Page 68 of Auction Time
After last night though, not so much.
There was a moment last night when I was with Vanessa when something changed about us. I would never be so crass as to think it was because it was the first time that we’d had sex without a condom.
I would be an idiot if I thought it was that.
I saw something in her eyes, but it was only a mirror of what was inside me.
I’d made love to her. That was what it was.
I’d made love to her, and I saw the moment her guard dropped and knew her feelings for me deepened, increased.
I claimed to be able to pay attention and have this keen eye for detail. Well, it came out full force last night.
It was beautiful, amazing, the best I’d ever experienced in my life. So, the question of what had stopped me before and did now was a real good one. The answer was brewing deep within me. I just never wanted to acknowledge it.
“Have you ever felt that you were so different to something that maybe, just maybe, it was best to keep things as they are?” I asked not knowing if that made sense.
“Perception is key,” Mom answered. She moved over to the sink and grabbed a glass, filled it with water from the filtered tap only halfway, and came back to me with it.
I thought she was going to drink it, but she set it down on the counter and pointed at it.
“Is the glass half empty or half full?” she asked.
I laughed. I’d heard this before, and my answer was going to be the same to anyone who asked me that question.
“The glass is half empty, Mom.”
“To me it’s half full, and I can decide what I want to do with it. It’s not so different that I can’t change what happens to the water. I can fill it right up, or I can drink the rest. And even when it’s gone, there is always something that can be done.”
“That easy?” I always loved that she could see the bright side of things.
She pointed to herself. “Almost died, or another chance to live?”
I stared at her and frowned. “Mom, you almost died.”
That was a hundred percent certainty, and I didn’t know how she could see it any other way. I was there when she had surgery, there during all the treatments, which were the actual culprit that nearly ended her. So, I truly didn’t know how she could ask me that.
“Son, the way I see it is I got another chance to live.” She nodded.
“Well, maybe the part of me that’s just like Dad sees the negative.” That was it. There was my answer.
There was the answer.
Just like Dad. I could have been him with my track record, and we were so much alike in the way we thought.
“Is that it? You’re worried you’re like him?”
It was it in a nutshell. “Yeah… I do worry about that, and please don’t sell me any bullshit about how wonderful he was. He wasn’t Mom. I admire him for the legend he was in football but that’s all. He was a terrible husband. I don’t get why you talk about him like he wasn’t. I don’t get it. He treated you so badly, and you should have left his ass at hello. But you stayed, and you don’t say anything bad about him. Not once, but the whole world knows what he was like.”
She looked stunned by my words, and she was right to be because I’d never spoken to her like that before.
She brought her hands together and sighed.
“Cole. I know you won’t understand this because what you see is what you saw, but while he was alive, I made the personal choice to stay with him. The man I married wasn’t the man I buried. After that whole event… you know when we first found out what he was like I knew there were other women. There would have been before too. I’d sensed it. A woman always knows. I just kept hoping he’d change back to the person I met. Hoping he’d come back to me. I’m the fool for thinking that it would happen, and I might be the fool for staying, but it was my choice. I’m not one to give up before trying. For me, it was better to try and fail than not try at all and wonder what could have been. Now that he’s dead, I know the answer, and I know we were probably never meant to be. But that’s my personal answer.”
I was listening. Listening and taking in all that she was saying. I hated that she chose to do what she did because I knew she could have done better. She could have and should.
“I get it. I just wished you could have been with someone who made you happier. You deserved that.”
