Page 74 of The Good Guy on My Porch

“Nora’s fine, Mom. It was a burst pipe. Everything’s fine. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Okay,” she said, calming a bit. “Don’t rush. Make sure you’re careful getting here.”

“I’ll be careful. I have to go. The kids need their lunch.”

I hung up and breathed deep through my nose, trying to settle my roiling stomach and calm my racing heart, but I couldn’t calm down. Everything was going to change and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Vaguely, I heard Lance saying my name, but he sounded really far away, and my vision was going cloudy.

A hand pushed my head down between my knees. “Slow deep breaths, sweetie,” Lance said. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

I felt better with my head down. I followed his advice and took slow, deep breaths. “I’m okay,” I said after a few moments. “I’m better.”

He lifted his hand and I sat up to see him kneeling next to me. My door was open, and we were parked on the shoulder of the road. “We’re stopped?” I asked, my panic returning. “We need to go. I need to get to my mom.”

He put his hands on my shoulders. “It’s okay,” he said in a calm voice. “I’ll get you to her, but right now you need to focus on you. Are you okay?”

“I’m okay. Just freaking out.”

He smiled. “No kidding.”

I smiled weakly back. “Can we talk while you drive? I really do need to get to Mom.”

He pulled me in for a hug so tight I could barely breath, and tears pricked my eyes. He released me after about twenty seconds and stood. “I’ll drive, you talk.”

Once he was back behind the wheel, I found the words didn’t come as easily as I thought they would. The whole town might already know my secret, but I’d been hiding for so many years, it wasn’t easy to open up.

“So,” Lance said. “Turns out you are a fantastic liar.”

I laughed, but I didn’t feel very happy. “I’ve had to be. My mother, she…Worries. I lie to her to help her stay calm, to keep her from worrying too much.”

“I’m not sure I even realized you have a mother,” he said. “Carrie’s never mentioned her.”

“I don’t talk about her. Not to anyone. Her worrying is pretty extreme, and she never leaves her apartment. Today, Mary visited her, which means…” I couldn’t say the words.

“Which means everyone is going to know your mother is…”

“Ill,” I said. “Anxiety, depression, paranoia. That’s what we know about anyway.”

“And I assume Carrie knows about it?”

Of course, his first thought was of Carrie. My own angry thought surprised me, but it was only because I knew he was right. I needed to talk to Carrie about this before she found out from someone else or she would hate me forever. “No one knows about it. Or no one did. The only people I ever told, they weren’t people from Catalpa Creek, at least not anyone who…No one who knew my family or my friends.”

“No one who’d share your secret.”

“Right.”

I waited for him to tell me what a horrible person I was, what a horrible friend I was for lying to Carrie all these years.

“It must have been awful,” he said.

I swung my head to look at him. His eyes were on the road, his expression somber, his earlier elation from the jump gone. This is what the truth about my life did to people, it sucked the joy. “What?”

He glanced at me, then looked back at the road. “It must have been hard to keep the secret, to not be able to vent or talk about it even with your best friends. Carrie would have helped, you know.”

“No one wants to be dragged into my drama. When my mom first got sick, Carrie’s sister had just been killed. She had enough to deal with, enough people to worry about and take care of without adding me to the list.”

“Everyone has drama,” he said. “And everyone needs help sometimes. How often does your mom need you?”

“Not that often. She prefers to be alone. I call her five or six times a day and I take her groceries twice a week. Once a week I go over for dinner, but she only needs me more often if she’s having a bad week.”

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