by Max Monroe
“How can you say that so easily after everything you went through with Dad?”
She shrugged, but a light of understanding flared in her eyes. “I don’t regret taking that risk with your father. That risk gave me five beautiful, intelligent, and kind children. And one of those kids gave me a gorgeous, brilliant, and gifted granddaughter. No amount of heartbreak from him could rob me of that.”
“Why do you think he did that?”
“Some men just aren’t meant to be fathers. Some men just aren’t meant to be husbands. Sometimes, they try. Sometimes, they think they can handle a wife and kids. But sometimes, they find out it’s just not where they are supposed to be. And really, it’s not my duty or burden to know why. It’s his. I still have all of the gifts we created together, and he does not.”
My mother was a remarkable woman—with a pure, kind heart. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to only say nice words about a man who literally up and left me to fend for myself and my children. Sometimes, I wondered if she was actually an angel sent from heaven.
“You’re too forgiving,” I complained.
She shook her head. “So are you,” she pointed out kindly.
Nick.
“That’s what all your hesitance is really about, isn’t it? By your description, Wes is a selfish, career-driven, good-time man. That sounds familiar, huh?”
“Exactly like Nick.” She nodded.
I pulled up short and forgot the dinner, so that I could turn to face her directly. “Except…”
“Except?” she asked when I didn’t go on.
“Except, Wes isn’t the good-time guy. His friends are. They’re the ultimate good-time people. But Wes isn’t.”
His laughter rang out from the living room again, and my mom’s eyebrows lifted suspiciously.
“God, Mom, I think I make him like that.” I pointed to the living room. “He’s only like that with me.”
She seemed to make a decision then, and she reached out to brush some hair off of my shoulder and then settled her hands on my upper arms.
“After it was all said and done, do you regret the risk you took with Nick?”
I shook my head instantly, without any second thoughts or doubts. “No. I don’t regret it. That relationship gave me the best gift I’ve ever been given.”
“Most times, even if giving your heart away ends in heartbreak, the risk was still worth it. Sometimes, that risk gives you little miracles. And sometimes, that risk gives you life lessons that allow you to grow and learn more about yourself. With your father, I learned that even though I’d love to find someone to share my life with, I’m a very strong woman,” she explained with a soft smile.
“I can always take care of myself and my kids. I didn’t know I was that strong until after your father. I learned a lot from that relationship and walked away with many gains. Sure, when your dad decided to leave us, it was the hardest thing I’d ever been through in my entire life, but it also made me the woman and mother and grandmother and friend that I am today.”
“So you think I should take the risk with Wes?”
“I think you should really listen to your heart. I think you shouldn’t let fear prevent you from taking the risk, if that’s what your heart is telling you.”
I sighed, and she chuckled quietly.
“You’re an intelligent woman, Winnie. And I have no doubts that you will always do what is best for your daughter. She is learning from you, you know. She sees how confident and independent and strong her mother is. She sees it every day.”
“I’m just scared, you know? I’m scared of letting another man step in with Lexi and…” I didn’t need to say the rest. I didn’t want him to leave.
My mother glanced out into the living room where Wes had Lexi sitting on his shoulders. They were both smiling and laughing as he spun her around in a perfect three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle per her request.
“He might make mistakes along the way—we’re only human—but I honestly think a man like that wouldn’t do anything to hurt you or my granddaughter intentionally.”
I watched Wes and Lexi continue to horse around in the living room while my mother pulled the garlic bread out of the oven.
“Dinner’s ready!” she shouted loud enough for everyone to hear, and just like that, our heart-to-heart was over. It was time for me to listen to myself and give it my best effort to follow through. If I ended up wrong…well, I was allowed to make mistakes, too.
“Thank God!” Remy shouted. “I’ve been here for at least thirty minutes!”
Everyone headed into the kitchen and started to take their seats at the table. Wes helped Lexi into her chair and scooted it in. She sat there, outwardly showing a patient little girl waiting on her meal, but the slight bounce in her legs as she fidgeted them back and forth told me she was feeling a little anxious.
But before I could offer some sort of distraction, Wes had already grabbed her iPad off the kitchen counter and set it in front of her.
She grinned up at him and then buried her nose into the screen.
As my mother walked to the table with the plate of garlic bread in one hand and the serving platter of spaghetti and meatballs in the other, Wes’s eyes met mine. He offered a soft, reassuring smile and I couldn’t stop myself from returning it.
“All right! Let’s eat!” Ty cheered.
And that was that.
When the Winslow brothers said it was time to chow down, it was motherfucking time to chow down.
I sat in the chair right beside Lexi and directly across from Wes at the kitchen table and started getting her plate together while she kept busy with a game on her tablet.
Once I had gotten both of our plates filled, my phone buzzed in my back pocket.
I pulled it out and saw a text from Wes.
Wes: Your brothers already have my gravesite purchased. I thought that was very reassuring.
I all but choked on my own saliva.
Me: Well, you’re the one who called yourself my boyfriend.
Wes: I did, didn’t I…
Me: Yeah. You did.
Wes: I’m actually taking the whole gravesite thing to mean I’ve passed their test.
I shook my head. This guy and his misguided ideas about “progress.”
Me: How do you figure that?
Wes: Come on. You only purchase a plot for your family. They’ve obviously welcomed me into the fold.
Winnie: Oh yeah, you’re in the fold, all right.
Wes: I think I can be in a lot of things later tonight. Once Lex is in bed and everyone has gone home. My mouth is craving that sweet, greedy little cunt of yours.
Me: You’re evil.
Wes: You’re mine, sweetheart. And tonight, you really will be.
I should’ve been pissed at him for several reasons. For one, he had completely avoided the boyfriend question. And two, he was texting the word cunt to me while my entire family was sitting at the table with us.
But was I pissed? Nope.
Turned the fuck on and emotionally content? Yes.
I knew my mother had given me her wise advice of following my heart, but holy hell, it was hard to distinguish which was loudest right now: my heart or my vagina.
These were not the thoughts I wanted to be having while sitting at the table with my four overbearing and way too protective older brothers.
Me: All right. Cut it out, Casanova. Unless you want an early view of your gravesite.
He flashed a knowing smirk, and I almost got lost in it. But Jude’s question brought me right back from the brink.
“How the fuck does a guy with an electrical engineering degree from Harvard end up with a football team and a restaurant and who fucking knows what else?”
There’d obviously been an interrogation going on in the living room, but hell, I wanted to know the answer too.
“Hard work and luck mostly,” Wes said around a sip of his water.
“I get the football team,” Ty interjected. “That’s co
ol as fuck. But I still don’t understand the restaurant.”
And then, with one simple statement, all my doubts about Wes moved right out of the way as he shoved me off the cliff.
“The restaurant wasn’t my dream, but I owed it to the woman who wanted it more than almost anything.”
“The woman?” Remy barked.
Wes’s eyes never left mine. “My mother.”
“What did she want more than the restaurant?” I asked, my voice echo-y to my own ears as if I was floating outside of my body.
“Me.”
I knew the feeling.
I want him more than anything else too.
Horns honked and taxis swerved in front of our car as we rode through Midtown Manhattan on a Saturday night, a swirling mix of snow flurries filling the late December sky. Nearly an entire month had passed, and yet, almost everything had stayed the same.
Winnie and I were still in this limbo-like place, searching our souls—separately, rather than together—for all the answers to our relationship. And it was only that defined because I’d made it so, declaring her my girlfriend at her family dinner. I wondered at this point if there’d ever be any definitive answers or set boundaries or ironclad roles, or if it would be this way until we slowly petered into the ultimate brink—death.
After the come to Jesus moment with my dad, I’d known I was going to have to fight, but I didn’t have the experience to know how to go about it. I’d done what I could, giving our relationship a parameter that should have facilitated a roadmap for expected behavior, but we still weren’t there.
There wasn’t much of a time when I wasn’t around anymore, taking Lexi to football practice and games, having dinner at their house, and sharing all of my commuting space with Winnie, morning and night.
Yep. She buckled on the commute. I have a feeling it had more to do with trains that smell like feet than me, however.
But if I didn’t ask to come over, Winnie didn’t protest or offer. It was like she expected me to flake out. And the energy it took to prove her wrong was wearing us both out.
I honestly had no idea what Winnie and I were at that point.
And I had a feeling she didn’t know either.
The one thing I was certain of was that I wanted more of her.
I wanted all of her.
An old Metallica song, “Fade to Black,” played in my head in time with the swerving traffic and gawking pedestrians at the mental image of our slow descent into nothingness.
I hoped we found a way to accept and appreciate each other before that actually happened.
People posed for pictures and laughed as the bright lights of forty-foot blinking billboards highlighted the contours of their faces, and some even stuck their tongues out to catch the falling frozen water.
It was chaos out there—the worst kind for actual Manhattanites—clogging the streets and making it hard for us to be cynical to the same degree we normally were. The week between Christmas and New Year’s was never less than insanity in New York. And these thousands of people, some of them seeing Times Square in all of its brilliance for the first time in their lives, were the epitome of happy.
The reason I was here, subjecting myself to their ecstasy, however, was so that I could make Lexi Winslow feel the same thing.
It was the worst possible time to be traveling to this part of town—the tourist sector, if you will—but when Lexi had started spouting facts about award nominations and work history of each and every member of the cast of Wicked, I knew I’d be spending a night like this. I knew I’d do it without comment or complaint and that, if it turned out as well as I hoped, I’d do it a hundred times over.
With Winnie on one side of the car, me on the other, and a sweet, quiet little girl in between us, I looked out the window and blurred out the mass of people until all that stood out were the landmarks. The TKTS booth, the towering billboards, and the New Year’s ball just waiting to be dropped. Just a few nights from now, approximately one million people would cram themselves into this tiny space just to get a chance to witness its trip down.
Lights danced through the window as we crossed over Broadway and came to a stop about a block away from the Gershwin Theater, and my heart doubled its pace.
Wanting so badly to give Lexi something from me, something I’d noticed and noted through our time together, I’d unconsciously put more pressure on this one night than I was comfortable with. Somehow, in my mind, the success of tonight—or lack thereof—would be some sort of indication of whether or not I could handle this kind of life—stepfather and family man, someone who put other people’s needs before his own.
Knowing there was a lot more to a Broadway show than met the eye, I’d purchased tickets with Lexi in mind, toward the front for the ultimate experience, but over to the side in case it became too much to handle at any point.
I didn’t want her to feel embarrassment or shame, and as her mother, I didn’t want Winnie to feel it either.
The whispers happened whether they were deserved or not: “What a shame she can’t control her child” or “That little girl has no manners.” In reality, this mother and little girl were the cream of the crop, but they’d been dealt a different set of cards in the game of life.
As the car finally crawled to a stop, a mob of people quickly surrounding it in the crosswalk and the rest of the street alike, I climbed out first, holding the door for both of them and pulling Lexi into my side as Winnie climbed to her feet. She looked gorgeous in a knee-length merlot-colored dress, and my eyes flared as she bent forward and her breasts filled the V-neck of the top even further.
She noticed and smiled, throwing me a wink and squeezing my hand as she stood beside me. It did things to me, things I wasn’t sure what to make of, the hormonal man and the people-pleasing child inside me at war with one another. I decided to split my focus as best as I could.
With one girl on each arm, my hand warmly around the skin at the back of Lexi’s neck, I escorted them down the sidewalk and across the street, under the marquee and into the entrance of the theater. I half expected Winnie to chatter, but she didn’t, staying so silent at my side that I found myself glancing over at her face every few seconds just to assure myself she was all right.
Fortunately, a soft smile had pulled up a figurative stool and taken up residence there, greeting me pleasantly every time my gaze met hers.
As we pushed through the far left set of glass doors, the weight of solid construction and years of history flexing the muscles in my arm, I noticed a woman perk up at the sight of us.
Her steps were hurried as she rushed forward to cut us off at the pass.
“Mr. Lancaster,” she greeted as she reached out to shake my hand. “I’m Emily, the theater manager,” she introduced herself.
Either she was some kind of medium or fantastically prepared for her job, having recognized my face the second we walked through the door, but regardless, I took her hand in mine, shaking twice and offering a polite smile.
I still didn’t smile often, but thanks to Winnie, I was trying to add it to my everyday repertoire. “Hello, Emily.”
I squeezed the hand at Lexi’s neck and pulled her slightly toward me. Her eyes came up quickly, but after a very brief encounter with a woman she didn’t know, met the swirled pattern in the carpet just as fast.
“This is Lexi, Wicked fanatic and the reason we’re here.” I turned to Winnie and pulled her closer with a hand at the small of her back. “And this is her beautiful and brilliant mother, Winnie.”
Emily correctly read Lexi enough to know not to attempt to touch her, but she reached forward and took Winnie’s hand as she said hello to both of them. “Hello, ladies. We’re so thrilled to have you here tonight,” she went on before turning toward the theater and sweeping out an arm. “Shall we?”
With the affirmation of my nod, she turned and led the way, escorting us through a side door and around the back to our seats. It was weird, having people thankful for your prese
nce just because you had more money than the other people who had paid the same amount of money for their tickets—and it wasn’t something I’d noticed until now. Regretfully, shamefully even, I’d somehow thought I deserved special treatment.
Now, wanting so badly to earn positive attention from a woman and child who would not give it to me if I didn’t earn it—that kind of notion just seemed stupid.
Still, for tonight, I’d take it, for special treatment of me meant special treatment of we.
With a wave of her hand, a man appeared at Emily’s side with a cushion for Lex’s chair, intended to make her the height of everyone around her so she wouldn’t miss a beat, and I breathed a small sigh of relief.
I hadn’t thought of that, so I was thankful the theater had—though I would have propped her up on my knee if I’d needed to.
“How many minutes until it starts?” Lexi asked as I took the cushion from the guy and moved to sit down.
The theater manager, still within earshot, smiled and looked to her watch before the rest of us could.
“Looks like thirteen minutes on the dot.”
Lexi smiled at the direct answer and happily climbed into her seat, and my own face lit up at her contentment.
I’d learned pretty quickly that she worked better in absolutes, with concise and clear instructions or warnings about what to expect. She didn’t need pattern or routine—just a warning. If she knew what lay ahead, she was ready and excited. I didn’t know if it soothed something in her or if it allowed her to better prepare for the extra stimulation, but I loved that it was something I could give her easily.
“She’s been listening to the soundtrack,” Winnie whispered into my ear, pulling my attention back to her for the first time in several minutes.
Guilt flashed, hot and uneasy in my gut, as I realized I didn’t really know how to balance the time between mother and daughter. Frankly, I felt a little like a fish out of water. Entertaining one woman for a night was easy—trying to meet the needs of two very different, drastically oppositely aged women at once was another thing altogether.