Page 72 of His Hot Mess

Mom hesitated, as if deciding how much to tell me. How much I could handle.

How much could I handle? Suddenly, I was plunged back to one of my darkest moments. The memory came at me sideways, so fast I couldn’t keep it down anymore.

I was in the church.

After the doors swished closed behind Jessica, I stood there staring at my shoes. All around me I could hear everyone in the room gasping and murmuring. I could feel their eyes on me, staring at me with shock and worse, pity.

I didn’t know what I should do—I was stunned. Disbelieving.

Furious.

I kissed my mom on the cheek and walked the wrong way down the aisle myself. I got in my truck and quietly drove back to our place, humming a tuneless song under my breath. Jessica wasn’t home; neither was her suitcase she’d packed for the honeymoon. Just mine, standing there alone in the foyer. Just like me. I’d stood there for a moment, staring at the suitcase, then I’d walked outside, picked up that stupid garden gnome Jessica loved so much and chucked it through our living room window.

I wasn’t ready for feelings back then.

But now, since I was ripped wide open already—what was the use in pretending they weren’t there?

“I’m ready to know,” I said, quietly.

Mom let out a breath. “Jessica’s back in town. Came back a few months after you left.”

My heart felt like it had stopped beating.

“Sweetie, she’s was with someone. They’re married now. And she has a child. A little girl.” Now that my mom was talking, it was clear by the way the words came out so neatly that she’d been practicing. She’d been keeping this information bottled up, trying to protect me. Now that I’d opened the door, she was letting it all out as efficiently as possible.

It was a good idea, I had to give her that. Make it a clean cut.

“I see her around town sometimes,” Mom said. “She always wishes you well.”

It’s that comment that did it. I put down the unopened beer and leaned my forehead against the fridge, where I was still standing. I cried like a fucking baby there for what felt like an hour, though it was probably only a couple of minutes. I could tell my mom was crying, too.

Finally, when I took a breath, I cleared my throat, and said, “I always thought we’d be together forever, you know?” My voice was rough. Cracking.

I hated this. But it was what I’d been avoiding for three years.

“I know,” she said. “I thought that too. But… sometimes high school sweethearts aren’t meant to be together, love. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. You and Jessica weren’t. Your father and I weren’t either.”

My dad. I’d never known him, but he’d always existed as this specter, the source of everything that was wrong in our life. Why I didn’t have siblings like my friends. Why Mom had to work all the time and couldn’t make it to half my softball games. It was all my dad’s fault—a man I’d never even met.

Something clicked in my head then, like a puzzle piece coming together. “I guess I always thought I would be better than him,” I said.

“You don’t have to be better than him. He’s not a bad man for having left us.”

“How can you say that? He left us. He left you, with a little baby to take care of. And he never looked back.”

Mom paused. When she spoke again, her voice was soft. “Jessica leaving you like that—she actually helped me understand something, Chris. After she ran away from my son, the sweetest boy to ever walk this earth, I realized that sometimes, people just hurt. They do things—terrible, hurtful things, but it’s because they’re hurting too. Sometimes we don’t know why. I don’t even think Jessica knows why she did that—I think, ironically, she was trying not to hurt you.”

I scoffed. But then I thought about it. Maybe Jessica had wanted to end things for a long time, and I hadn’t wanted to listen.

Mom hesitated. “You know, it’s hurt her too. Her father has never really forgiven her for what she did to you.”

I thought back to Jessica’s dad, how he’d helped me start that business.

“He cared about you, Chris. He always said you were the son he never had.”

Mom’s words made something cold run through me. He’d said the same thing to my face. In my memory, I thought that had made me feel warm. Loved. Appreciated. I’d never had a dad. But I’d forgotten until now just how uncomfortable that made me. He’d say that, and then he’d give me advice about my business I didn’t want but felt bad for not taking. I never wanted to be his son. I’d cared about him, but that pressure had been suffocating.

I thought back to when me and Jessica were together. To the trips we took, the things we did together. Our house. The garden gnome. It was nice. A perfectly comfortable life. And I loved her, of course I did. But I was also fulfilling a promise I’d made to myself. That I wouldn’t be like my father. That I’d never be the one to leave.

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