A Long Time Coming

by Heather Van Fleet

  “Hah, now you sound like me. So knock it off.”

  “I’m not a hypocrite. I’ve got better reasons for my thoughts than you do anyways. I’m physically damaged,” he pointed down to his stump, unsuccessful at swallowing his regretful words, “I’m never going to be good enough to be the man that Abigail deserves.”

  “Oh no, don’t you even start with that, you dumbass. You know she loves you. And you know she doesn’t care about your leg—or any other issues you apparently have either. You and Abigail are the personification of two people who are just meant to be. And as far as I’m concerned, it has taken you way too long to figure that out.”

  Chuckling, he fell back on the bed again, his thigh throbbed at the sudden movement, and he found the end, wincing at the sudden burn under his fingers. “I’m not trying to play the pity–me game here. I’m trying to let you know that my shit’s all coming together—finally. I’m determined to be the guy she deserves, Harley. And for the first time in almost three years, I’ve got a plan.”

  His shoulders fell out of pure relief. There, he’d told someone. It felt amazing to know that he’d verbally spoken the words out loud. Now there was no way he could go back on them without being considered a douchebag.

  “Oh yeah? What’s your plan, Stan? You make some life–altering decision or something? Have an epiphany maybe? I’m good with epiphanies, you know. Some of the best things in life come from epiphanies. Just call me Harley the epiphany queen.”

  Snorting from laughter, he threw his arm over his eyes. His sister was a rambler—and he loved the hell out of her because of it, even if she didn’t know when to shut up sometimes. “Yes. I had what you could call one of your epiphanies. I want to get my four year degree and become a PT.”

  “A PT?” Plopping down next to him, she peeled his arm from his head. Her brows pulled together—her face held confusion and disbelief. “What the hell’s a PT?”

  She was so damn dense sometimes. “Jesus, Harley, a PT, as in a physical therapist?”

  “Christ, David, I’m half asleep here,” she swatted his arm, “…don’t be an ass.” Laying her head on the pillow next to him, they sighed, almost as one. He’d missed this—missed his time with his sister. The friendship they had wasn’t something he could ever replace with some random person out there in the world. The two of them were one of a kind.

  “Sorry, but you do have a lot of that density in you.” He turned his head and smiled, digging his knuckles into her hair.

  “Well, you and I did come from the same womb, you know.” She scooted from his noogie assault and rolled over onto her back. “I’m sure my denseness rubbed off on you in there too.”

  “I’m serious here. I want to do this,” he sighed again, tucking his arms behind his neck once more. “I mean, I don’t know how or if it will work for someone like me, you know, with a prosthetic and all. I just, man, after being around a kid yesterday with the same issues as I have, I kind of, I don’t know…decided that it was a good option for me—made me feel important and shit.” He sat up straight, knocking his head against the headboard behind him. He couldn’t sit still. The excitement brewing was way too intense to have so early in the morning. “You think I could do it?”

  Smiling up at him, she spoke. Her confidence in him was always beyond impressive. Out of everyone in his family, she was the only one who made him really think about things in life. Think about moving on, being the brother, son, and now boyfriend and father he was always meant to be. She may not have known it, but his sister was his hero. “Yeah, there is no doubt in my mind, David. You’re strong and stubborn—you won’t give up on people, even though you did kind of gave up on yourself once upon a time.”

  Guilty as charged on that one, he knew it. But the most important part was that he was willing to push through it, whether he’d make it or fail, it didn’t matter. He was going to try.

  A knock sounded on the door, and they looked at each other, shrugging, popping up from their positions in unison. “David, Harley? God, kids. Are you two in there? Open up!” The voice grew frantic—terrified—it was their father. The hinge flipped opened, his dark eyes were almost crazed. His hair stood on end and tears were in his eyes. He found each of their gazes, seemingly unsure who to look at as he spoke.

  “Get dressed, both of you. We have to go. Something happened…” The air in the room seemed to still at their dad’s words. David clenched his hands together, staring back at his sister’s face, seeing her eyes widen and her mouth completely set in the same matching grim line as his own.

  Fuck. Something had happened to their mom.

  * * *

  “Sweetheart, wake up please.”

  Her mom had some serious suicidal thoughts if she was waking her up before the sun actually rose. Snarling, Abigail flipped over to the other side of her bed, taking note of the lady in her skimpy, white, silky bathrobe. Her hair was all done up in some messy bun–looking thingy that looked pretty damn killer for a woman who’d just rolled out of bed. That could only mean one thing: Mr. Bob–the–younger–man–builder had stayed over again.

  Her mother was not a morning person, but with the new boyfriend in the picture, she sort of had turned into one. Making breakfast, getting lunches in order—Abigail couldn’t deny the fact that her mom was actually happy, too. But the way she’d gotten to this supposed happiness point was not impressive by any means.

  Groaning at the thought, she rolled back over, pulling the blanket over her head. But then her mom pulled it back down, harrumphing at her, hovering. Dammit—the lady just needed to step away, especially after the night she’d had.

  Foreboding dreams, death, lots of crying…yeah, not a pleasant trip to dreamland, that was for hella sure. Not to mention the fact that her eyes were burning something fierce and her nose was plugged beyond belief as well. Her head felt full of something wicked nasty, and would most likely split down the center soon for all her luck. Crap. She couldn’t be getting sick. She didn’t have time to get sick, dammit!

  “You need to get ready for school. You didn’t set your alarm, and if you don’t get up now, you’re going to be late.” Snarling, Abigail reached over and grabbed the phone. The screen was black. Nice—dead again. Hadn’t she just charged the stupid thing?

  “What time is it?” She groaned, staring over at the curtains. The light wasn’t even flooding through the windows like it usually did, which meant only one of two things. A: It was raining out, or B: Her mother was seriously messed up with her timing today.

  “It’s almost seven, honey. Marcus and I overslept too.”

  “God Mom, can you just not…say his name to me, especially in the morning? It makes me wanna hurl.” She was being stupid, and more than childish, she’d be the first to admit that. But dammit, she wasn’t exactly ready to accept another man sleeping in the spot where her dad…fuck, he wasn’t even her dad anymore, so what did it matter?

  She flipped off the covers, and swiped the jeans she’d worn yesterday off the floor. She had to safety pin them together due to the fact that they were no longer buttoning, and it wasn’t exactly flattering, so to speak. She’d asked her regular doctor about her larger than normal preggo size for being only eleven weeks along, but he reassured her, saying that there was only one heartbeat in there—not two. But he did mention that she’d probably get larger fairly early in her pregnancy because she was so petite. Not what she wanted to hear… But on the other hand, it strangely made her giddy inside to see the way her belly protruded, knowing that there was a good reason for it.

  “Hey, I wish you’d talk to me, sweetheart,” her mother whined from behind her, touching her shoulder. “We’re worried about you.”

  Rolling her eyes, she pulled on a sweatshirt, and threw her own hair into a very craptastic ponytail. “Who’s worried—you and my supposed father?”

  “Abigail, please, you need to know what happened. You need to know we never planned on keeping this from you for so long.”

 
Yeah…right. “So, you mean to tell me that my real father is gone, so my pseudo gay uncle–dad stepped up to take that spot? That’s about right, isn’t it? I mean, come on Mom, how generic can you get? This is like shit in the movies, not real life!”

  “Yes…no…oh crap, I don’t know how to explain this right.”

  Two seconds, that’s all it was going to take for her to all–out snap on this woman if she didn’t get her ass out of there. But part of her wanted to know the truth and apparently that part was going to win out today. Before she even realized what she was doing, she was already sitting on the foot of the bed, gaze focused fully on her mom as she waited to hear the rest of her life story.

  “Talk. Five minutes. That’s all I can give you this morning.”

  Gaze practically begging for forgiveness already, her mother began to speak, her eyes watering already as she sat down next to her again. Her voice cracked like the emotion was eating her up the closer the words crept out onto her tongue. It was the strangest thing to see and hear, because Abigail had never once seen the lady act so…nervous, if that was even the right word for it.

  “When you were almost a year old, your father—your real father—was staying at home with you. He was…out of sorts, I guess you could say. He had lost his job, and he couldn’t find another, so he agreed to stay home with you while I worked at the salon. Then, when I didn’t work, he would go out and take on a few side jobs.” Her head was down; her hands were twitching in her lap. Abigail’s mother looked broken. And for the first time in years, Abigail felt the strangest urge to hug her. Unfortunately though, the two of them never had that sort of relationship. Sadly, it wasn’t something she really missed.

  At that thought, she pressed her palm over her stomach, vowing silently to hug her baby every single day for as long as she lived.

  Shaking her head, her mom broke their gaze, staring down at her lap. “Anyway, we lived in this house we live in now, grandma and grandpa paid the mortgage, so we didn’t have many bills to worry about, just everyday expenses. We were taken care of. So when I explained that he didn’t need to worry about getting a job right away, he got angry at me. Told me he was going to leave if he wasn’t allowed to earn his keep around here. So I apologized, thought we were good. Then when I got home from work that same night, I found you in your crib, crying, soaked through your clothes, wet. That’s when I knew he’d left us. I’d pushed him away. I made him leave,” she sobbed, crying so hard that the bed shook under her.

  Abigail had no idea what to do. No clue what to say, how to respond—couldn’t really feel much though because she didn’t know any better. Nor did she really care. How could she, when she had no idea who the man was? She didn’t care where he went, or what he did. She didn’t know him—had no desire to. But with her mother’s tears and sobs, a sense of clarity took hold of her senses. Her mother painted the perfect image before her. The constant unhappiness she exhibited as Harley grew up. The distance she always put up between everyone—her and her father included in that. The lady had been broken. Utterly and completely broken.

  “Then your dad—er, Jonathon—came over to visit from Alabama. He was always so good to you, loved you since he first held you. He had the intuition your biological dad missed out on. So I asked him to take on the role of your dad, begged him actually. Told him I’d pay for him to move back here. I couldn’t raise you alone. My parents, they would have been so angry that their only daughter was a harlot, living alone as a single mother. So Jonathon agreed to play a role, until I could get out on my own, not live under my parents’ rules… But then he never left and things just got…comfortable, so to speak. No stress of finding love, no worries about telling people that he was gay and that I was now a single mother. And he fell too much in love with you to leave, Abigail,” her mother’s trembling hands pressed against her face as she spoke. Angry tears fell from Abigail’s eyes. She took in the honest face of the most un–honest mother alive and had absolutely no idea how to respond. But no matter what, she couldn’t back away, couldn’t stop listening either.

  “So, what, you guys just kept up this façade? Told the world you were married, when you—”

  “We’re not married, Abigail. In fact…we never have been married. For almost seventeen years, we’ve been in this sort of agreement with one another. Neither one of us have ever dated anybody, at least…not until just recently. We wanted you to have as normal a life as possible, sweetheart, so that included making these sort of…sacrifices in our own lives.”

  Shaking her head in utter disbelief, Abigail stared down at the strings of her hoodie, pinching the knots at the end between her nails. “Our family has never been normal, Mom.” Her voice grew low, quiet as she spoke. Her energy level for the day was already washed away. “I mean, I always knew there was something different. I never saw you hug, or kiss, or anything remotely close to what a marriage should be. And then you fought, all the time. I could hear it from my room at night, and I hated it. No child should ever have to live through that.”

  “I’m sorry, honey. I really am…” Nodding her understanding, Abigail stared at the extra lines around her mom’s eyes, the crinkles lying in rows on her forehead—they were two visual proofs that the guilt she felt over everything had been plaguing her for way longer than just a few weeks.

  “I’m not going to let this go…I need to talk to Da…I mean Jonathon,” man, that sounded awful. He would always be her dad, no matter if he’d been the sperm donor or not. It would just take her a while to get past this.

  “Do you want to know where your real dad is, Abigail?”

  Thinking about it for the shortest of moments, Abigail turned to her mother, her eyes sharp as she stood and walked backwards towards the door. “Honestly, I don’t care where he is. He doesn’t matter to me.”

  “He did love you…”

  Shrugging, she grabbed her purse and slung it over her shoulder as she headed towards the hall, “Apparently not enough, Mom.”

  * * *

  It was a rainy, humid mess out there, and of all the days for her defogger not to work on her car, it had to be today. Lightning shot overhead and she jumped as the thunder crashed around her seconds later. Jesus, leave it to Nebraska to experience thunderstorms at the beginning of October.

  The wipers were at their peak, doing a fairly decent job of keeping the steam away. She’d cracked the windows too and that helped—but just barely. The small parking lot surrounding her tiny school was jam–packed today, so parking along the street was the only option she had left. But damn—parallel parking was not her thing. Admittedly, it took her ten minutes just to get it right.

  Her nerves were shattered when she reached into the back seat to grab her umbrella. So cussing the stupid ridiculous thing when the water dripped down onto her lap and soaked the denim of her jeans seemed like the perfect stress reliever. She didn’t mind getting wet usually, but she didn’t have the time to grab any extra clothes on the way out of the house. All she’d been able to think about was getting to class when she’d left—getting out of the insanity that was her life.

  Her real father had abandoned them. Her father now—her uncle—had stepped up to take on the job, no questions asked, apparently. Sure, the two of them had forgone a lot in their lives to try and make her life as normal as they could. And she appreciated the hell out of that too. But in the long run, she had to wonder if it had been worth it, for any of them? In a way it had because yeah, they had their occasional awesome family moments. Family vacations, holidays… Hell yeah, things definitely could have been worse.

  She smiled to herself, shaking her head, lifting that umbrella above her. Raising her eyes to stare up at the dark sky up above, she reveled in the coolness as the water slipped over her cheeks. She needed to call her dad—needed to tell him that she was sorry for flipping out that night in the kitchen. Needed to tell him thank you for doing the job his brother was apparently not man enough to do. Yeah, the truth hurt—the lies especially
—but the grudge would be painstakingly more annoying than forgiveness ever would.

  So as she stepped out of her car, chin held high, she made a deal with herself. A deal that would surely make her life a lot easier in the long run. A deal to forgive, a deal to forget—she’d take what she was given, run with it, and love it with all she had…even if it was never technically hers to begin with. Her smile grew wider as she stopped in the middle of the street, now fifteen or so feet before the brick building of her school. In the midst of the rain, Abigail simply took the moment to revel in the life she’d been blessed with.

  Yeah, this was good. In fact, with her little pep talk, she felt better than she had in a long time. Strangely, there was still so much wrongness in her world at that point, but now, she’d do everything she could to keep the rest of the bad at bay.

  Today would be a day for getting past the wrongs, and wholeheartedly accepting what she’d been blessed with to date.

  David…

  Her baby…

  A best friend…

  Her mother…

  And the man who she’d never accept as anything other than her dad–gay uncle status and all…

  Yes…today would be a good day.

  But as she sighed and began to step forward towards the steps of the building, the life she was excited to start living flashed before her widened eyes…just as the sound of screeching tires skidded off to her left.

  Chapter Twenty–Seven

  “Where is she dammit! I need to see her,” his mother pulled at one arm, his father at the other. Harley was behind him, sobbing into Mason’s chest.

  “Honey, please…just calm down.” Was his mother actually telling him to calm down? He couldn’t hear her if she was. Nor did he care. He was blocking his hearing, blocking everything around him until he knew where she was, until he knew if she was okay. Nothing else mattered—nothing but Abigail…