Page 54 of Horn of Plenty
But he’d never expected he’d be one of them.
His gaze bounced between her and the row of homes. “I don’t understand.”
“I think you do,” she replied, raising an eyebrow. “And I think you recognized this place when you and Mabel drove here with the food bank donation last week.”
“Did Mabel tell you that?” he rasped, barely able to form the words.
Betty shook her head. “No, she didn’t have to.”
“Then how did you know?” he pressed, trying to put the pieces together.
She patted his cheek. “I had a feeling you’d remember, but I wanted to see for myself.”
“That’s why we’re here?” he questioned, agitation edging out his confusion.
“Partly. Preston’s been begging us to send him a vegetable casserole. But after I learned you’d come here and then heard Mabel had gone to New York, I knew it was time. The stars had aligned. You were ready to know.”
He sighed. Not more of this horoscope crap.
“Time for what?” he asked, working to keep the irritation out of his tone.
“I owe you an explanation,” she said. “And now is the time for you to hear it.”
He blew out an exasperated breath. “Betty, I still don’t understand.”
“It’s about your mother, Cal,” she answered, watching him closely.
It was as if the pavement shifted beneath him. He barely could discern up from down.
“What about her? She grew up in Elverna. I figured you knew her,” he tossed back, his words coming out chopped and ragged.
“You’re right. I did know her quite well. She worked at the diner for us when she was a teenager—like Mabel did.” Betty paused with a sad smile stretched across her thin lips. “I’m not sure how much your grandparents have shared with you about Sabrina.”
Sabrina.
He hadn’t heard anyone utter her name in decades.
He swallowed past the lump in his throat. “She wanted to get out of Elverna to become a model. But she got derailed and fell in with the wrong kind of people. She started using drugs, then had me before she overdosed.”
He’d locked that part of himself away. The scared little boy. The terrified child. The chaos. The tears. It was too much—too painful. He needed to keep it separate from himself. His stubbornness and his strict adherence to a schedule had kept those memories at bay.
Betty cocked her head to the side. “That’s one way of looking at it.”
He schooled his features. “I don’t see another way. That’s how it happened.”
“That’s what your grandparents knew, Cal. What they didn’t know was that Sabrina had reached out to me,” Betty revealed.
He was, at once, both too hot and too cold. Conflicting emotions pulled at him from every direction. His eyes went wide as he worked to steady himself. “To you?” he bit out.
The woman nodded. “She was in trouble and needed help.”
He paced back and forth, trying to reconfigure the picture he’d constructed in his head of that turbulent time in his young life. “Why didn’t she call my grandparents?”
Betty sighed—a sad, lonesome sound. “Families can be messy, dear. Your grandparents weren’t pleased when she left. Sabrina had cut off contact with them. I hadn’t heard from her in years either. And then one day, out of the blue, she called and asked for my help. She told me that she had a son and wanted to do better for him. I could barely believe that she’d had a child, but I wasn’t about to turn her down.”
He’d never given his mother much credit. It was easier to peg her as the villain, the addict, the negligent mother. But not every memory was terrible. He glanced down the street and spied a little park. Rusted and overgrown with weeds, a memory floated to the surface of his mind. His mother had brought him here. She’d pushed him on the swings.
Callan goes up so high and down so low.
