The Good Guy on my Porch (Catalpa Creek #3)

by Katharine Sadler

  “Hey, sweetheart,” he said, his expression tender. “Dinner’s ready. I’d let you sleep, but I think you need some food.”

  “Right.” I rubbed my face and forced myself to wake up. My stomach was still feeling empty, but my headache felt marginally better. “Thank you.”

  The food smelled so good I could barely stand it. “It’s just spaghetti and meatballs,” he said, as we sat. “Nothing too fancy, but I thought maybe you could use some comfort food.”

  I stared at the heaping pile of spaghetti covered with red sauce and meatballs and felt like crying all over again. “Why are you being so nice to me?”

  “Because you’re hungry. And because I care about you.”

  “But I already told you I lied to you.”

  He shrugged. “I’m sure you have a good reason. You can deny it all you want, but I know you, Dilly. You aren’t a bad person.”

  I figured I should eat before I disabused him of that notion, so I twirled some spaghetti on my fork and dug in. Oscar talked about his day while we ate. He also told me about Molly and how into the baby she was getting. She was a grade-A overachiever and already had the baby’s room set up and decorated. All that and she was planning a wedding. I’d hate her a little bit if I didn’t know what a nice person she was.

  After we’d eaten, I helped Oscar clean up. With food in my belly, I was feeling much better, though I was dreading the talk we were about to have. No matter what he said, I didn’t see how he could forgive me. And I couldn’t lie to him anymore.

  I took his hand and led him to the couch, enjoying the feel of his warm palm against mine for what I was sure would be the last time.

  “I made up Jerome to cover up the fact that my mother needs me to call and check in with her at least five times a day. No one…No one in town knows my mother is ill, and I can’t let them find out, she wouldn’t want it.”

  He stared at me, shock obvious. He reached for me, shook his head, looked at the ceiling and then back at me. “You’ve been single this entire time?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But, if it makes you feel any better, I lie to everyone. I lie all the time.”

  “You’re a pathological liar?” Now he was leaning away, his expression closing down.

  “No. Absolutely not. At least, I don’t think so. I only lie to keep my mother’s secret. To protect everyone else from my sad story, you know?”

  “Protect everyone else?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Everyone else has their own issues to deal with, their own problems. I’m a good friend by supporting them, by not bringing them down with my problems.”

  “So, you don’t talk to anyone about your mother? You’ve never talked to anyone about her…What exactly is her illness?”

  “Anxiety, paranoia, depression. She’s been diagnosed with them all, but she won’t take the medications…She hasn’t found any that are right for her.”

  He stepped toward me and the heavy weight on my chest, the weight that swore I’d lose him by telling him the truth, lightened a bit. “Do you think you could tell me more about her? About why you’ve had to lie?”

  “I’m not sure where I should start.”

  “Just start at the beginning. Was your mother always ill?”

  “No. I mean, she was always a bit of a worrier, like any mother, I would think. But she was a fun, vivacious person. She was always singing and dancing around the house. She had a good job and was friends with everyone. She adored my father and he adored her. They were both dedicated to their jobs and loved to socialize and have people over, but they always made time for each other. They laughed together, so much.” I sighed, my throat tightening. I missed my mother so much. Of course, I missed my father, too, but there was something worse about the way I missed my mother. My father was frozen in time, a happy, loving man. My mother, the woman she’d been, had been destroyed, had been razed down to nothing but abject misery. And I missed the person she’d been, wished there was something I could do to help her become that person again. “When I was twelve, my father was killed in a freak accident. He was a construction foreman, and he fell at work. I’ve never been sure why he was on that roof in the first place, but my aunt, his sister, says he enjoyed the hands-on, labor intensive aspect of his job. Even as foreman, he’d lend a hand when necessary. The fall wasn’t even that far, just one story, but he happened to land…” I shook my head, shaking off the memory. “He died and my mother…She was heartbroken. She and I, we locked ourselves away for a couple weeks and mourned him, but then we got back to living. Mom was so determined that we’d live the life my father would have wanted for us.”

  “But that didn’t last.”

  “She blamed herself for my father’s death. She’d had a bad feeling that morning when he’d left for work. She thought if she’d told him about it, he would have stayed home, and he’d still be alive. She went back to work, but slowly she stopped accepting invitations to parties, stopped inviting people over. It was so gradual, I don’t think her friends even really noticed. At least, when she stopped going anywhere but to work two years later, no one knocked on her door to check on her. It was like they’d forgotten about her.”

  “They must not have been very good friends.”

  I nodded. “That’s what my aunt thinks. I mean, I was just a kid, but my aunt was friends with my mom. She thinks my mom never really got close to anyone.”

  “And when you’re lying to everyone around you, you can’t really be friends with anyone.”

  His words made me flinch, but I didn’t see censure in his expression, just calm compassion. “You can be a good friend to other people, even if they don’t know all your secrets.”

  “You can be a good friend to them, but they can’t be a good friend to you, can’t really be there for you when you need them.”

  I ignored him and went on with my story. “When I was fourteen, Mom turned her paranoia and anxiety on me. I mean, she’d been getting more and more protective of me, keeping me home from school if the weather was the least bit bad, that sort of thing, but when I was fourteen I wanted to go to a school dance. She said no. She put a padlock on my bedroom door and locked me in. Until my dad died, I’d been pretty independent, free to run around the neighborhood with my friends, so I didn’t take well to being locked up. Especially not when my date was Damian Vernay, who’d I’d been crushing on for three months.”

  “Damian the bartender?” he asked.

  I laughed. “The same. Not sure what I ever saw in him, but at the time I wasn’t going to let anything keep me from that dance. I shimmied out the window, walked to Carrie’s house and got a ride with her parents. I told Carrie my mom had come down with the stomach bug and couldn’t drive me.”

  “Damian didn’t pick you up?”

  I cupped his chin and rubbed my thumb over his cheek, trying to erase the outrage from his expression. “He wasn’t old enough to drive, Oscar. Anyway, when I got back from the dance, my mother was furious. She said she’d been physically ill with worry about me. She locked me back in my room. At first, I didn’t care. I went to sleep and figured she’d cool off the next day. Except, when I woke up the next day, my door was still locked, and she’d painted my window shut.”

  “That’s insane,” he said. “What if something had happened? What if the house had caught on fire?”

  I shrugged. “She was at home the whole time, so I guess she figured she’d keep me safe. She kept me in there for the entire weekend. I had a bucket to pee in and she slid food under the door. I pretended to be sorry, but I was freaking the fuck out. I was worried she’d keep me in there forever. On Monday, she let me out to go to school and she went to work. As soon as I got to school, I left. I ran all the way back to the house, packed a bag, and walked to the other side of town to the university where my aunt worked. I didn’t want to risk my mother finding me and dragging me home, so I didn’t go to Aunt Melly’s house. I waited outside her office and, when she got there, I told her everything that had
happened. She wanted to call the police, but I wouldn’t let her. My mother wasn’t a criminal, she was sad and she was overprotective and…”

  “It was more than that,” he said. He spoke calmly, but there was rage in his expression.

  “She was scared, and she was ill. I moved in with my aunt and refused to go home. I was terrified of being locked up again. My mother wasn’t happy, but she didn’t argue too hard. Aunt Melly told her if she pitched a fuss we’d get the authorities involved and they wouldn’t look too kindly on my mother locking me in my room for forty-eight hours.” I sighed. “We didn’t have any proof, but it was enough of a threat for my mother. She visited me every weekend at my aunt’s house and I called her every day, twice a day. I felt guilty for leaving her alone, but I just couldn’t…I wouldn’t be locked away like a fragile china doll.”

  “You were right to stay with your aunt,” he said, squeezing my hand. “What your mother did was wrong.”

  I’d never told the entire story to anyone but my aunt before. Sure, I’d told college friends and ex-boyfriends about my mother’s illness, but I hadn’t told them everything. Oscar’s approval of my actions meant more to me than I could say. I’d felt guilty, like a bad daughter for so long…Still, I hadn’t told him the worst. “We went on like that for a few years and everything seemed to be working out fine. I was even considering going back to Mom’s. She’d been going to work every day and she’d stopped asking me to stay home from school every time it rained. We thought she was improving. And then, I was invited to go on a spring break trip to Myrtle Beach my junior year. I never should have told Mom about it, but I thought she was better…She begged me not to go, was sure I’d never come home again. She was so adamant that I was going to die on that trip that it started to get to me. I had nightmares and was considering not going, but Aunt Melly put her foot down and insisted that I go and that I stop talking to my mother until I got back. I shouldn’t have…But I was seventeen and I wanted to see a new place. All my friends were going and I…I chose myself over my mother. I was selfish.”

  “You weren’t selfish. You were young, and you had every right—”

  “You don’t know the whole story.” I swallowed hard. I never talked about this, not even to Aunt Melly. “When I got home from the trip, Mom didn’t answer my calls. Aunt Melly and I went to the house and we found her on the couch, almost dead from dehydration and malnutrition. When I left, she fell apart. She’d stopped eating, stopped drinking water. She nearly died because I was only thinking about what I wanted.”

  He took both my hands in his and looked into my eyes. “Your mother almost died because she chose not to eat. That had nothing to do with you, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

  God, I wanted so badly to believe his words, but I couldn’t. “She was sick, she couldn’t help herself, and I left her all alone.”

  “You went on a trip and you had fun. She’s an adult and she’d been taking care of herself for years without your help. What happened to her was her choice.”

  He didn’t understand. I didn’t blame him, it was hard to understand unless you saw it for yourself. “We took her to the hospital. It turned out She’d been lying to us for months. She’d stopped going to work, stopped going anywhere. She hadn’t been paying any of her bills and the house was in foreclosure. Luckily, she had enough money from my father’s life insurance to cover her hospital bills and to pay for some therapy, but she didn’t like the therapy and she hated the drugs. She refused to continue treatment, so my aunt put her up in an apartment. Once I started making my own money, I took over the rental payments and her expenses.”

  “And you have to call her five times a day and will never leave town because you need to take care of her?” His words were clipped, and he was holding my hands too tight. He didn’t understand.

  “It’s not a hardship. She needs me, and I want to do what I can to keep her healthy.”

  “Even if you have to lie to everyone who cares about you to do it?”

  “She doesn’t want anyone to know she’s sick.” I sighed and pulled my hands from his. “I’m sorry I lied to you and, if you don’t ever want to see me again—”

  His lips were on mine before I could finish speaking, his hands in my hair, pulling me to him. It was like he’d been curled up tight, waiting, and once released there was no holding him back. I melted into him, forgetting everything, pushing aside the worried voice in the back of my head that reminded me I hadn’t told him everything, hadn’t told him the worst. It was okay, I promised myself. I could have fun with Oscar without getting too close. I needed him, and he wanted me. It wouldn’t hurt to have some fun. I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled myself forward until I was straddling his waist.

  He deepened the kiss, but didn’t move his hands from my hair, didn’t try to cop a feel or take things farther. He kissed me like we had all night to enjoy and taste each other. The kiss was amazing, but it was making me want things, mostly because I knew I wouldn’t have forever with him. I lowered my hands and slid them under the hem of his shirt, running my fingers over his firm, muscled body. He groaned into my mouth and I felt him grow harder beneath me. I tugged on his shirt, trying to lift it over his head, but he just kept kissing me. He kissed me so well, that I forgot for a moment why I was pulling on his shirt. Only a few moments passed before I remembered I wanted more.

  I pulled again on the shirt and he stopped kissing me and smiled. “What’s your hurry?”

  “I’m not a patient person.”

  He smirked. “You act like you’ve been thinking about this for a while.”

  “Nope,” I said, fighting a smile. “Not at all. Not even a little bit. But now that we’ve started…” I leaned in to get back to kissing and the alarm on my phone beeped. “Shit.” I tried to climb off his lap.

  “What’s that?” He trapped me in tight against him with his strong arms. I wanted so badly to forget all about that alarm and get back to kissing him, but I knew there’d be consequences. There were always consequences.

  “It’s to remind me to call my mom. She gets really upset if she doesn’t hear from me.”

  Still he didn’t let me go. “When you say really upset, what do you mean?”

  “She’ll call my aunt, who’s in Italy, and then she’ll start mourning me. She’ll curl up wherever she is and just cry. She won’t eat or drink and she’ll make herself physically ill.”

  He let me go, but he didn’t look happy. I didn’t blame him. Nothing about my mother’s illness was fun.

  “It’ll just take a few minutes.” I grabbed my phone and headed for the porch.

  “Stay,” he said. “You can make the call here.”

  “It’s tedious. You don’t want to hear—”

  In one swift move he stood and laced his fingers through mine, leading me to the couch. He cupped my cheek with his free hand. “I want to know everything there is to know about you, even the baggage, even the tedious stuff.”

  I stared at his handsome face and his sympathetic eyes and hope flared in me. He wasn’t pushing me away like so many had before, he wasn’t complaining or asking me to deal with my mother on my own time. I squashed the hope as quickly as it appeared. There was no hope for us and I should probably walk out now, before things got any more intense, but I’d denied myself so much of what I wanted for so long, I couldn’t walk away from this. It would hurt when it ended, but I was certain Oscar would be the one to end it, that he wouldn’t be the one hurt. My mother was easy to deal with on day one, it was the constant, day-in day-out needs that drove a person insane. I put the phone to my ear and listened to it ring.

  She answered right away, her voice breathless, panicked. “You’re late. Is everything okay?”

  I reassured my mother while he listened. I lied to my mother and he didn’t flinch. I went through our nightly routine of reassurances, yes, the stove was off, yes, the door was locked, yes, the fire alarms were up to date, on and on and Oscar just listened without look
ing impatient or shocked. In fact, his expression was blank and still, impossible to decipher, and it made me nervous. I hung up with my mother and dropped the phone on the coffee table.

  I climbed back onto his lap and dropped my lips to his, hoping to get back to what we’d been doing, but he didn’t kiss me back. My heart sank. Shit, my mother was too much for him after all. I leaned back and tried to climb off him, but again he had me locked tight in his arms. “I get it,” I said. “She’s a lot—”

  He pressed his lips to mine and kissed me, but he pulled away far too soon. “I want to do this right,” he said. “I want to take you on a date, wine and dine you.”

  “But you’ve already taken me on some of the best dates I’ve ever had.” I tried to push against the brace of his arms to kiss him again.

  He grinned, but held me back. “They don’t count, because I thought you were with someone else. I want to take you out when I know you’re with me.”

  “Okay, but I don’t know how you’re going to beat that stargazing.”

  His grin widened. “How about getting naked under the stars?”

  That image, something I’d wished for as I’d laid next to him under the stars, somehow made me want him more. I tried to kiss him again, sure his will would break if I could just get my lips on his, but he continued to hold me back. “We’ll go out tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll pick you up at eight.”

  “Actually,” I said, tapping a finger against my lips. “It’s my turn.”

  His grin faded. “What?”

  “Yep, it’s definitely my turn to take you to do something you’ve never done before.” I wracked my brain, trying to think of the perfect first official date, but the truth was that there were probably a million more things he’d done than I had. Then it hit me, in all its cheesy, cliched glory. “Karaoke. You ever done it before?”

  “Define karaoke,” he said, speaking slowly and carefully. “Because if singing in the shower counts…”

  “Berap,” I buzzed my lips together. “It does not count.” I hopped off his lap, his arms now loose, and clapped my hands. “This is going to be so much fun.”