I curled my fingers into fists on my thighs. “Sounds awful.” What kind of person was Joshua’s mother? Who would accuse a dying teen of intentionally getting pregnant to trap her boyfriend?
Regret changed Joshua’s expression. “They were normal for a while when I was young. Before Dad started drinking too much and Mom started lashing out to regain control.” He scrubbed both hands over the top of his head, wrecking his tidy style. He raised an apologetic smile. “I had no idea you needed me. My parents thought I was a worthless piece of…crap. They said I’d never amount to anything. I was useless. I believed them. When Mark pushed me out of your life, I spiraled. I let all the hateful words in and I clutched onto them like they were the gospel and I was powerless against it. When my folks split and moved, I was glad to go.” He blew out a long breath. “I wanted to leave you. I wanted to go somewhere none of my friends knew I was a dad or that my girlfriend was dead, probably because I got her pregnant and she’d refused early treatment. Maybe because I agreed with her to hide the pregnancy for so long. All because I didn’t step up and be strong when she was afraid.”
A gentle breeze lifted the fresh scent of cut grass and wildflowers into the air, reminding me this wasn’t a dream. A waft of lunch carried inside as well.
“Oh.” He jumped to his feet. “Sorry. Give me just a minute.” He ran a hand over his face as he walked onto the patio.
I grabbed the oven mitts and platter he left on the counter. “Hey.”
He turned to me with a look of anguish that nearly landed me on the ground. “Thanks.” He took the items from my hand and rolled the grill top open. Scents of trout and veggies floated into the air. He loaded the grill contents onto the platter and turned off the burners. “Amy and I were going to change the world. She wanted to be a chemotherapy technician. She had a lot of respect for the work she saw them doing on her mom when she was young. I think seeing her mom recover gave her hope that she would, too.”
“What about you?” Why did he always leave himself out? Was he humble or hiding something? I hoped it was the former; I feared it was the latter.
“I was going to be an engineer, but…”
“But she died?” And it had changed everything for him, too.
“Yeah, but you were born. She fought fiercely for you. There was no reasoning with her. She knew exactly what her odds were. She knew all the facts, and she wasn’t taking any chances with your life. I admired that. I admired her.”
“She didn’t take chances with my life,” I laughed humorlessly. “She gave hers up instead.”
He swung his head back and forth, eyes red and chest expanding. “She never gave up. She fought. She was strong, Katy. The cancer was aggressive, and Amy fought.” He made a fist in the air for emphasis. “More than one nurse said no one would’ve made it through without a miracle.
“I’m sorry things happened the way they did, but I’m glad she got her way. I’m glad you’re here, even if I screwed it up too bad to know you. You’re the only good thing I’ve ever done. I wasn’t around to screw you up.” He marched back inside looking exhausted.
I shut the patio door behind us and leaned against the wall for support. So far, he’d done all the talking but my heart was racing like I’d run a marathon. “I remember you at Grandma’s funeral.”
His limbs went rigid. He set the tray on the table and turned slowly. “I am so sorry for that. I was drinking heavily then. I was home on leave and got the news. I drove all night to get here and drank the whole way to deal with the pain. It was like losing Amy all over again. Same town. Same family. I saw you at the casket with your tears and your black dress.” He sucked air. “I wanted to take you away from there.”
My vision blurred. Tears slipped onto my cheeks. “I wanted to go with you. I knew Mark didn’t want me. I didn’t know what to do without Grandma.”
He watched me. Slowly, he pulled a chip from his pocket and handed it to me. “I earned this before I moved here. Two years sober. It’s not been easy, but I’ve taken the easy way for too long.”
I turned the little coin in my fingers.
“Two years,” he said. “That means I was headed downhill for eight years after I saw you at the funeral. Whatever you went through with Mark might not have been perfect, but I guarantee you it was better than what you’d have gone through with me.”
My aching heart splintered into ragged pieces. “Is every family this screwed up?” The words were out before I’d had time to consider them.
“Man, I hope not.” He shuffled his feet. “I didn’t know Mark would be unkind to you. From where I stood, he looked like father of the year.” Shame and guilt marred his youthful face.
I pressed a fist to my aching chest. Why was everything so freaking complicated? “Mark was grieving. He’s still grieving and hurting and just really pissed off. This wasn’t the life he planned. It’s not what he wanted, and he can’t get past it. Sometimes I think he wants someone held accountable for ruining everything. Other times, I think he blames himself.” Since when did I defend Mark? He had been absolutely wrong for keeping my family apart, so why did I feel compelled to plead his case?
Joshua reached for the chip. “I think there’s been enough blame and hurt going around, and maybe it’s time we find a way to heal.”
Chapter 23
Neither of us could eat, so we opted to walk. We shuffled along the streets around his apartment and past the butterfly garden. The sweet scent of rose bushes filled the air where words should have been. A plethora of whacked-out emotions drove me along beside him, matching his long gait with ease, waiting to see where this excursion would ultimately lead. The visible tremor in my hands had worn down to the standard internal flutter I experienced anytime I faced something or someone new. I couldn’t tell if Joshua was taking his time so I could get myself together, or so he could. His shadow stretched out before us, waving over crumbled curbstones and uneven patches of concrete. My shadow was fittingly dwarfed by tree trunks and parked cars. Everything he’d confessed in the kitchen felt raw and transparent. I appreciated that more than he could know.
“So,” he began after so many silent blocks I’d assumed he’d changed his mind about speaking further. He rolled his broad shoulders and groaned. “I owe you so much more than an explanation. I don’t know where to begin.”
“All I wanted was the truth and your side of the story.”
“Fair enough. I want you to know I loved your mother.”
Another shot of idiotic jealousy spindled through me, there and gone in a snap. He might’ve loved me, too, if he’d gotten to know me. He turned up a gravel lane that disappeared into the forest. Sunlight flickered patterns through thick leafy oaks overhead, leading the way to nowhere in particular. The “No Trespassing” signs, nailed to trees and fastened to an aged gate, were faded and cracked from sun and weather. “Have you ever been to Miller Lake?”
“No.” I tried to blend into the shadows as cars floated along the road, hoping not to be seen. Why were we here? How must it look to passersby? Did they know he was my father?
Joshua unwound the length of chains from a rusty red gate and looped them over the anchor post.
He shoved the gate, and it swung wide on well-oiled hinges. “Come on.” He motioned me through when I didn’t respond right away.
I didn’t make it a practice of going down creepy gravel paths with strangers, but this was complicated. How did stranger danger work when your dad was the stranger? I checked over my shoulder for witnesses and shook off the remnants of too many true crime documentaries.
“Your mom and I used to come here to be alone. We practically had to hide to steal a few minutes. Amy was magnetic. People flocked to her.” He shook his head, a look of sadness and wonder in his eyes. He swept the hat off his head and fixed me with that tragic face. “You look like her, you know?” He’d grabbed the trucker cap on his way out the door and wedged it over his freshly messed hair.
“Yeah.” I chewed my lips, busily sorting rampant emotions and errant thoughts into piles of crazy, pertinent, and irrelevant.
He turned glassy eyes skyward and the obvious hit me like a cartoon anvil. Joshua was heartbroken. After all these years, despite a beautiful wife and baby on the way, he wasn’t over my mom.
“I’m sorry,” I stammered, “about your loss.”
He levelled me with a look of bewilderment. “I’m the one who’s sorry. You have no idea how much, and I don’t think I could tell you if I spent the rest of this life trying.”
“I’m okay.”
“You shouldn’t be. I left you and went off on a suicide mission. I couldn’t see a life without Amy.” He squeezed fists against his stomach and frowned. “I was sick. My thoughts were dark and desperate. I was too young and naïve to face any of it so, instead of trying, I ran. That’s all on me. Mad as I was at Mark for cutting me off, he was right. I had nothing to offer you.”
He screwed the cap back onto his head and walked ahead of me several paces. Tension and shame rolled off him, and I cut through the wake to his side. He stopped at a clearing and turned to me. A view of the horizon and the most glorious blue lake I’d ever seen sprawled out before us. Puffy white clouds and pointy evergreens reflected in the water’s pristine surface. Scents of earth and pine drifted in the air. “What do you think?”
“Wow.”
His cheek kicked up in agreement. “Pretty, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hey, do me a favor, call me Josh.”
“’Kay.”
“Did you ever learn how to skip rocks?”
“Yeah.”
We moseyed down the hill to the lake and gathered fistfuls of small flat stones.
“You know what your mother wasn’t good at?” He flicked his wrist and a little rock hopped onto the lake in long, graceful skips before sinking thirty yards away. “This. She was absolutely terrible. I’m not lying. Anything else, she nailed, but this”—he wiggled his wrist and released another stone—“no go. It was good to know I could beat her at something. It’s rough on a man’s ego when his girl can out-run, fish, and shoot him.”
The easy smile erased ten years from his face.
I tried to imagine the cheerleader from the photos doing target practice or any of the other things he mentioned. She was an outdoorsman.
He sobered up and threw another stone. This one skittered and sunk. “I think she was sick long before she was pregnant, but she wouldn’t talk about it. She never wanted to worry her folks, not after what her mom had been through. Heck, maybe she knew somehow and didn’t want to face it just yet. Instinct or something.”
“I don’t think that’s a thing. No one expects to have cancer.”
Josh rocked back on his heels. “Getting her to tell me she had cancer was easy. The minute she found out, she went straight to the library to research your odds in every scenario. Cancer was the only thing she was ever scared of. Seeing what it did to her mama, I can’t say I blamed her.”
He made a throaty noise. “She made me believe the doctors were wrong, that she’d pull through, that we’d be okay. She lied to me.” Anger cut through his words.
His eyes went wide. He scrubbed a hand over his mouth. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
I tossed a stone, and it scooted across the water’s surface before vanishing somewhere just beyond sight. “It’s okay. I’m mad at her sometimes, too.”
“Don’t be. She loved you so much. The doctors didn’t expect her to make it to her delivery date, but she held on a whole year after that, just to see you smile, I think. She didn’t want to miss anything, not a laugh or a step. It killed her to miss your life.” He lowered his eyes and groaned.
“It killed her to give me life.” I fought the words through a tight throat, pacing my breaths to reduce the pain in my chest with each inhalation. Faced with the most important person I’d ever met, the truth came flooding out like someone had punched a hole in the local dam. I braced for his agreement. I’d killed my mother.
“What?” He dumped the remaining rocks at his feet and dusted his palms. “What do you mean by that?”
I lifted and dropped a shoulder then flung another rock into the water. “I guess I feel exactly like you do. Like it was my fault. If she’d gotten treatment sooner, she’d be here, but she didn’t because she was determined to save me and not herself.”
“That’s not true.”
I gave him a disbelieving look. “If I wasn’t part of the equation, she’d have gotten early treatment and she’d be here. I wouldn’t, but she could’ve had other children.”
“Jesus.” He spun in a circle. “That’s not right. She was sick. Really sick. Her cancer was vicious and angry. There was no stopping it.” He swore under his breath and braced his hands over his hips. “You sound insane to me right now. Is that how I sounded to you when I blamed myself a little while ago?”
I dumped my rocks and mimicked his akimbo stance. “You left me.” Tears burst into my eyes. “Grandma died. Mark didn’t want me. He wanted her, but she was gone and I was here. Alone. For eighteen years!” I choked on the scream that accompanied my final words. He’d chosen to spiral into alcoholism and who knew what else, but I’d been trapped. “How is that fair?”
Josh fell backward on the grassy shore and let his legs flop in front of him. He sat stiff-backed, a look of horror on his face. “It’s not.” He raised a guilty gaze my way. “I ran away to the service where I could shoot things and hurt people. I had rage like I’ve never experienced. I didn’t want to deal with any of it. I wanted to die. I marched onto every battlefield with nothing to lose. I was absorbed in my own tragedy. I went off to war thinking your grandparents would handle things.”
“Things like me.”
“Yeah. You. I figured life would settle down when the grief wore off and I was out of the picture.”
“Joke’s on you because his grief didn’t wear off.” I lowered myself onto the grass beside him. “Grandma died. I think he’s slowly gotten madder.”
“Bitter.”
“Withdrawn,” I countered.
“Me, too. Beth almost didn’t marry me because I was so pissed off all the time. I still get like that, but I can’t afford to let it take over anymore. I’ve got a family to think about.”
I looked away, stung again by the mention of his little family.
“Did you ever think about me?” My heartbeat pounded in my ears. It was stupid to ask questions you didn’t want answered.
He blew out a long breath. “Every day.”
“Didn’t you want to know me?” Hadn’t he even wondered who I grew up to be? Fury beat back manners. Why was this my life? How could he know he had a daughter in the world and not want every detail of her existence?
He kneaded his hands and slid his eyes my way. “I know you are Katherine Rachel Reese. Rachel after the girl on Friends, not the one in the Bible, though. Don’t tell Mark that. You were born at three-oh-five a.m. on a hot July morning to a devoted and longsuffering mom, who was a year younger than you are today. I gave you a goofy pink elephant and some matching roses.”
Mr. Cuddle-ups. “You gave me the elephant?” My heart wrenched in my chest until a little gulp slipped between my lips. I pressed the heels of both hands to my eyes to staunch the deluge of unending tears.
He dragged a handkerchief from his pocket and touched it to my hands.
“Thanks,” I sobbed.
“Your mom loved elephants. I would have done anything for her, anything to save her. I tried to give my blood, my marrow, anything, but the hospital wouldn’t take it. There was no saving her.” A tear scooted over his bottom lid and made a lazy trail into his stubble. “I would have taken her place a thousand times, endured anything to reduce her pain by a fraction. She was my soul mate, and I will never stop loving or missing her. Not ever.”
I recognized the raw pain tearing through
his words like a barely scabbed wound torn open. I’d seen this every day of my life.
“I’m glad you loved her. For what it’s worth, I’m not mad anymore, not like I was, and I don’t think you’re a villain. You shouldn’t think that either. Everything was really complicated. I don’t want to judge your decisions. It doesn’t matter how I would’ve done things. The past can’t be changed, but my future can. I’ll always have a mother-shaped hole in my life, but I’m done being a victim. I’m done pretending the past will go away if I ignore it, or change if I obsess long enough. You left, and that sucked. Mom died, and that sucked. Mark as a grandpa? Sucked. But my life could’ve been worse, and I’m choosing a different kind of future.”
He blinked. “You deserve a great future, Katy, but I don’t deserve your forgiveness. I was selfish in ways that ruined lives. I won’t forgive myself, and you shouldn’t forgive me either.”
“Well, I do, so that’s just how it is.” With those words, a weight I’d carried all my life lifted from my lungs and I breathed. “Would you do something for me?”
“Anything.”
I swallowed hard. I knew it was asking too much, and I was fully taking advantage of a hurting man, but there were too many of those in my life these days, and I had the power to help them both if they’d let me. “Talk to Mark.”
What She Wanted Page 21