The Road Leads Back, page 6
He’d never spent so much time in a grocery store as he did with Kara explaining what to buy and what to avoid. She told him she’d find a farmer in the area to get eggs and dairy.
“What about meat?” he asked.
Her frown let him know his diet was going to be missing more than cans of processed soup.
“Okay, look,” he said. “I can agree to cutting canned goods and frozen dinners. I’ll even stop buying milk from the store. But I have to draw the line somewhere, Kara.”
She patted his shoulder. “You’ll be fine, big guy.”
“Who is placating now?” He looked at the pack of tofu in her hand. “I’m not going to eat that.”
She chuckled. “I’ll buy meat from a farmer who doesn’t use hormones and chemicals on his animals. I’ll start looking for one tomorrow. I promise, by the end of the week you’ll have some kind of meat on your plate. What do you like to eat?” She dropped the mashed soybean curd into the cart.
“Meat.”
She reached for a bundle of spinach. “Hmm. What else?”
“Chicken. I had buffalo at this restaurant in Seattle. It was delicious. I could eat that again.”
“Stop with the dead animals, Harry. What do you like? Chinese? Mexican? Spicy? Mild? What flavors do you enjoy?”
“Meat is a flavor. I’m sure of it.”
She sighed. “You and Phil are so much alike it frightens me.”
He smiled. “Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. You can sneak cheeseburgers when I’m not around. He does.” She stopped scanning the vegetables and eyed him. “I will not feed people I care about processed foods and mistreated animals.”
Harry tilted his head. “So you care about me, huh?”
She sighed and walked away. He caught up to her and leaned on the cart while she started assessing the apples.
“Does Jess have a special diet?”
Kara stopped examining a Fuji and looked at him. “You mean because she has Down?”
“In part.”
“And the other part?”
He shrugged. “Because sometimes kids have special diets. If I want to take her out for pizza or ice cream, I should know if she can’t have something. Shouldn’t I?”
Kara hesitated, as if judging his sincerity, and then focused on the apples again. “She was born with a heart condition, but she had surgery to correct it. She’s perfectly normal in every way except her chromosomes. She likes painting, dancing, and playing games just like other little girls. She may not run as fast or catch on to math as quickly, but she can hold her own with her classmates.”
“I wasn’t insulting her, Kara.”
“I know. But in a few months’ time, you’re going to understand why I get defensive. People treat her differently, and she’s old enough now to recognize it.”
“Unfortunately, it’s something we all have to learn to deal with. Jess especially.”
“She shouldn’t have to.”
“No, she shouldn’t. But you and Phil shouldn’t have been taken away from me either.” He stood upright as she turned and faced him. “You shouldn’t have been a single mother. He shouldn’t have grown up wondering where his dad was. There are a lot of things in our lives that we shouldn’t have to deal with, but we do. I’m going to need your help in not being one of those people who treat her differently and helping me connect with Phil.”
She scoffed. “He already thinks the world of you.”
“For now, but we both know the newness won’t last forever. I want to be the kind of father to him now that I should have been back then.”
“Yeah, well…the next time he needs his diaper changed, it’s on you.”
He smiled. “Smartass. Gather up some of that hippie grub and let’s go. I’m starving.”
“Apples.” She held the organic red orb out to him. “These are called apples.”
Chapter Six
Kara glared across the table at her son. Harry’s suggestion of unwinding from the long day with a bottle of wine had sounded great right up until Phil started in on how horrible his childhood had been.
“We may not have had a big house, but you grew up in loving communities surrounded by people who cared about you,” she reminded him.
“They were communes, Mom.”
“They weren’t cults, Phil. Nobody made you drink poisoned Kool-Aid.”
“Might as well have.”
“We were taken care of because we took care of others. That’s how it worked when you lived with a group of single mothers who were tossed out on their asses.”
He shook his head.
“We were a part of something wonderful. No, we didn’t have a lot of material things, but we had food and we always had a roof over our heads.”
“Yeah, but never one that belonged to us.”
“Golly, that must have been tough on you,” she said with faux sympathy.
She pushed herself up and briskly left the room, empty wineglass in hand. She was loading the dishwasher when Harrison walked in and put his empty glass in the sink. He leaned against the counter and rested his palms on the tile, watching her. She hated how heavy his gaze felt on her. She wanted him to leave. Leave her to the dishes and her anger.
“He’s got quite a bit of resentment about not having a stable home, huh?”
“Oh, you noticed.”
“I reminded him that’s on me. Not you.”
“Don’t come to my rescue. I don’t need it.”
“You don’t need him giving you a hard time over things that happened thirty years ago, either.”
She slammed the dishwasher door shut and faced him. “I did my best, but it has never been enough for him, and you know what? I’m sick of hearing how hard his life was because of me. I’m the one who was tossed aside. I’m the one who lost everything. I’m the one who had to make a life for us out of nothing. He acts like that’s what I wanted. Like I had a choice. I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t have anything.”
“I know.”
“No, Harry. You don’t know. Because you weren’t there.”
She brushed past him and walked the short hallway to what was now her bedroom. She wanted to slam the door with her frustration, but she suspected the glass panes wouldn’t withstand the force. Instead, she closed it gently and leaned against it, wondering why Phil’s comments had hit her so hard. It was nothing he hadn’t said before, but tonight his criticism felt like he was cutting her off at the knees.
Actually, she didn’t have to wonder why his words hurt so much. Harry had suddenly appeared with his perfect life and perfect home and everything she had never been able to give to Phil. This was the life Phil had wanted, even as a kid, and there Harry stood after being missing in action for almost thirty years, offering it up on a silver platter. And there Kara was with nothing to give to her son. As always.
“Must be nice to be so fucking wonderful,” she muttered to herself.
Pushing herself from the door, she crossed the room and looked out the big window. The stars were shining brightly. She could almost pretend she was back home—home being anywhere along the West Coast and as far from Iowa as she could get. Though the city was close, they were far enough that the lights didn’t drown out the beauty of the sky. She glanced back at the bed and decided to move it under the window so she could fall asleep admiring nature. She’d once stayed with a friend who had put skylights in every room in his house. She would spend hours curled up in bed staring at the stars.
She moved the easel and some of the boxes she had yet to unpack and started tugging at the bed. She’d only moved it about eighteen inches when it suddenly started shifting with ease. She nearly fell on her ass from the surprise. She gasped when she noticed Harry moving the foot of the bed as if the frame and mattresses weighed nothing. “Really?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to enter without knocking, but I saw you struggling.”
“I guess I’ll be making curtains tomorrow.”
He ignored her. “Where do you want this?”
“Over there.”
“The window can be a bit drafty. It won’t bother you now, but come winter, having the bed there may be too cold.”
“It’s the first week of August, Harry. How long do you plan on me sleeping in your office?”
Instead of answering, he pushed the bed to where she had pointed and left her side. She glanced back, wondering where he’d gone. Clearly he hadn’t peered in her door just to see if she needed help moving the bed.
He scooped up a box he’d left on the chair next to the door and then sat on her bed, apparently waiting for her to join him. She hesitated but finally did. He lifted the top off, and she recognized her penmanship scrawled across several envelopes.
He pulled one out and ran his fingers over her writing as if it were some great treasure. “I’ve read them all. Thirty years too late, but I finally read them. You were a great mom, Kara. I can tell in the way you wrote about him. The things you guys did… I wish I’d been there.”
Her shoulders sagged as he pulled out a photo. Toddler-aged Phil was laughing as a wave crashed against his back. She took the picture from Harry and sighed. “When he was ten, he was fascinated by the ocean. By everything about it. I agreed to clean this guy’s fish, whatever he caught, if he’d take Phil and me out with him. Phil loved every minute we spent on that stupid boat, so the guy offered to keep taking us. Every Tuesday for months, I scaled fish so Phil could learn firsthand what the ocean was about. He can tell you the best bait, the best time of day, the best locations off the Oregon coast to fish. He can tell you about currents and temperatures and name just about any fish in the Northwest Pacific.” She handed the picture back to Harry. “But do you think he ever tells anyone he learned that because of the sacrifice I made?”
“He’s got his own issues to resolve. You and I weren’t the only ones impacted by what happened here.”
“I know that, but he isn’t a kid anymore, Harry. He’s old enough to have processed some of that.”
“So are you, but you’re still pretty damn bitter that I wasn’t there.”
She frowned. He was right.
“We all have to work through the anger of not having the life we wanted,” he said. “He blames you. You blame me. I blame my mother. And we’re all pissed off at the world in our own way right now. But we’re in this together, and we have to stop being so hard on each other so we can figure out how to have the life we lost.”
“I know. It’s just… He never tells people that I decorated our bedroom like a zoo when he wanted to be a zoologist, or a jungle when he wanted to be Tarzan, or a doctor’s office when he wanted to practice medicine. He just tells them that we had to share a room because we didn’t have our own house. He doesn’t even give me credit for stepping up to help him with Jess the minute he asked me to. His wife left him with an infant, and I was there, without question or hesitation, taking care of his baby so he could finish school. Once, just one time, I’d like to hear him share a story where I wasn’t screwing everything up.”
“He has.” He looked out the window, up at the night sky. “You once told him I was probably on the moon, building a city for us.”
Kara smiled at the memory. Phil’s eyes had grown wide as he hung on her every word.
“And then you told him I was perfecting pizza crust.”
“I really regretted that one. He wouldn’t eat anything but pizza for weeks.”
“And you let him because what he needed to believe was important. You could have told him I was a worthless jerk who disappeared on you. You could have told him that you wrote letters and tried to make me be his dad until you got so disappointed and angry that you finally gave up on me. You could have told him I didn’t want him. But you didn’t. You never threw me under the bus. That wasn’t for my sake, Kara.”
She hated the burn in her eyes but couldn’t stop the tears from filling her eyes. “He always thought you were a better parent than me, and you weren’t even there.”
“If I’d been with you, he would have resented me, too. All kids do.”
“This runs a bit deeper than teen angst, Harry. He really hates the life I gave him.”
Harry sighed as he brushed a hand over her head. “I’m sure it was tough on him to never have the things that some of the other kids did, but I promise you, once he works through some of this anger, he’s going to realize he had so much more, and he’s going to understand you gave him that.”
She swiped at her cheek. “Don’t hold your breath. He’s never been shy about pointing out how I failed him. Somehow it never got to me because I was at peace with the fact that I had done my best. Now…”
“Now I’m here shoving your nose in all you couldn’t give him.”
Her frustration returned. “Maybe I could have given him that life if I hadn’t been sent away.”
“But you were. And I was lied to. And Phil will come to terms with all this in his own time.”
“He’s twenty-six.”
“He’s a twenty-six-year-old single dad with an almost-eight-year-old child who has Down syndrome. He’s never had a chance to resolve his own issues. Jessica is great,” he said before she could get defensive, “but as much as you and Phil want to insist it isn’t any harder having a child with special needs, you know that’s a lie. Not because of Jessica but because she has had health problems and because she needs you more. You’ve both buried yourselves in caring for her and never dealt with the familial problems that everybody has. You think you’re the only mother out there with a kid who thinks he got a raw deal?”
She shook her head. “You don’t get it, Harry. I’ve always known that if he could choose between living with you and staying with me, he’d choose you. From the time he could talk, he wanted you.” She shrugged. “And the moment you showed up, I lost him.”
“You didn’t lose him, Kara.”
“Not like that.” She sighed. “I don’t mean he’d walk away and never look back. I just mean…any little bit of respect he had for what I gave to him is gone because you’ve already given him more than I ever did.”
He put his arm around her shoulder. “No, I haven’t, Kara. I could never come close to giving him what you have. He’s just always had you, so he doesn’t see what has been right in front of him. That’s all. He loves you.”
“I know that.”
“But he doesn’t appreciate you.”
“It sounds selfish when you say it like that.”
“Wanting our sacrifices recognized isn’t being selfish.”
“It’s more than that,” she whispered. “This isn’t where I belong. He fits here. You fit here. I don’t. I never will.”
“You’re right, you never did fit in here. If you had, I wouldn’t have noticed you. Every girl in school was trying so hard to be like Shannon Blake. But you didn’t care about that. You were passionate about your art, about music, about everything. I admired you so much.”
She shook her head, not believing him.
“I wanted to ask you to prom our junior year. I had this whole speech planned out. Do you remember how I used to stand by your easel in art class until you would finally snap at me to go away?”
She chuckled.
“I couldn’t get the words out. I was terrified. So, I decided I would take you to the Valentine’s dance. When that didn’t happen, I decided I’d take you to homecoming senior year. And then Valentine’s again. Then senior prom. I never worked up the nerve, but I never stopped wanting you to notice me.”
“I noticed you. As I’m sure you realized graduation night.”
“Yeah. I was still standing in the corner, waiting for some surge of courage to kick in. Then all of a sudden you were standing in front of me.”
“And then I was pregnant.”
He laughed. “Yeah. Then that happened.” He wrapped his arm farther around her. “The point is I wouldn’t ask you to change, Kare. I don’t expect you to try to fit in. I just want our family to have the chance that was taken from us so long ago. We can’t have that if we tear each other down from the inside.”
She nodded. As usual, Harry was right. She ran her fingers over the letters in the box he was still holding. “I’m glad Elaine didn’t throw them away.”
“Me, too. I feel more connected to you both now. Like I was there, at least on the outside, while he was growing up.”
“Have you talked to her?”
“Not since I took these.”
“Are you going to?”
He exhaled heavily. “I have to sometime. I just haven’t figured out what to say or how to say it without wrapping my hands around her throat.”
“Are you going to be able to forgive her?”
“I don’t know. This isn’t like the time she took my dog to the pound and told me he ran away. She stole my family from me. She lied to me for years. I missed so much that I will never be able to get back. I don’t even think the enormity of what I lost has hit me yet.”
Kara frowned. “Look, Harry, you and Phil can make your own decisions, but Elaine has no place in our lives as far as I’m concerned. I know that’s my own selfish view, but I don’t want to have anything to do with someone capable of doing what she did. And I don’t want you trying to make me feel bad for that. Okay?”
“I wouldn’t. I won’t push you either, Kara. But, having said that, I looked into your parents. They still live in the same house. You do what you want with that information.”
She shook her head. “They hurt me, too.”
“You know,” he said softly, “my mother’s reaction to your pregnancy was ongoing. Deliberately carried out for years. But your parents never had a chance to take back what they did. Maybe if you’d gone to them a week later, they would have opened their arms to you.”
Her anger sparked again. “Maybe I could have if your mother hadn’t sent me to the other side of the country with no way home.”
