The Better Man (Chicago Sisters)

by Amy Vastine

  She wasn’t afraid. It simply didn’t seem right to speak ill of the dead. Plus, the truth made her feel like a failure.

  “What are you talking about? What is she talking about?” Maureen asked her daughters.

  Kendall shut her eyes and pressed the heels of her hands over them to keep from crying. She’d cried too many tears over this. She dropped her hands and focused on the concerned and confused faces of her mom and sisters.

  “I guess you can say Trevor and his father had more in common than we knew.”

  “What does that mean?” her mom asked. Lucy nodded like she’d known it all along. Emma’s eyes bulged from her head.

  “He was cheating on you?” Emma asked, shaking her hands off and casting around for a towel.

  Kendall sat down at the kitchen table. She’d held on to this secret for so long she didn’t know where to begin telling it. “When he came back from Afghanistan after the second tour, I could tell something was different. I chalked it up to him being at war. He’d had a hard time adjusting after his first deployment, but after a couple of months, he went back to normal. But this time, it didn’t get better, it got worse. He would start fights with me for no reason. He’d pick on every little thing I did wrong. He was just plain mean.”

  Her sisters and mother joined her at the table. Her mom took hold of Kendall’s hand. “I had no idea.”

  “I didn’t want anyone to know, Mom. I mean, it was embarrassing. I felt like it was my fault. Then he told me he was going back, he had to go back.” Kendall remembered that day so clearly. She’d actually been relieved. “Part of me wanted him to go, but Simon was so happy to have his dad around, I begged him not to. That’s when he told me he wasn’t in love with me anymore.”

  “Did he tell you there was someone else?” Emma asked.

  “No, he didn’t mention anyone else, so I thought I could fix things. I thought maybe if he went away and we had a little space, we could work on things when he came back. He didn’t come back, though.”

  “So how do you know he was cheating?” Emma pressed.

  “She came to the funeral, didn’t she?” Lucy was always more perceptive than anyone other than Kendall gave her credit for.

  Kendall nodded, unable to answer with words.

  “What? How do you know this?” Emma asked Lucy. “How do I not know this?”

  “She was the only other woman crying her eyes out. I saw her approach Kendall. I also noticed when Kendall ran after her and pulled her aside for a private chat.”

  “She worked with him as a translator,” Kendall said. “I knew the moment she offered her condolences and told me all the amazing things she was going to miss about him that she was the reason he didn’t love me anymore.” Kendall shook her head. “I confronted her like a fool. I shouldn’t have. She didn’t come to cause drama. She came to say goodbye to someone she loved. But I had to know if I was right. And I was.”

  “Kendall Marie, how could you keep all this from us?” Her mother’s arms folded around her. Now that Kendall knew how good telling the truth felt, she, too, questioned why she hadn’t done it sooner.

  “Oh, my gosh, what do you do when you want to kill someone who’s already dead?” Emma asked, holding her head in her hands.

  “This is why I am never getting married,” Lucy said, causing her mother to sigh.

  “Can you two keep the focus where it belongs?” their mother scolded. She placed her hands on Kendall’s shoulders and looked her in the eye. “Do you have any idea how hard it was for me, as your mother, to call you up and tell you I needed your help when I got sick? The last thing I ever wanted to do was burden you girls. But I did it because I needed you. You came home and you held my hand and sat through treatments with me. You were there for Lucy, too. She needed all of us when she got sick. And should things ever not go as planned for Emma, I know you’ll be there for her. That’s what our family does. Don’t deny us the chance to do the same for you. No matter what it is that knocks you down, we’ll be there to pick you up and dust you off.”

  Deep down, Kendall had always known that. She wouldn’t forget again.

  “I don’t want to interrupt mother-daughter bonding, but there’s a little boy who wants his mom to give him one more kiss good-night,” her dad said, returning from bedtime duty.

  Kendall gave her mom a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered before going upstairs.

  She found Simon in his bed, buried under every blanket they owned. Her father had even pulled out the baby blankets from his closet.

  “Did you tell Papa you were cold?”

  He giggled and nodded. Kendall smiled at her own memory of being tucked in by her dad when she was little. He’d ask if she was cold and she’d say yes just so he’d go hunting for another blanket. It was a game they’d play until she was covered in dozens of quilts, blankets and even oversized beach towels from the linen closet.

  She kissed Simon’s forehead, the only part of him uncovered. He’d scared her half to death today. She needed him as much as he needed her. They were going to have a very long talk in the morning about not leaving the house without permission. Right now, she was going to enjoy this moment and focus on how Simon spent the evening talking and playing as if his selective mutism didn’t exist.

  “Do you think Max likes Thanksgiving?” Simon asked, already moving on to the next holiday. She was happy he hadn’t skipped straight to Christmas.

  “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him the next time you see him.”

  “Can we see him tomorrow?”

  Like most of his questions today, she wasn’t sure how to answer this one. She had no idea how long Max would need before he’d talk to anyone related to Paul. Kendall also had to make amends for the way she’d treated him.

  “I don’t know, buddy. His mom is visiting him. We should let him spend some time with her before we ask him any more questions.”

  Simon was too tired to argue. His eyes shut as he yawned.

  “Get some sleep, Blanket Boy. I love you.”

  “I love you more.”

  “Impossible,” she said, shutting off his light.

  * * *

  WHEN KENDALL GOT back downstairs, she picked up her phone and scrolled through her contacts until she got to Paul’s name. She tapped the call button and listened to the phone ring. She had no idea what she was going to say if he answered, but something had to be said.

  It went to voice mail. She tried again with the same result. He was avoiding her, she was sure of it. Kendall asked her parents if they’d stay with Simon so she could have it out with Paul, face-to-face. She needed some answers and she needed them now.

  The drive north to Lake Forest was long but uneventful. It was late enough at night that the traffic was light. Kendall rarely drove her red Honda Civic except when she took Simon to visit his grandfather. Trevor most definitely rolled over in his grave the day she traded his yellow Mustang in for it. First, it wasn’t made by an American car company, and second, it was a boring sedan. It was a safe and reliable car, just right for her and Simon. But there was part of her that knew her motivation to purchase this particular vehicle had had a little to do with spite.

  She pulled into Paul’s driveway just before ten. His enormous, all-brick estate sat on over an acre and a half of land. Trevor had come from a home where he always got what he wanted. She rang the doorbell twice and knocked on the door to be sure Paul knew she wasn’t leaving without seeing his face.

  He swung the door open with a frown on his face. “What in the world are you doing here this time of night?” He stepped out to look behind her as if she might have brought someone else along. Whether he wondered if that someone was Simon or Max, she couldn’t tell.

  “We should talk,” she said, letting herself in without an invitation.

 
“It’s late. It’s been a long day. Can we do this later?”

  Kendall shook her head and kept moving deeper into the house. Every room was like something out of a museum. It looked like a model home rather than a place where someone actually lived. She made her way to the gourmet kitchen, which featured a huge center island that wouldn’t fit in any room in her house.

  Paul said nothing. Like an old, familiar friend, Kendall welcomed the silence. She needed a minute to gather her own thoughts. She was angry with him and she wasn’t exactly sure why. Maybe it was because Paul was always so full of himself. He knew best. Nothing Kendall did was ever good enough. Trevor had been perfect because he had the perfect parents. All of Simon’s weaknesses were obviously Kendall’s fault.

  “Did you know? Did you know Max existed?” When he didn’t answer, she pushed harder. “I need to know, Paul. Max is important to Simon.” Important to her, too, if she was being completely honest.

  “Are you in a relationship with him? How could you when he looks so much like Trevor?” His tone reeked of judgment. For a moment, she allowed him to make her feel guilty. Like being attracted to Max was somehow a betrayal of Trevor’s memory.

  Then the anger resurfaced. There was only one person who deserved to feel guilty. “Did you know he existed, or not? Because he seems to think you did and chose to have nothing to do with him. That’s pretty unbelievable.”

  “I don’t need to explain myself to you,” he said, sitting down on one of the stools that lined the island.

  “Wrong,” she snapped, surprising herself. “Simon wants Max to be in his life, so I need to know if what Max said is true. If you did that, if you left his mother to raise him alone...” Kendall struggled to believe he could have done that. It went against everything she knew about him. “Max may not want anything to do with us now that he knows you’re Simon’s grandfather.”

  Paul held his head in his hands and spoke to the granite countertop instead of her. “You could never understand.”

  Maybe that was true. Kendall certainly couldn’t understand how someone could take no responsibility for his child. She couldn’t imagine walking away and never looking back. “Try me.”

  He sighed and sat upright, rolling his head around to ease some of the tension he surely felt. “I knew Joanna was pregnant.”

  “But she was just someone you slept with, so you just left?”

  His back straightened and his cheeks flushed. “I was in love with her! She was like no one I had ever met. Certainly not like Nancy, who I was going to leave. But I needed to have a plan before I gave up everything and made a new life with Joanna. Things like that take time.”

  Kendall didn’t have any trouble picturing Paul doing exactly what his son—Trevor—had done, pushing his wife away until he worked up the courage to tell her he was leaving her for someone else. Trevor had been too much of a coward to admit he’d been in love with another woman, though. Not that it would have made his leaving any easier.

  “Then Nancy announced she was expecting a baby, too. I couldn’t leave my wife when she was carrying my child. My parents, her parents, they never would have accepted that.”

  “So you abandoned Max and Joanna instead.”

  “I did what I had to,” he said defensively. “I offered Joanna money. I promised to help her if she needed it, but she refused. She said she didn’t want my money. She wanted me or nothing. She left me with no choice.”

  Kendall’s emotions were all over the place. She felt sad for Max and heartbroken for his mother, who had undoubtedly thought Paul was going to start a life with her only to have that dream ripped away a couple of months later. At the same time, she could sympathize with Nancy. She knew what it was like to be in a failing marriage and clinging to any shred of hope that it could be saved. Nancy probably thought the baby would fix all their problems, and in some ways Trevor had, but it still didn’t change the fact that Paul was in love with someone else for the rest of their marriage.

  “I thought about them all the time, though. Wondered where they were, if he liked the same things Trevor liked. Every time Trevor did something new, my thoughts returned to the child I didn’t know. I couldn’t be there for both of my kids, so I poured everything I had into Trevor.”

  She would have felt bad for him if he hadn’t brought all of this on himself. His choices, his consequences. The problem was, he wasn’t the only one who paid the price for those choices. Max and his mother had suffered unfairly.

  “I don’t know what to say.” How would Max ever be able to forgive Paul? If he couldn’t forgive Paul, would he want anything to do with her or Simon?

  “I never wanted him to hate me. He hates me, doesn’t he?”

  There was no reason Max shouldn’t hate him, but she had no idea how he felt about any of this. “I don’t know for sure, but you have a lot of work to do if you hope to change that.”

  “He must be a good man if you let him around Simon.”

  The twinge of guilt was back. She had asked Max to stay away for no reason except that she was afraid he was too much like the picture his ex-wife painted of him. The man she knew, though, was caring and kind. He was funny and polite. He knew how to make others feel comfortable and how to lighten the mood when it was needed the most. He admitted his wrongs and tried to make up for his mistakes.

  “He is.”

  Paul’s lips curved upwards for the briefest of moments. Max was a good man. He deserved good things. Kendall realized Paul wasn’t the only one who had some making up to do.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  AS MUCH AS Joanna had wanted to process the events of the day, Max refused to discuss anything that happened on Halloween with his mother. Part of that was due to the fact that she was clearly happy about this predicament, while Max’s feelings were quite the opposite.

  For Max’s entire life, he’d pictured his father as a guy who never settled down. Someone who didn’t have time for a family because he was too self-centered for that kind of thing. His leaving was more about him than about Max and his mom. He couldn’t be there for anyone, not only them.

  Paul Montgomery, on the other hand, had chosen to raise another son. The better son. The son he wanted.

  Not talking about it didn’t stop Max from perseverating on it, though. It crept up on him every time his mind got quiet. It didn’t help that he had no job to fill his time and occupy his thoughts. He only had his mother, who was getting on his last nerve after sharing space with him for two days, and his plot against Katie.

  “Did you know that kale can not only lower your cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart disease, it has so much Vitamin K that it can help prevent cancer? It’s the miracle vegetable.” She dumped a glob of plain yogurt into the blender.

  The small breakfast bar that broke up his kitchen from his living room was covered in notes he’d written for Wayne. Making a case against Katie wasn’t as easy as he thought, and every attack he jotted down made him feel more and more like the bad guy.

  “I was never much of a vegetable lover...or did you forget?” he asked, crossing off the notation to have Wayne look into a DUI Katie got before she was pregnant.

  “You used to love celery. I’d make you ants on a log after school. You’d gobble up a plate full.”

  “Ants on a log? That sounds less appetizing than that kale concoction you’re making.”

  “It was celery, peanut butter and raisins. You loved it. I remember.” She switched on the blender and all her ingredients mixed together into a dark green sludge.

  She was respecting his wishes with regards to Paul Montgomery, but he knew her well enough to know that she desperately wanted to talk about him. His mother had been very much in love with Paul and probably still was to some extent. There hadn’t been any real closure for her. Every time she looked at or talked to Max, she had to think about him. Tre
vor and Max had both inherited many of their father’s features, hence the creepy resemblance to one another. Perhaps it was less creepy knowing they were related.

  Max had mixed feelings about the brother thing. On the one hand, it would have been nice to know he had a sibling. Maybe they would have had some sort of a relationship. Trevor had been married to Kendall, and he was Simon’s father—he couldn’t have been a bad guy. Of course, according to Simon, things between husband and wife hadn’t been going so well before he died. Maybe he wasn’t a great guy, either.

  It didn’t matter what kind of man Trevor was because he was dead, and Max was never going to know him personally. He could add that to the long list of things to hold against Paul Montgomery. Because of him and his lies, Max would never know his half brother.

  Thinking about Trevor always led to thinking about Kendall and Simon. Simon was his nephew. Aidan had a cousin. These were family ties, ones Max would not let Paul’s lies destroy. The only obstacle he worried about was Kendall. She hadn’t wanted Max in Simon’s life when he was just some guy she knew. Would her feelings change now that he was Simon’s uncle?

  Joanna set a glass of the kale “power smoothie” in front of him, a bright pink straw sticking out of it. She had her own that she was already sucking down like it was the tastiest milkshake she’d ever had.

  “Does cancer or heart disease even run in our family?” he asked, hoping the answer was no. His grandparents were both still alive and in their eighties. He couldn’t remember either one of them having heart trouble or ever facing the evil “C” word.

  “Not on my side,” she said, taking the seat next to him. “Just think—if it wasn’t against your rules, I could ask he-who-I-cannot-name about his side, and you could have a complete family medical history. But since you refuse to talk to him or about him, I guess you’d better drink up to be safe.” She nudged the glass in his direction and grinned like the brat she knew she was being.