worth it. Obviously Lureen didn’t agree. That made Bobby’s anger come back in full force.
“H’lo?” Ennis answered the phone while chewing something.
“I’m coming home!” Bobby started off, not calmly or rationally at all, as he’d hoped to be. He’d also said it a bit louder than he’d meant to and saw some heads swivel toward him. He hunched his shoulders, a nice little trick he’d learned from Ennis, and scrunched closer to the wall.
“What? What’samatter?” Ennis swallowed whatever he was eating.
“I’m sick of it here. Sick of L.D. and sick of Lureen and I’m ready to be home.”
“Hey, now, slow down. What happened?”
Bobby heard Jack in the background. “Who is it? What’s wrong? Is it Bobby? Is something wrong with Bobby?”
The thought of being somewhere people actually loved him and wanted him around made a lump rise up in Bobby’s throat and replaced his burning anger with a dull, throbbing homesickness. Why did he have to be out in stupid Texas? He wanted to go home, with the wind he hated and the cows and his horses and his dog and his family. He’d never been this far away before.
“What’s wrong with Bobby?” Jack called again from wherever.
“Well, shut up so I can figure it out!” Ennis finally sassed back. “Bobby? What’s going on out there?” His voice was tinged with worry now.
“I just…” Bobby cleared his throat. “I want to come home.” To his horror, his voice cracked and he felt the hot sting of tears. He blinked hard and fast to get rid of them.
“Okay.” Ennis said slowly. “You gotta tell me why, though.”
“I just do.” Bobby had to whisper to keep from crying. “I miss you and Daddy. And Junior.”
Ennis sighed and cleared his throat.
“Well, you know, we miss you too, bud, but…”
“Ennis, please!” More heads turned to look at him, but he didn’t even care anymore.
“You…you homesick?” Ennis asked. Bobby hesitated. Was Ennis going to think he was a baby if he admitted it? He was being a baby. But knowing that didn’t make him any less homesick.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.” Ennis was quiet a minute. Bobby was sure he was annoyed. Annoyed to be saddled with such a baby. He was nearly eighteen years old! “Well, can’t say I blame ya. You ain’t never been away for long, huh?”
“Huh uh.” Bobby was ducking his head to hide his swimmy eyes, though no one could see them anyway.
“Yeah.” They were both quiet, but Bobby could hear Buddy barking and Jack yapping at Ennis, probably hovering right at his shoulder. “We…we sure miss you, you gotta know that.”
“Then lemme come home.” Bobby’s voice was dangerously close to a wail. Ennis sighed. Before he could answer, Bobby heard the clack-clack-clack of heels and a sharp voice ring out through the whole floor: “Robert John Twist!”
“Shit.” Ennis swore. “Voice sounds like a fucking witch.” Then he made a noise that Bobby recognized as his damn-I-shouldn’t-have-said-that grunt.
“She is.” Bobby said gloomily. He could hear his father, right in the phone now, probably hanging on Ennis, asking “Whose voice?!” Bobby pushed the phone into the crook of his shoulder.
“I’m on the phone.” He told her, rather rudely.
“Bobby…” Ennis’s warning voice sounded tinny from that far away. “I don’t care how much of a bitch she is, you be respectful.”
“Yessir.” Bobby bit his lip. “Although, you know, she calls me stupid and makes fun a me for not being able to read.” Okay, so it was a lie, but he was seventeen and wanted to go home. He was not above slander.
“She what?!”
“Nah, she never did that.” Bobby admitted. He was a bad liar; always had been. He always felt too guilty.
“Damn, Bobby, I was goin’ a come out there myself and getcha.”
“You still could.” Bobby said hopefully.
“Listen. You hang up now, you talk to her, and if she’s still…still being that way, you call. We’ll bring you home right away.” Ennis told him.
“What is going on?!” Jack was beside himself.
“Promise?” Bobby knew he sounded like a little kid, but he couldn’t help it.
“Promise. Cross my heart and all that.” Ennis chuckled a little, remembering when Bobby used to insist they all had to cross their hearts, hope to die, swear on your mama’s grave (that one went away once he was old enough to understand that Ennis’s mother was actually dead and all the things that entailed), spit shake on every promise.
“Okay.” Bobby sighed. “I’ll prob’ly be calling later.”
“Well, you call later, no matter what happens, ‘kay?”
“Okay. Tell Daddy to calm down ‘fore he has a fucking stroke.”
He hung up and took a deep breath. Lureen was standing there, arms crossed, heel tapping, eyes bugging out of her head with rage.
“You can’t just go off like that!” She shouted. “You hear me?”
“I ain’t deaf!” Bobby felt his own anger start up again. “And I ain’t a little kid, neither!”
Just then, Lureen noticed that everyone was staring at them. Always one to keep up her appearances, she smiled that cold business smile and said stiffly, “Why don’t we go on home?”
Bobby was having none of it. “I’d love to,” he spat. “But my home is in Wyoming.”
Her teeth were clenched together so hard he could hear them grinding. “Come on.” She hissed. She tried to grab his arm but he yanked himself away from her.
“Um…I think I changed my mind.” Bobby heard one of the younger pregnant women say morosely.
As soon as they’d both slammed the car doors closed, Lureen was laying into him. “What the hell is your problem?!” She shouted, throwing the car into gear and backing out without even looking. Bobby hoped a car magically appeared.
“I don’t think I did anything wrong.” Bobby said calmly. It was a fake calm, meant to infuriate her. It always infuriated Jack, and it always infuriated Bobby when Jack used the calm voice on him. Lureen, unfortunately, was already so livid that the calm voice was lost on her.
“Oh, you don’t, don’t you?” She jerkily lit a cigarette and took a long drag. “You scream at a sick old man and then you just disappear and now you don’t think you did anything wrong?”
Well, when she put it that way…
“I left so I could cool off, because that nasty old bastard finally crossed the line!”
So much for that whole cooling off thing.
“Don’t you dare talk about him that way!” She changed lanes and almost collided with the one other car on the highway. The other driver honked and Lureen gave the man the one fingered salute. Now Bobby could see the spunky rodeo queen Jack talked about, instead of the tight-lipped cold fish he’d seen the entire week. Too bad this was what it took.
“Well what gives him the right to trash talk my dad like that? Huh? You think I’m just gonna sit there and take that?”
“Bobby, my father is a good ol’ boy from Texas. You had to know he was gonna have something to say about Jack.”
“That don’t make it okay!” Bobby exploded, furious that she seemed to think that just because L.D. was ignorant Bobby was supposed to let it go. “He can’t say shit like that!”
“What did he even say?” She sounded less mad now-just sort of worn out. It almost made Bobby feel sorry for her, having a daddy like that instead of a happy, loving one like he had, but he was too pissed to feel any pity just then.
“Oh, just that my daddy’s a pissant who ain’t no good at anything-never has been, never will be-and is surely going to hell for shacking up with another man!”
Lureen sighed. “Sure it ain’t nothing they both ain’t already heard.”
“That don’t mean I have to sit and listen to it.” Bobby blew out a hard breath and crossed both arms as they pulled into the driveway. He slammed the door hard and walked in front of her into the house, debating stomping up to the room he was staying in or staying and yelling some more. In true Twist fashion, yelling won.
“And I can’t stand that he thinks he has a right to talk to me like he knows me or like he has anything to do with how I turned out!”
“Well, he’s your granddaddy.” She said it with a shrug and a puff of smoke. Bobby felt himself starting to spiral out of control, and if he didn’t grab hold of his anger and reign it in he was going to probably say something he shouldn’t.
“Yeah, good thing I only met him when I’m seventeen, huh?”
“Well, whose fault is that?” She shot back.
“That’s yours!” Bobby finally exploded, finally lost the fight with his emotions. He was flat out screaming now. “It’s your fault because you didn’t want me when I was a baby and you ain’t never wanted nothing to do with me my whole life! You couldn’t make it for one birthday?! You couldn’t stand talking to me more’an when Daddy makes me call you every fucking holiday?! What, you just forget you had a kid? Or you just wish you never did?” He was almost crying now, because those were the bitter questions he’d been longing to ask her as soon as he was old enough to understand what was happening. Mothers were supposed to be there to put a band-aid on your knee after you fell off your bike and bake you a cake on your birthday and send cookies in your lunch at school. Jack and Ennis had done the best they could and they had, admittedly, done a hell of a job, but there was still always that little hole where Lureen was supposed to go.
Lureen stared at him for a minute, her face unreadable to Bobby, a stranger, as painful as that fact was. He thought her eyes might’ve been a little glassy and maybe she was crying, but it just made him angrier. What right did she have to cry? This was her fault.
“You got no idea, Bobby.” Her voice was soft and sounded different from the voice she’d been using all week. She sounded like a little girl. “You got no idea what it woulda been like if I’d kept you. I wasn’t cut out to be a mama. I can’t cook for shit. Why do you think I got someone that does that for me? And I…I don’t know how to be good to a baby. Truth is, my mama and your daddy did most of that stuff when you and your daddy were still here. I fed you, but…well. Jack mostly did the rest, when Mama wasn’t here to do it.”
She lit another cigarette and inhaled slowly. Bobby noticed her hands were shaking. His anger was gone, he realized in a detached sort of way, and left in its place a hollow, sad feeling he couldn’t name. It was the feeling he remembered getting one time at parents’ day at school, when he was still little, and someone asked why Bobby didn’t have a mom.
“I was too young for a kid.” She said, shaking her head. “I shoulda been on the circuit still. Was just too young to do it by myself. People in town woulda talked…” She bit her lip.
“So you figured dumping me off on Daddy would be a better idea?” His voice was raw with sixteen years of unshed tears. He refused to let them all out in front of her. She dropped her head for a second, then raised it and looked him straight in the eye.
“I ain’t saying it was the best decision.” Her voice was soft but still firm. “But it’s the one I made and I can’t go back now.”
“But how come you didn’t never want to see me?” He was blinking away tears, trying his damndest not to let her see, but his voice was betraying him anyway. He heard her suck in a breath and maybe there was a sniffle in there too, but he was seeing now that some of his stubbornness must’ve come from her because no way she’d let those tears spill.
“It was too hard.”
“Too hard.” He tried to absorb that but still couldn’t quite get it. It was hard not having a mama his whole life, and she was saying it was too hard for her to be around?
“I couldn’t…I couldn’t see you, knowing it’d only be for a little while. And you…” This time when she pulled in a breath he knew he heard a sniffle. “You’re just a little piece of your daddy. And I just thought that one Jack Twist taking my heart was prob’ly all I could handle in one lifetime.”
A little piece of him, that part that remembered that parents’ day and all the Mother’s Days presents he’d had to make in school to take home to no mother, wanted to stay hard and calloused and put his hands on her shoulders and shake her hard, screaming “What about how hard it was for me, growing up thinking you just didn’t want me?”
But he was too tired. He wasn’t even eighteen yet, and he knew an old man’s weariness. He didn’t say another word, just turned and slowly climbed the stairs, as if his bones were old and could hardly make the trip. And somewhere in the back of his head, a quiet whisper told him let be, let be.
While the chili was simmering, filling the house with a smell that was…interesting, to say the least, Jack very pointedly said that he wanted to wash up a bit after his long drive. He went upstairs, and then Ennis cleared his throat, eyes darting around, flush making its way up his neck and across his wide face. He opened his mouth as if to make his own excuse to go upstairs, then closed it and instead just turned tail and ran. Junior laughed a little, amused that he was so embarrassed about it. And then she wrinkled her nose, because…well, gross.
Ennis had the presence of mind to close and lock the bedroom door and then he was gone, grabbing Jack and setting upon him. They kissed wildly, hands scrabbling and scratching, desperate, as if they’d been apart for months, or weeks at the very least, instead of mere days. Jack was moaning into Ennis’s mouth, the way he had a tendency to do, and it drove Ennis wild, just as it always did. Finally, neither of them could stand just kissing, and the clothes started coming off.
Jack moaned some more as Ennis sucked at his neck, and that nearly ended Ennis right there. He push-walked Jack over to the bed, whimpering a little himself as Jack’s hands went to all the right spots. They were well practiced with each other’s bodies; knew all the right buttons to push and all the tricks to pull.
“Missed you,” Jack mumbled against Ennis’s lips. Well, actually, it came out sounding more like “Mgnh oo.” because his tongue was otherwise occupied, but Ennis got the general idea.
“Uh huh.” Ennis’s sounded right, because he didn’t need his tongue for that phrase. Then he added, “Oo oo.” Jack could’ve taken it simply as a compliment to his kissing abilities, but he knew it was supposed to be “You too.” Jack entertained a little fantasy of them somehow losing their tongues in some sort of freak accident and still being able to communicate, but then oh God, that fantasy disappeared as he realized Ennis was going to need his tongue if he was going to keep doing that. And he definitely was going to keep that up if Jack had anything to say about it.
Ennis pulled away, making Jack whine a little. Ennis nuzzled at Jack’s neck, then pushed their foreheads together and looked into those blue eyes that drove him wild.
“God, I love you.” He mumbled.
That was it for Jack. He grabbed Ennis in a fierce kiss, and there was definitely no more talking after that.
-----------------------------
Bobby stalked away blindly, anger burning so fierce he wandered up stairs and around corners and down halls until he’d burned down some and realized he didn’t know where he was. Hmm. Probably not a good thing.
Judging by the amount of large, cranky women and frazzled men, Bobby’d wandered to the maternity ward. That was helpful to know, he supposed, but he didn’t know how to get back to L.D.’s room. He didn’t really want to go back, but he didn’t really have a choice at the present time, unless he wanted to spend the rest of his life at the hospital. He blew out a frustrated breath and, out of the corner of his eye, spotted a pay phone. Score.
His anger started to peter out as he waited patiently for the man using the phone to finish exclaiming over his new baby girl to whoever he was talking to. “Seven pounds even! Most beautiful thing you’d ever see!” Yeah, yeah. Whoever they are, buddy, they don’t agree with you, so just wrap it up. Okay, so maybe he was still a touch cranky.
Finally, the new daddy hung up. He had a wild grin and even wilder hair. He had some seriously nasty looking stains on the scrubs he was wearing. Nasty enough for Bobby to reconsider children. But the huge grin, paired with tear tracks, made Bobby think maybe it was worth it. Obviously Lureen didn’t agree. That made Bobby’s anger come back in full force.
“H’lo?” Ennis answered the phone while chewing something.
“I’m coming home!” Bobby started off, not calmly or rationally at all, as he’d hoped to be. He’d also said it a bit louder than he’d meant to and saw some heads swivel toward him. He hunched his shoulders, a nice little trick he’d learned from Ennis, and scrunched closer to the wall.
“What? What’samatter?” Ennis swallowed whatever he was eating.
“I’m sick of it here. Sick of L.D. and sick of Lureen and I’m ready to be home.”
“Hey, now, slow down. What happened?”
Bobby heard Jack in the background. “Who is it? What’s wrong? Is it Bobby? Is something wrong with Bobby?”
The thought of being somewhere people actually loved him and wanted him around made a lump rise up in Bobby’s throat and replaced his burning anger with a dull, throbbing homesickness. Why did he have to be out in stupid Texas? He wanted to go home, with the wind he hated and the cows and his horses and his dog and his family. He’d never been this far away before.
“What’s wrong with Bobby?” Jack called again from wherever.
“Well, shut up so I can figure it out!” Ennis finally sassed back. “Bobby? What’s going on out there?” His voice was tinged with worry now.
“I just…” Bobby cleared his throat. “I want to come home.” To his horror, his voice cracked and he felt the hot sting of tears. He blinked hard and fast to get rid of them.
“Okay.” Ennis said slowly. “You gotta tell me why, though.”
“I just do.” Bobby had to whisper to keep from crying. “I miss you and Daddy. And Junior.”
Ennis sighed and cleared his throat.
“Well, you know, we miss you too, bud, but…”
“Ennis, please!” More heads turned to look at him, but he didn’t even care anymore.
“You…you homesick?” Ennis asked. Bobby hesitated. Was Ennis going to think he was a baby if he admitted it? He was being a baby. But knowing that didn’t make him any less homesick.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.” Ennis was quiet a minute. Bobby was sure he was annoyed. Annoyed to be saddled with such a baby. He was nearly eighteen years old! “Well, can’t say I blame ya. You ain’t never been away for long, huh?”
“Huh uh.” Bobby was ducking his head to hide his swimmy eyes, though no one could see them anyway.
“Yeah.” They were both quiet, but Bobby could hear Buddy barking and Jack yapping at Ennis, probably hovering right at his shoulder. “We…we sure miss you, you gotta know that.”
“Then lemme come home.” Bobby’s voice was dangerously close to a wail. Ennis sighed. Before he could answer, Bobby heard the clack-clack-clack of heels and a sharp voice ring out through the whole floor: “Robert John Twist!”
“Shit.” Ennis swore. “Voice sounds like a fucking witch.” Then he made a noise that Bobby recognized as his damn-I-shouldn’t-have-said-that grunt.
“She is.” Bobby said gloomily. He could hear his father, right in the phone now, probably hanging on Ennis, asking “Whose voice?!” Bobby pushed the phone into the crook of his shoulder.
“I’m on the phone.” He told her, rather rudely.
“Bobby…” Ennis’s warning voice sounded tinny from that far away. “I don’t care how much of a bitch she is, you be respectful.”
“Yessir.” Bobby bit his lip. “Although, you know, she calls me stupid and makes fun a me for not being able to read.” Okay, so it was a lie, but he was seventeen and wanted to go home. He was not above slander.
“She what?!”
“Nah, she never did that.” Bobby admitted. He was a bad liar; always had been. He always felt too guilty.
“Damn, Bobby, I was goin’ a come out there myself and getcha.”
“You still could.” Bobby said hopefully.
“Listen. You hang up now, you talk to her, and if she’s still…still being that way, you call. We’ll bring you home right away.” Ennis told him.
“What is going on?!” Jack was beside himself.
“Promise?” Bobby knew he sounded like a little kid, but he couldn’t help it.
“Promise. Cross my heart and all that.” Ennis chuckled a little, remembering when Bobby used to insist they all had to cross their hearts, hope to die, swear on your mama’s grave (that one went away once he was old enough to understand that Ennis’s mother was actually dead and all the things that entailed), spit shake on every promise.
“Okay.” Bobby sighed. “I’ll prob’ly be calling later.”
“Well, you call later, no matter what happens, ‘kay?”
“Okay. Tell Daddy to calm down ‘fore he has a fucking stroke.”
He hung up and took a deep breath. Lureen was standing there, arms crossed, heel tapping, eyes bugging out of her head with rage.
“You can’t just go off like that!” She shouted. “You hear me?”
“I ain’t deaf!” Bobby felt his own anger start up again. “And I ain’t a little kid, neither!”
Just then, Lureen noticed that everyone was staring at them. Always one to keep up her appearances, she smiled that cold business smile and said stiffly, “Why don’t we go on home?”
Bobby was having none of it. “I’d love to,” he spat. “But my home is in Wyoming.”
Her teeth were clenched together so hard he could hear them grinding. “Come on.” She hissed. She tried to grab his arm but he yanked himself away from her.
“Um…I think I changed my mind.” Bobby heard one of the younger pregnant women say morosely.
As soon as they’d both slammed the car doors closed, Lureen was laying into him. “What the hell is your problem?!” She shouted, throwing the car into gear and backing out without even looking. Bobby hoped a car magically appeared.
“I don’t think I did anything wrong.” Bobby said calmly. It was a fake calm, meant to infuriate her. It always infuriated Jack, and it always infuriated Bobby when Jack used the calm voice on him. Lureen, unfortunately, was already so livid that the calm voice was lost on her.
“Oh, you don’t, don’t you?” She jerkily lit a cigarette and took a long drag. “You scream at a sick old man and then you just disappear and now you don’t think you did anything wrong?”
Well, when she put it that way…
“I left so I could cool off, because that nasty old bastard finally crossed the line!”
So much for that whole cooling off thing.
“Don’t you dare talk about him that way!” She changed lanes and almost collided with the one other car on the highway. The other driver honked and Lureen gave the man the one fingered salute. Now Bobby could see the spunky rodeo queen Jack talked about, instead of the tight-lipped cold fish he’d seen the entire week. Too bad this was what it took.
“Well what gives him the right to trash talk my dad like that? Huh? You think I’m just gonna sit there and take that?”
“Bobby, my father is a good ol’ boy from Texas. You had to know he was gonna have something to say about Jack.”
“That don’t make it okay!” Bobby exploded, furious that she seemed to think that just because L.D. was ignorant Bobby was supposed to let it go. “He can’t say shit like that!”
“What did he even say?” She sounded less mad now-just sort of worn out. It almost made Bobby feel sorry for her, having a daddy like that instead of a happy, loving one like he had, but he was too pissed to feel any pity just then.
“Oh, just that my daddy’s a pissant who ain’t no good at anything-never has been, never will be-and is surely going to hell for shacking up with another man!”
Lureen sighed. “Sure it ain’t nothing they both ain’t already heard.”
“That don’t mean I have to sit and listen to it.” Bobby blew out a hard breath and crossed both arms as they pulled into the driveway. He slammed the door hard and walked in front of her into the house, debating stomping up to the room he was staying in or staying and yelling some more. In true Twist fashion, yelling won.
“And I can’t stand that he thinks he has a right to talk to me like he knows me or like he has anything to do with how I turned out!”
“Well, he’s your granddaddy.” She said it with a shrug and a puff of smoke. Bobby felt himself starting to spiral out of control, and if he didn’t grab hold of his anger and reign it in he was going to probably say something he shouldn’t.
“Yeah, good thing I only met him when I’m seventeen, huh?”
“Well, whose fault is that?” She shot back.
“That’s yours!” Bobby finally exploded, finally lost the fight with his emotions. He was flat out screaming now. “It’s your fault because you didn’t want me when I was a baby and you ain’t never wanted nothing to do with me my whole life! You couldn’t make it for one birthday?! You couldn’t stand talking to me more’an when Daddy makes me call you every fucking holiday?! What, you just forget you had a kid? Or you just wish you never did?” He was almost crying now, because those were the bitter questions he’d been longing to ask her as soon as he was old enough to understand what was happening. Mothers were supposed to be there to put a band-aid on your knee after you fell off your bike and bake you a cake on your birthday and send cookies in your lunch at school. Jack and Ennis had done the best they could and they had, admittedly, done a hell of a job, but there was still always that little hole where Lureen was supposed to go.
Lureen stared at him for a minute, her face unreadable to Bobby, a stranger, as painful as that fact was. He thought her eyes might’ve been a little glassy and maybe she was crying, but it just made him angrier. What right did she have to cry? This was her fault.
“You got no idea, Bobby.” Her voice was soft and sounded different from the voice she’d been using all week. She sounded like a little girl. “You got no idea what it woulda been like if I’d kept you. I wasn’t cut out to be a mama. I can’t cook for shit. Why do you think I got someone that does that for me? And I…I don’t know how to be good to a baby. Truth is, my mama and your daddy did most of that stuff when you and your daddy were still here. I fed you, but…well. Jack mostly did the rest, when Mama wasn’t here to do it.”
She lit another cigarette and inhaled slowly. Bobby noticed her hands were shaking. His anger was gone, he realized in a detached sort of way, and left in its place a hollow, sad feeling he couldn’t name. It was the feeling he remembered getting one time at parents’ day at school, when he was still little, and someone asked why Bobby didn’t have a mom.
“I was too young for a kid.” She said, shaking her head. “I shoulda been on the circuit still. Was just too young to do it by myself. People in town woulda talked…” She bit her lip.
“So you figured dumping me off on Daddy would be a better idea?” His voice was raw with sixteen years of unshed tears. He refused to let them all out in front of her. She dropped her head for a second, then raised it and looked him straight in the eye.
“I ain’t saying it was the best decision.” Her voice was soft but still firm. “But it’s the one I made and I can’t go back now.”
“But how come you didn’t never want to see me?” He was blinking away tears, trying his damndest not to let her see, but his voice was betraying him anyway. He heard her suck in a breath and maybe there was a sniffle in there too, but he was seeing now that some of his stubbornness must’ve come from her because no way she’d let those tears spill.
“It was too hard.”
“Too hard.” He tried to absorb that but still couldn’t quite get it. It was hard not having a mama his whole life, and she was saying it was too hard for her to be around?
“I couldn’t…I couldn’t see you, knowing it’d only be for a little while. And you…” This time when she pulled in a breath he knew he heard a sniffle. “You’re just a little piece of your daddy. And I just thought that one Jack Twist taking my heart was prob’ly all I could handle in one lifetime.”
A little piece of him, that part that remembered that parents’ day and all the Mother’s Days presents he’d had to make in school to take home to no mother, wanted to stay hard and calloused and put his hands on her shoulders and shake her hard, screaming “What about how hard it was for me, growing up thinking you just didn’t want me?”
But he was too tired. He wasn’t even eighteen yet, and he knew an old man’s weariness. He didn’t say another word, just turned and slowly climbed the stairs, as if his bones were old and could hardly make the trip. And somewhere in the back of his head, a quiet whisper told him let be, let be.