Drew stepped in front of Nate and Mel, crossing his arms over his chest. “The judge said you have to be sober. You will not take my son from this house in your condition.”
“He’s our son!” she cried with a warble, stumbling in her heels. “You can’t keep him all to yourself!”
The eerie calm of Drew’s reply settled in Mel’s bones. This wasn’t just angry. This was infuriated on a level that surely only a parent can feel when one’s child is in a potentially dangerous situation.
“I can and I will if you’ve been drinking.”
Sherry swatted a hand in the air with a dismissive gesture. “I only had one drink. Just one.” She waved a shaky finger up at him. “You can’t prove I didn’t. It’s my turn to have Nate. Give him to me!”
Drew grabbed at her arm, but not before she stumbled and reached out again in her drunken stupor to Nate, latching on to a handful of his shirt and ripping it.
Still Nate didn’t move. Not when everyone gasped, and not even when Selena called Sherry something in Spanish Mel guessed wasn’t kind. His face was blank, his young body stiff. It was as if he thought because she was his mother, he had to endure such horrific behavior.
Not on her watch.
Mel put Nate’s hand in hers and quietly tugged at it, hoping to remove him from the situation, but Sherry caught sight of it and shoved past Drew. She launched herself at Mel in an awkward, crab-like thrust, catching Mel in the jaw with her flailing hands.
“Who’s the slut, Drew?” she accused, spit flying from her mouth, her lips curled in a snarl. “Did you think you were going to get a new mommy for Nate because you’re in charge of everything? You don’t own everything, Drew, and she can’t have Nate! None of you can,” she seethed, piercing everyone with hateful eyes. “You bastards—all of you are bastards, trying to keep my son from me!”
Mel winced, but she refused to let go of Nate’s hand. Instead, she gave him a hard yank, pulling him back against her. Though he was taller than she was, she thrust him behind her, taking a defensive stance by putting her body in front of his.
If there was going to be a rumble in the jungle, the hell she was coming out the loser.
“That’s enough, Sherry!” Drew roared, wrapping his arm around her waist and propelling her toward the door while he pulled his cell phone from his shirt.
Sherry screamed her rage, twisting her body against Drew’s while he literally carried her out the front door.
Maura’s husband slammed the door shut the moment Drew walked through it, blowing out a heavy breath while everyone else gathered together, muttering terse words.
But Mel wasn’t paying attention to anyone but Nate who’d silently slipped out the back door off the laundry room and out into the backyard.
Myriam was the first to react, throwing a kitchen towel at the sink with a yowl. “Ohhh! That woman is a filthy, filthy creature!”
Selena ran her weary hand over her forehead and patted Mel on the back. “I’m sorry, Mel.”
Mel was torn between going to Drew and finding Nate. “Forget me. What will Drew do?”
“The same thing he always does,” Delia said, pulling a hat down over the ears of her son Patrick who squirmed and giggled. “He’ll call her a cab and lodge his millionth complaint with the courts about that drunk floozy. Then tomorrow, because he’s the salt of the earth, he’ll drive her car home for her and check to be sure she’s not dead of alcohol poisoning.”
Kathleen, dark and gorgeous, and a complete dichotomy in coloring to the fair Delia, scrunched her face. “And it’ll be the millionth complaint they ignore because she’s Nate’s blood. That they won’t terminate her visitation until she gets sober stuns me speechless.”
Mel was horrified. “How can it be okay for her to show up plastered and try and take Nate? Clearly, she shouldn’t be driving with him in the car. What kind of law allows that?” Mel asked, outraged that Nate was subjected to something so ugly and so detrimental to his safety.
“Oh, she can’t. She absolutely has to be sober, but that doesn’t mean she can’t try. It also doesn’t mean she can’t make a scene that Nate has to be a witness to time and time again. In the end, she’s his mother. That’s what the court says,” Maura’s husband, tall and lanky, spat.
A tear slipped along Selena’s pudgy cheek. One Mel was sure she’d shed many times before. “It was her Saturday. I should have known she’d show up here and try to assert all those rights she flings around at us when she gets done at the bar with whatever man she’s managed to weasel into buying her drinks.”
Kathleen put her arm around her mother and kissed the top of her head. “C’mon, Mom. I’ll make you some tea before we go.”
While everyone cleared dishes and soothed Selena, Mel made her way to the laundry room to take a peek out the window at Nate.
The backyard light shone on his lone form, sitting on one of the yellow plastic swings, unmoving, his torn shirt flapping in the subtle breeze.
Mel dug around on the washer where the coats were piled and grabbed the one she’d seen him wear at school. Tightening her sweater around her neck, she headed out the back door into the inky evening.
Nate’s eyes glistened, tearing at her heart. It almost made her want to hunt down Sherry and club her to death with the broomsticks she gave the boys to use for their posture.
But not enough to ignore the pain Nate was so obviously in.
She held out his jacket to him with a smile, then sat in the swing next to him. “Guess you don’t want to talk.”
He shrugged into the jacket, wiping the corner of his eye on it.
The wet film of his tears glistening on the black nylon fabric left Mel gritting her teeth to keep from reaching out and hugging him. Nate didn’t want pity. That much was clear from the determined set of his jaw. And he was twelve. If anything, he’d rather give up his Xbox 360 than cry in front of her.
“Not really.”
She shrugged her shoulders like it was no skin off her nose, taking the swing next to his and rocking it by using her toes. “Okay. I can just sit. Or I can go back inside. I hear there’s flan, and we both know how I feel about dessert.”
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
“For?”
“My mother. She’s not a bad person mostly. But when she drinks, she has a pretty bad temper, and sometimes she says things that are rude.”
“No sweat.”
“She hit you.” His voice hitched just enough to let his embarrassment leak into it.
Which meant she had to go out of her way to prove to him she didn’t care what his mother did. It was no reflection on him. Mel began to pump her legs. “Hah! That was nothing. You should have seen the time Neil slugged me in the eye during a particularly intense tango. That was something.”
“You don’t have to be nice.”
“I’m not being nice. I’m being factual. There’s a difference.”
“You have a bruise.”
Mel ran her finger over the lump forming on her jaw. “Do I? Huh. Didn’t even feel it.”
“Did my dad take her home?” The worry in Nate’s voice shredded her, but she refused to allow him to think she was affected or put off by him because his mother was an alcoholic.
“Not sure. You want me to go see?”
He shook his head hard “No! I mean. No,” his tone softened in his typical showing of respect. “Please don’t. She’ll only get angrier if she sees you.”
Mel nodded her understanding. “Then I’ll stay put.”
“I don’t get her. She doesn’t want my dad, and she doesn’t want to be married to my dad, but she doesn’t want him to be around anyone else. That’s why she acted like that when she saw you. I’m sorry she called you a slut.”
Mel tried not to let Nate see how that information affected her, and she didn’t want him to think she’d use him to pry. Nate was letting off steam, and she had to show him she respected that.
“How about you quit apologizing for someone else’s
behavior? And let me tell you about the competitive world of ballroom dancing. That word is cotton candy compared to some of the words I’ve been called. No one can ever top what Joanna Lucille Vega called me. She was dreadful.” Mel wrinkled her nose to show him how dreadful.
“What’d she call you?”
Mel snorted at the memory. “Ladies don’t repeat such things. Suffice it to say, it wasn’t nice and it was exceptionally unsportsmanlike.”
“Nate?” Drew’s voice came out of the darkness, making them both stop their swings.
“Did you call her a cab?”
Drew approached them, his mouth set in grim disapproval, his hands shoved deeply in the pockets of his jeans. “I did. She’ll be fine.”
Nate rose from the swing, his expression sad. The light from the backyard glimmered in his eyes, sharing his unshed tears. “She’s never going to be fine. You know it, and I know it.”
Nate’s adultlike acceptance of his mother’s alcoholism left a cold chill Mel couldn’t shake. Shouldn’t he at least be hopeful Sherry could overcome? But knowing Nate, he’d looked up the statistics of beating such an ugly disease, weighed reports, and factually calculated his mother’s fate based on her past behavior.
If Sherry was the kind of repeat offender she appeared, Nate’s sense of hopelessness was warranted. Being a genius gave Nate a logical mind, and surely he’d drawn logical conclusions. But logic didn’t always allow you to dream.
Drew sucked in a breath. When he let it go, he blew out a puff of air, cold with condensation. “I wish I could say that wasn’t true, son.”
She had to fight to keep her rising anger in check. If Drew didn’t at least leave Nate with some hope his mother could recover, then who would? “Hold on,” Mel intervened, unable to relinquish the idea that nothing was impossible. “Nothing’s impossible, right? People do it all the time.”
“Right. Ever watched Intervention?” Nate asked sarcastically.
“I’ve watched marathon after marathon,” Mel responded. “I’ve seen a lot of recovery in there along with the failures. Nothing’s impossible.”
Drew popped his lips together, shooting Nate a glance. “Son? Why don’t you go inside and help Grandma with the clearing up. I’ll be in in just a sec.”
“You’re mad at Mel,” Nate assessed in his oh so logical way. “Don’t take it out on her, Dad. She’s just trying to be hopeful because she doesn’t know.”
“Inside,” Drew commanded with the hitch of his thumb.
Nate shot Mel a quick look of sympathy before skulking back in the house.
Drew rounded on her the second he heard the back door shut.
“How about you don’t fill my kid with bullshit hope of any kind of recovery for his mother?”
Mel jumped up from the swing set, her feet cold and numb from the chilly night, knowing full well she was interfering where she didn’t belong but taking the road less traveled anyway.
“How about you remember he’s twelve, and while it’s fine to teach him reality sucks, it can be tempered with some hope?”
“Because he’s my son and not yours, and while you teach him in the classroom, I think I have a pretty good handle on everything else.”
“Good comeback, but his emotional well-being’s just as important to me as it is to you. A healthy, well-adjusted, secure child always learns better.”
“Nate knows where his mother stands. There’s no point in candy-coating it.”
Mel was astonished and even a little disappointed. “God forbid you should instill the possibility for recovery exists. It’s called hope, Drew, and I don’t know if you were paying close attention to your son’s face in there while the woman who gave birth to him made a complete ass out of herself, but it hurts him. Does he have to be so dipped in reality he can’t believe things can change?”
Drew shoved a hand through his thick hair, the lines on his face weary. “I have a lot of trouble with hope where Sherry’s concerned.”
Gazing up at him, Mel pursed her lips. “Yeah, I get that. It’s pretty clear, but do you have to steal Nate’s hope, too? She’s his mother, for God’s sake. He has every right to wish she’d get better. She’s not my mother, and even I hope she gets better.”
He pulled her to him, smiling down at her. “I’m being a caveman again?”
She brushed him off, rolling up her sleeves. “Don’t turn my light switch on and off to avoid the subject, Drew. I understand preparing Nate for the worst. I’d bet my left ovary he’s already done that himself by looking up all sorts of things related to alcoholism online because that’s just who he is. But you can’t find optimism on Google, Drew. That’s an attitude, and something you should wholly participate in practicing. Sure, tell him things don’t look good, but don’t count her out just yet. You have no right to steal that from him until he gives it up himself.”
“And then he ends up hurt because he’s continually disappointed in her? This has been going on since Nate was six and Sherry and I divorced, Mel. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I only know what I saw, and Nate’s resigned to her never recovering because you are. She’s his mother, good, bad or otherwise. Was she always like this? Or were there good times?”
Drew’s smile grew fond—a smile that stabbed at her heart like tiny needles being thrust into it. “No. Not always. She was a good mother—at first.” But that was all he had to offer, leaving Mel feeling left out.
“I don’t want to pry, and you don’t have to tell me what happened between you and Sherry, but I also don’t want to see Nate stuff his wish for his mother’s recovery away because you say it won’t happen. You don’t know everything, Drew McPhee, and you sure as hell can’t predict the future. So with that thought in mind, I’m going to keep hoping Sherry realizes the terrific luck she has in a son like Nate, and wish for the best.”
His face grew soft again. “She called you a slut.”
“Is that an apology I hear in your tone for someone else’s bad behavior? Like I told Nate, that can’t touch some of the things I’ve been called. So forget it.”
His thumb caressed her chin. “She also hit you. I’m sorry.”
Mel raised an eyebrow. “I’ve broken my coccyx—and yes, in case you didn’t know, that’s my ass. A little lump on my jaw won’t kill me.”
“You broke your ass?” His chuckle was deep, rumbling and echoing in the night, breaking the tension between them.
“Well, Neil broke it when he dropped me. And don’t let him tell you he didn’t drop me. He dropped me like I was hot. But I try not to hold grudges.”
Drew’s face went grim. “I should have known she’d show up.”
“I take it she does this often.” Mel didn’t ask it as a question, she had a horrible feeling this was just one episode in a string of them.
“On more occasions than I can count. How she can love booze more than our brilliantly funny kid always leaves me astounded.”
“Has she tried to get help?” How could you not at least try when you had a son as incredible as Nate?
Drew’s next words were snide and filled with residual anger. “Oh, she’s been to plenty of rehab courtesy of me and at the expense of my business. And she always leaves rehab the same way she went in—drunk.”
Mel let her hand rest on his arm, her eyes sympathetic. “I’m sorry for both you and Nate.”
“He’s such a great kid. I don’t know how she can’t want to be as great for him as he is to her.” There was a defeated sorrow in Drew’s voice—sorrow for a wrong he couldn’t right for his son.
Mel remained silent. If Drew wanted to share with her, she wanted something so painful to be done in his own time.
He braced a hand against the swing set. “I guess I owe you an explanation.”
“You don’t owe me a thing. The only thing you do owe me is flan.”
“I know everything about your sordid past.”
Mel rolled her eyes, tightening her sweater at her chest. �
�Like you’re breaking records there? Who in the free world doesn’t?”
“Tell you what. I’ll go get us some flan, and you meet me up there.”
He pointed to the tree around the corner, a tremendous oak, shedding its leaves in a colorful array of bright patterns on the ground.
“In the tree?”
“You afraid to climb?”
“Hah—go get the flan. We’ll see who’s afraid of what.”
“I’ll check on Nate and meet you back here in five.”
Mel rounded the corner of the house, and when her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw a ladder made of rope hanging down the side of the oak. Looking up, she grinned, feeling foolishly lighthearted. A tree house.
She grabbed a handful of the rope and began to climb, hoping it was sturdy enough to hold her. As she hit the top, she threw her leg over the limb that served as the entry to the structure and slid in.
The interior had her catching her breath. Even in the dark, she could see the outlines of two small benches built into the wall of the tree house, polished and shiny. The moonlight streaming in from the window with actual Plexiglas cast a golden hue on the interior that bounced off the walls, creating a world all its own on the planked wood walls. There was a round table made of knotty pine meant for a child in the middle of the small floor, positioned by the benches with a book on it.
Mel slid in and found she couldn’t totally stand up, so she inched over to the bench and grabbed a seat, marveling at the craftsmanship that had so apparently gone into this tree house. Her eyes caught the title of the book on the table—The Forensic Science of C. S. I.
“Nate’s,” Drew said, sliding a plate with flan toward her with two forks. He dropped a Thermos on the floor of the tree house and pulled two disposable cups out of his jacket pocket before angling himself upward and into the interior.
“Is he okay?”
“He’s fine. He asked to go to my sister’s with his cousins for a sleepover.”
“This,” Mel said, spreading her arms out with a smile, “is amazing. It’s like a dollhouse.”
“Don’t let Nate hear you say that,” he warned. “We don’t need no one callin’ this a stinkin’ dollhouse. This is a man-cave, complete with manlike things, including a refrigerator that, if you run an electrical cord to the house, can be plugged in.”
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