Heavy Issues (21 page)

A snort full of derision escaped her throat. “If the problem here is tactile and olfactory input, you just have to give some of my geek friends a couple of weeks and they’ll come up with a way to solve that issue.”

“I bet they could.” Of that he was absolutely sure. They learned Klingon, for crying out loud. Sure as hell they could come up with a way of fooling your mind into believing that a small computer was an actual book. “So what
book
are you reading now?”

“It’s for the library’s inauguration. Remember how I told you I wanted to organize some book readings, one for kids and another for adults?” He nodded. “There’s a romance book club that meets in the library, so I checked their reading list and found out one of their authors lives in Boston. She’s agreed to come read a chapter of her new book. It’s called
Bleeding Hearts Lost in Passion
.” He scowled, and she laughed. “Yeah, I’m reading it now myself to make sure there is nothing that will send Mrs. Wilkinson straight to the hospital again.”

“Do I dare to ask what’s about?”

“It’s about second chances. It tells about this guy who, after several bad breaks, grows bitter with the world. His life is all messed up, mainly by his own hand, plus he’s having a hell of a time in his job and kicking his drinking habit. The heroine tries to save him.”

He couldn’t have refrained from snorting even if he’d wanted to. “Delusional woman. She should cut her losses. Dump him and run like hell in the opposite direction.”

Her tone was amused. “Not big on second chances, are you?”

“Nope. There’s no way to help someone hell-bent on self-destruction.”

“You have to have faith in people. Sometimes they just need a little help to straighten out their lives. A gentle push in the right direction.”

Sure, or a hard shove down the stairs. “Sorry, I’m a firm believer that everyone has to go to hell in their own special way. And alone. There’s nothing you can do about it. No way to save them from themselves.”

“Is it that you think people can’t change?”

“Can’t, won’t, same shit, honey.”

“Yes, but—”

“I know what I’m talking about. I tried to save my mother. It didn’t end well.”

Christy’s eyes widened in surprise. “What happened?”

He had every intention of keeping quiet. He hadn’t thought about that day for ages. He didn’t want to now, but the memories rolled over him and he found himself opening up to her.

“I was twenty when I decided to search for my mother. God fucking knows why. She’d been gone for ten years. I guess I was still angry and resentful. I wanted to confront her and throw in her face how well I was doing without her. How well we were all doing without her.”

To his surprise it wasn’t difficult to track her down. She hadn’t reverted to her maiden name and apparently hadn’t remarried. He still remembered how his heart had thudded in his chest the whole three-hour drive. Excitement and dread and fear warring inside him.

While growing up, he’d thought she’d left because he and his brothers weren’t good enough, that she’d traded them for a better family, a better life. He’d imagined her living in suburbia. Baking cookies and tending the garden. Content and satisfied. Spoiling her new kids and husband rotten.

Nothing was further from reality.

“She was living in a trailer park. She looked like a bum. Chain-smoking and sloppily dressed.”

Rachel, his mom, had left Sweden in a hippie bus, met Cole’s dad while traveling around the US, and had settled down. He remembered Rachel as a young, vibrant, beautiful woman. As a mother he remembered her being distant and moody, easily angered and prone to fits and screams and tears, but sometimes also happy and smiling. Taking him with her to the salsa classes, talking to him about the things she’d seen on her travels and the places she was going to take him to. Although maybe it was just his memory playing tricks on him. In any case, she hadn’t been like that anymore when he found her. She was a haggard, prematurely old, devastated shadow of a woman. Drunk or high or maybe both. She’d looked unwashed and uncouth—bloated. Her once-beautiful strawberry-blonde hair had been bleached a horrible, yellowish mess that hung down shapelessly to her shoulders and around a sharp-boned face that had been carved with sour lines. Her mouth was missing many teeth, and the ones in it were rapidly decaying. She was…used up.

The badly patched-up heart he’d had left broke at the sight of her.

“She didn’t recognize me at first. When she did, she tried to bring herself together, straightening her frayed robe, smoothing her tangled strands, but she might have deemed the endeavor useless, as she turned her back on me and began crying. I was totally unprepared for that. I expected her to have a perfect family with well-behaved kids. Or have a high-paying career in some important field maybe. Why else would she have walked out on us if not because we were dragging her down? Anyway, the owner of the trailer came. Loud, smelling of whisky, and got mouthy at her. I jumped up, and as he began insulting her and me, I told her to pack, that I was taking her away from there. The asshole got aggressive with her, so I intervened. Cutting a long story short, the police showed up, she sided with him, and I got arrested for assault and battery. In the struggle the asshole had dropped a packet of dope, and when the police found it, Rachel tried to pin it on me. Talk about a model mom.”

She visibly winced. “I’m so sorry.”

Yeah, no good deed goes unpunished. Or better yet, no stupid deed goes unpunished. “I spent the night in jail. Then I had to call my dad to bail me out.” Thank God the police had figured out by then who the true owner of the coke was, or he would have been in much deeper trouble.

“What did your father say?”

“There was nothing to say. He knew where Rachel had been living all along.”

Cole’s dad had sat beside him in the cell, in silence first. He could still remember the smell of foul sweat that the cell exuded, the way his father had sat stoically there for a long time, motionless, his presence so comforting and so heavy to bear at the same time.

“
I tried that several times, son
,” he’d said. “
It didn’t work
.”

Cole hadn’t known what to say, and he just stared at the wall in silence. What was there to say? Nothing.

“That next day I enlisted in the marines.” Until now he hadn’t spoken about this with anyone. And fuck if he knew why he was telling her of all people. He was ashamed of it, always had been, a black dot in his life that didn’t go away no matter how hard he tried. Rachel hadn’t even come to see him the night that he spent in jail. Not to apologize or excuse herself or explain. Not even to berate him. No, apparently Cole wasn’t even a blip on her radar.

The thing that had pissed him off the most wasn’t her behavior, which didn’t scream mother of the year, but not getting answers to his whys. He thought he’d gone there to rub it in her face, but in reality he’d been searching for answers. Why? Why did she leave them? Then the reality had burned a hole in his gut; did they truly matter so little to her that she left them for a fucking life in a shitty trailer being abused by losers? He’d never gotten an answer. And it’d been just as well. Fuck the whys. He didn’t need to know. Hell, he didn’t want to know. He’d just gone into blowing shit up for twelve years. He’d learned his lesson, though: allowing yourself to be emotionally vulnerable was a fucking dumb thing to do.

Christy seemed to be able to read his thoughts. She reached for him. “Some people can’t deal with good things happening to them. That’s probably why she left you.”

“If you say so,” he said with indifference.

She laughed softly. “Look at us. We’re two of a kind. You’re pissed at your mom for walking out on you, and I’m pissed at mine for not walking out on me.”

He wasn’t ready to admit to anything, especially to anything related to his mother. “Are you?”

She nodded. “For many years I tried to ‘fix’ her, and when I couldn’t, I used to dream she’d finally do something so horrible that I could in good conscience cut her loose. I had this friend, Lisa, in high school, whose mother often disappeared for days at a time, leaving her to fend for herself—no food, no money. When Lisa turned sixteen, she walked out of there with her chin up and never looked back. She cut her mother off from her life. I was so jealous of her! I couldn’t do that because my mother wouldn’t let me. Every so often she’d do something nice or offer me a glimpse of the person beneath all that mess her life was, and I couldn’t walk away. She couldn’t take care of herself. I felt responsible for her inability to cope. How crazy is that, right? In the end the joke was on me because I was unable to manage a normal life too.”

Cole looked at her, feeling like a total shmuck for going on that pity party in front of Christy when she’d had it so much worse. She’d been depending on others for her sense of value, well-being, and happiness, and when that hadn’t come, it had crippled her. No wonder she didn’t know how to take compliments. No one had encouraged her, built up her self-esteem, taught her she had worth. Without self-esteem or a safety net under her, she’d been a scared little girl eating her feelings away every time she felt bad or unworthy, which, judging by the way she talked about her childhood, was pretty much all the time.

“Anyway,” she continued, “the bottom line was I couldn’t turn my back on her, but damn, what I wouldn’t have given for her to turn her back on me.”

He felt his lips quirking up. “How did you solve your impasse?”

“It’s called the accept-smile-and-walk-away technique. She still has the power to riddle me like no one else, but all in all things are better. I won’t lie to you; Fred and her focus on him has helped. You’ll work out your thing with your mother too.”

“No, I won’t. She died some months ago.” He hadn’t told anyone before. Hadn’t spoken with his brothers about their mother’s death. His dad had called and told him the news, but he hadn’t even been interested in going to the funeral.

She turned to him and touched him slightly on his arm. “I’m so sorry, Cole.”

“Don’t be. I’m not particularly sorry myself.”

She didn’t seem to believe him, or if so, she chose to ignore his words. “How did you find out? Did she reach for you at the end?”

He laughed drily. “Nope, my dad had always kept tabs on her. I don’t know why, probably some misplaced sense of responsibility. He told me she’d finally kicked the bucket. Drank herself to death, I suppose. Or maybe the loser she was living with helped a bit.”

Eyes glimmering with compassion, she climbed onto his lap and, without a word, curled herself around him, her head nestling in his neck. He stiffened, but she ignored it and hugged him tighter.

Christy didn’t allow any space between them. Without even knowing it herself, she demanded intimacy of a magnitude he’d never known.

When it became obvious she wasn’t going anywhere, he relaxed into her embrace. She was soft and smelled of him and he loved it.

“You don’t need to pretend around me that you don’t care,” she whispered.

“I. Don’t. Care.” When you cared, people disappointed you. He didn’t need that.

“Yes, you do.”

His temper flared. “Don’t pretend to be telling me how I feel.”

He expected her to stiffen, give him some lecture about his lack of social skills; God knows he’d heard that before from his nonrelationships. He didn’t do feelings. Sex he could do, to everyone’s content, but that was about it, the extent of his involvement. The total of his interpersonal skills.

Christy surprised him by laughing. “Hold your horses, soldier. God forbid I’d tell you how you should feel or how you should take care of your own shit.”

Cole looked at her and felt something very unfamiliar in his chest. Heartburn maybe? He couldn’t breathe properly, as if something was constricting his throat.

He wrapped his arms around her, marveling at how perfectly she fit in his lap, how perfectly she fit him.

“Let it never be said I stand between a man and his grouch,” she continued, “but let me tell you something. When they asked Charlie Chaplin what was, in his opinion, the key for a long, happy life, do you know what he answered?”

“I don’t know. Humor?”

“Nope. According to him, the key for a happy, long life is a short memory.”

Cole snorted. “Wrong. The key to a happy life is to religiously base your life on a bunch of premises you won’t, under any circumstances, ever test. Like the typical ‘I know he’s married, but if I ask him to leave his wife for me, he will.’ The idea is to never ever test those premises. The fuckers who manage to live happily ever after are precisely those who wallow in blissful ignorance. They are all fools, but they are happy fools. My mother taught me that.”

He vividly remembered how it had felt when Rachel walked out. He’d been the only one home. When he realized she was leaving, he’d asked her to stay. Begged on his fucking knees for her not to go. Poor, innocent boy that he’d been, he hadn’t known all those rules, and in his ignorance he tested the hypothesis. It had crushed him. The shock had cured him of any romantic fantasies about life. Never test the premises you’re building your life on, or better yet, don’t have them. No premises, no expectations, no needs, no disappointment.

Christy clicked her tongue. “You’re a cynic, Mr. Bowen.”

Well, he’d been called much worse. He could live with cynic.

She reached for him, her small hands cupping his jaw. “But I like you anyway,” she whispered and, offering him a sweet smile, placed a soft kiss on his lips. “You’re a good man, one any mother would be proud of claiming.”

His heart all but stopped. God, sex he could handle just fine, but genuine displays of affection, which to her came so naturally, unmanned him. He tucked her head under his chin, hugged her tighter, and breathed deep, wondering how long it would take for his hands to stop shaking.

For the first time in his life he wished he weren’t a cynic, because by God, he ached for her. For something he didn’t even know how to name.

But women left. That’s what they did, that’s who they were. So yes, sex with Christy was fabulous. She made his dick stand at full attention in record time, but that was all there was to it. The rules hadn’t changed. Couldn’t change.