My Lucky Days: A Novel (37 page)

The driver’s side opened and he climbed inside. He seemed nervous. More nervous than me. And that was saying a lot. My hands were starting to shake from the apprehension and the nasty spiral of dread bearing down inside my chest.

“What is it?” I asked him. “I can’t take this . . .
this
. It’s frustrating. Just tell me.”

Flipping on the interior light, he opened the console in the center and handed me a photograph.

It took a moment for my eyes to catch up to what I saw in front of me. My breath caught in my throat and the tater tots balled into a knot inside my stomach. That dread. That fear. Not even close to the reality.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the image.

His brown eyes. His blond hair.

I felt myself slipping into a full-on panic attack. My chest hurt. It hurt so very bad with every beat of my heart.

Lucky had a child.

He had a child with someone else.

After all the different women through the years splashed across the magazines, none of those images scratched the surface to the sudden pain twisting up inside of me from this photo. This I didn’t expect. This I wasn’t prepared for. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

I looked up at him as a single tear rolled down my cheek. My emotions were sudden and very deep. I couldn’t stop them from betraying my devastation.

“That’s Sam,” he whispered.

I swallowed hard and nodded. “He’s um . . . he’s cute. Looks just . . . just like you.”

“He’s not my kid, Katie.”

“What?” I shook my head, staring at the image. “But that’s you. I mean.
That’s you.
How is he not your son?”

“He’s my nephew. My sister’s little boy.”

Our eyes locked onto each other. Another tear fell down my cheek. “Wait. What? I don’t understand.”

A layer of pain spread across his face. I read every broken line as they cracked. I could tell he was pushing back his own tears. “My birth mother contacted me.”

I blinked at him as I counted my breaths. “Oh my gosh.”

“A few months ago, she sent a letter to my mama.”

“I can’t believe it. After all these years.”

He nodded absently. “I didn’t know what to do. But it hit me hard. I couldn’t shake it. So I went to find her. She lives out in the country. Back in some hills. It’s a really poor area. And I saw her.”

“Alone?”

“Yeah.” He gritted his jaw. “When she opened the door, I just stood there. Staring at her. She didn’t have front teeth. They were rotted out. And she had chunks of hair just missing from her head. I felt so . . . I couldn’t understand how
that
person could possibly be my mother.”

Part of me wanted to comfort Lucky. And if that dark-brown console hadn’t separated us, I would have wrapped my arms around him. Instead, I reached for his hand. He clasped it hard, looking back at me. “I thought I didn’t care, Katie. But I did. And seeing the truth. It hurt pretty damn bad.”

“I’m so sorry.” I didn’t know what to say to him. It was hard. I knew it hurt.

“Her name’s Trenda. And mine’s . . .” He let out a deep breath, rubbing his thumb over my fingers. “And mine is Bo.”

Our eyes caught. I think a person’s identity is deeply defined by their name. You answer to it when someone calls. You write that name on every important document. Some people change it when getting married as an act of unity. And sometimes fathers pass their name on to a child with a sense of pride.

Whether you liked it or not, the name picked by your parents defined you. And for Lucky, I knew his name had meant something very deep. He loved what Colleen had decided to call him. But more importantly, he loved the reason she gave it to him.

“You’re not Bo,” I whispered.

He swallowed hard. “There’s nothing in me that feels any connection to what I saw. Or what she said. But I know on the inside, I’m connected to her. And it makes my fucking skin crawl.”

I guess sometimes the pain of not knowing was easier to swallow than finding out the truth. “Did she tell you why she did it?”

He nodded. “Trenda said it wasn’t on purpose. She had to run an errand. I don’t know what kind. But I’m guessing drugs. Who knows maybe she was . . . meeting someone.” His eyebrows knitted up as he took off his cap. I followed his train of thoughts right to a place that was even worse than meth. He mashed his hat back down in frustration.

“Trenda said she just left me at the entrance of the church for a few minutes. Thought I’d be safe. Told me not to move. But I must have wandered inside the door. When she came back, she saw us. Me with Colleen. She said everything just clicked. Just made sense. So she left and never looked back.”

“What about your father?”

He shook his head, looking away. “She doesn’t know who my father is.”

“I’m sorry.” I saw the pain he tried to push back down inside of him. He was broken in so many ways. Maybe more than he realized. This was really bad. All of it. “So how did you meet Sam?”

“Trenda brought him out. She said I had a half-sister named Leah. But she’d overdosed last year. And she was tired of taking care of her kid. That’s what she wanted, Katie. That’s
all
she wanted. After all this time, she didn’t give a shit about seeing me. Trenda just wanted to get rid of another kid. She wanted me to take Sam. That’s it. Nothing else. Which is fucked up. All of it. And money. She had the nerve to ask for fucking money as she pawned off another kid.”

And suddenly it all made sense. The house. Moving here. All of it. “You took him?”

“What the hell else was I supposed to do? I couldn’t leave him. Not there. Not with her in that shit-hole. I gave her a fucking check, and we left.”

“Where is he right now?”

“At my mama’s. She’s been helping me until I can get this all figured out. I mean. He needs someone. And when I look at Sam. I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I see me. What I must have looked like standing there. And I know it’s what I need to do.”

“So you’re going to do it? You’re going to be his father?”

His smile was bittersweet. “I became his father the moment I put him in my truck. I’m just not a very good one.”

“You will be,” I whispered. “It just takes a little time.”

“That’s why I wanted to call you. For weeks, I wanted to call you. I just wanted to talk to you about it. But it’s not something you just drop on someone. I’ve been terrified and happy. And confused. I don’t want to fuck this up for him.” He sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You’re the only person who really ever knew all of me. Who knew me when . . . who almost did this with me.” His jaw clenched. “I just wanted to talk to you about him.”

“We’re talking now.”

“I know, but that’s not the only reason I wanted to talk to you.” Lucky turned in his seat so that he was facing me. He wrapped both of his hands around mine. “I’m doing what I can. But it’s hard. And I’m not enough. Sam needs a mother too.”

I blinked at him a couple of times as his words circled around in my mind. He couldn’t possibly be suggesting . . . I shook my head, feeling the panic building. “What are you saying?”

He was looking at me again with that familiar look, the one that made my heart melt. It was mixed with the pain of the story he just told me and the longing that always appeared right before he kissed me breathless.

Lucky lifted my hand up, putting his soft lips against my fingers. “I want you in my life. Both of our lives. I don’t want to do this with someone else. You and me. We could take care of Sam. I know it could work.”

I yanked my hand free of his grasp. “You want me to be his mother? Have you lost your mind?”

“No, I think for the first time, in a very long time, I’ve got my head on straight. I want us to be his parents. I know you’d be good at it. Just meet Sam. You’ll see what I’m talking about. We can do this, Katie.”

“Do what? Pick up like the last eight years didn’t happen?”

“Well, I know you didn’t marry Ryan because you still love me. We can start with that.”

My nostrils flared in anger, and I pointed a finger at him. “Whoa! Don’t go there. I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to. I saw it in your eyes. I heard it in your voice.”

I shook my head. “Don’t confuse the past with the present. I’ll always care about you. But we walked away from each other for a reason. And you know it.”

“I didn’t walk away from you, Katie. You said leave. So I did. You were sad and . . . and broken. I didn’t know what to do. So I didn’t do a damn thing. I let you decide our future. It was the worst mistake of my life. And believe me. I’ve made some pretty damn bad ones the last few years. But none of them compared to me leaving you. To just giving up. I don’t plan to make that mistake again. Not this time.”

The burning panic got stronger as we stared at each other. “You have your career because you left. That was your big break. You would have eventually hated me. Resented me. You had a dream. And I would have taken that away from you. But none of that matters right now. This is bigger than you, Lucky. Bigger than concert stages and tours. Bigger than who’s to blame for the past. We are talking about a little boy. You’re a father now. This isn’t about us. This isn’t about me.”

“But I want it to be about you.”

“Well, I don’t want it to be about me.” I looked out the window into the dark sky. My heart was beating fast, and I was so very confused. “I think you need to take me home. You’ve got somewhere you should be tonight, and it’s not out here with me.”

He didn’t answer nor did the truck move. I looked over at him. “Why are you grinning?”

“Because I think we finally had our first fight. After all of these years. And we survived.” He looked around the cab and then back to me. “No broken windows or busted taillights. I’m disappointed. It would have made a great song.”

My head fell back against the seat. “You are so impossible sometimes.”

“You have no idea how impossible I can be now.” The emotions flickered in his eyes as he stared at me. “I’ll take you back home. But we ain’t done with this yet.”

“Yes, we are.” I glared at him.

He just smiled. “No, we’re not.”

Lucky drove back to my house, thankfully with the radio on instead of more talking. He parked in the driveway. I saw the lights on inside, which meant Peyton was home.

I reached for the door handle and looked back at him. I hated to part ways with us fighting. The guy might be famous now, but it didn’t make him invincible to the pain of finding out about his past. My heart did feel for him. I hated that he finally knew, and it was probably worse than he’d ever imagined.

Everyone wanted the fairytale. Even the little boys. They don’t lie in bed at night dreaming about their real mother being a meth head who probably slept with guys for money.

“Look, I’m sorry about your mom. I want you to know that. I wish it had turned out different for you. But if it had been different, you wouldn’t have needed Colleen.”

“I know.” He nodded. “And I’m working to put that part behind me. But it’s not what’s important now.”

“You’re right. It’s not.” The moonlight filtered through the windows into the cab of the truck. It filtered in the way the past kept hitting me with little pieces of light and dark. “I get that you’re scared. Your world has changed, which is causing you to grab at straws. But what you’re asking?” I sighed. “I can’t do that with you.”

“You could, Katie. Just think about it.”

“I can’t. I let you go, Lucky. Not because it was easy. Not because I was hurting. I did it because it needed to happen. Deep down, you know that it’s true. We were headed in different directions before we ever met. And I was just a small piece of your life a very long time ago when those paths crossed for a while.”

“You’re wrong, Katie.” He shook his head, leaning closer as his eyes pleaded with me. “What I had with you was the most real thing I’ve ever felt in my life. Leaving you broke my heart into fucking pieces. And I tried to be with other people. I actually tried to get over you. But it didn’t work. I never loved any of them. I felt nothing. You can’t go back to just random sex after feeling what I did with you.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better about this? Telling me you slept with a bunch of other women? You think that’s going to help you win this argument?”

“No. I’m just trying to say, despite what either of us have done since I left, we still feel this for each other.” He grabbed my hand, holding it over his heart. “I still feel it right here. I still love you. I never stopped. You were never just a small piece of my life. From the moment we met, you became my whole world. And even when you were not in that world, I still loved you.”

His admission rattled me. I suddenly thought back to the day Ryan proposed at Boomer Lake. The air had smelled of flowers and sunshine as we ate a picnic lunch next to the water. It had been the perfect day. We laughed and smiled together, feeding the ducks little pieces of bread. But as I looked down at a very nice man on one knee, I found myself saying no.

I wanted to say yes. I really did. But the words had refused to come out of my mouth. My feelings for him had not been a lie. Part of me loved Ryan.