Page 83 of Known By You
We had a surprising number of memories for the not quite two months she’d been here. Granted, I’d been a persistent little pest in her life, but she’d been willing to have me there, hadn’t she?
My phone buzzed and I grabbed it, answering before Ifully registered it was an unknown number with a Nevada area code.
“Hey, Kenneth. How are you?”
My mom’s voice startled me, and dread held me in place in my chair.
“Mom.” No point in pretending I was glad to hear from her.
“Well, how are you, son? You still hanging around with that celebrity, Jack something? He still in town?”
My hackles rose instantly. Did she think I was an idiot? I knew she wasn’t, despite how she’d played it over the years. She knew how to shape people, how to manipulate them, and it’d taken me years to see it.
“Why are you really calling?” I braced, waiting for her to say.
“Can’t a mother call her son?”
“Not when she hasn’t done so in more than six years. Don’t you think it’s a little odd, this call coming after so long?”
“We’ve just reconnected. I thought we could do it different this time,” she said, enough pleading in her voice to make me second-guess myself.
“I don’t know if that’s possible,” I said, not all that interested in trying, but enough of an optimist I couldn’t simply hang up on her.
“You’ve gotten used to spending your time with people you think are better than us, is that it? All your fancy Army friends and all those celebrities and such? Never knew I raised such an ungrateful boy.”
Ah. There it was.
The irony here, aside from the fact that several of my “fancy Army friends” had grown up poorer than me, was in how I’d never been all that interested in material wealth.From the youngest age, I’d wanted security and I’d wanted love. When I thought I’d found it with Shay, I’d clung to it. And when I lost it? I had no reason to stay connected to her or my family, who’d tossed me out like they had not only no love lost for me, but no use for me.
The truth was that she’d called to get something from me and now she’d heard I wasn’t going to offer up another check or anything else she could use, she had no use for me.
Sounds about right.
“I think we’re done here, Mom. Have a nice life.” I hung up and leaned back against the Adirondack chair, my gaze rising to the towering mountains, and reveled in the feeling of being dwarfed by them.
Right now, my family, Liz’s imminent leaving… they felt like monstrous problems to face. But sitting here in the shadow of these peaks that’d been here for centuries, it reminded me my problems weren’t so huge. They weren’t lasting. They wouldn’t outlast me just like I wouldn’t outlast these mountains.
And that gave me hope.
I headed back inside and knew what I needed to do. No more moping around alone, no more wishing I could change my past, my family, or what felt like my inevitable future heartbreak. No morethinkingabout the problems.
I needed my friends, a few romcoms, and maybe some high-quality home-baked goods.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Elizabeth
Ifelt like sludge climbing out of bed Saturday.
I’d eventually left the couch, regretfully moving from the space we’d spent so much time enjoying each other—whether last night or even over the last few weeks when we’d simply been watching movies and chatting—and huddled into the temporary sanctuary that was my bed.
Then I had continued to cry until my throat was hoarse and my eyes were swollen enough I’d remembered to take my contacts out before I finally passed out.
When I woke, I wasn’t ready to see Kenny. I was raw, and both deeply honored and soundly rejected in a confusing way, so I poured myself, as I always did, into work.
Tragically, there was only one email from work and it did nothing to distract me from the disaster with Kenny. Instead, it sent me into a new round of tears, which I hadn’tthought possible after crying a Danube’s worth of tears last night. It pointed out just how inevitable our end was, and now it would come far sooner than I’d hoped for.
Good news for my job. I’d been exonerated from any blame and the junior agent was found fully at fault. It would still be there, in my file, but I could return to work. I could get back to the life I’d built. This should’ve made me feel better, shouldn’t it? They’d gone through the process and they’d seen me for the reliable, trustworthy agent I was. They knew me.
