Redemption Road: Jackson Falls Book 5 (Jackson Falls Series) Page 9

  This was the kind of “family thing” she was determined to avoid. “Probably not a good idea,” she said. “Especially considering that Trish isn’t overly fond of me, and Jesse’s my ex-husband. You can only take the word family so far.”

  “Hey, don’t freak out on me. I’m just passing on the message.”

  The kid had spirit. Colleen liked spirit. “Sit down,” she said. “Have a drink. Let’s see, I have Coke, coffee, tea, hot chocolate?”

  Paige pulled off her coat and plopped onto a wooden chair. “Coke’s fine.”

  Colleen took a Coke from the fridge, popped the top, and poured it into a glass. Leaned against the kitchen counter and said, “So tell me about this family get-together.”

  “Well…” Paige lifted the glass and took a long drink. “It’s kind of hard to explain. They’ve been doing it for a while, I guess. Since before I got here last year, anyway. And—”

  “Wait. Stop. What do you mean, before you got here last year? I thought you came with your father.”

  “You haven’t heard the story?” At Colleen’s bewildered head shake, Paige said, “I didn’t meet my dad until I was fifteen. I grew up in Boston, with my mom. When she died a year and a half ago, I came here to live. He never knew I existed until Mom’s lawyer called him and said, ‘Congratulations, it’s a girl.’”

  “Wow. I had no idea. And I’m sorry about your mom.”

  Paige shrugged. “It is what it is. Things were sketchy for a while, but it’s gotten better.” She took a sip of Coke. “So, anyway, about the get-together, there’s all kinds of food, and Dad brings this impossibly hokey music from when he was a kid, and we just eat, and visit, and—I can’t really explain it any better than that. It freaked me out at first. I grew up as an only child. I didn’t even have cousins. After my grandparents died, it was just Mom and me. Coming here, landing in the middle of this clan, yeah. There was some culture shock. I think it took a couple of months before I knew who everybody was and how they were related. This is one huge, crazy-ass, intermarried family. I mean, Jesse’s married to my dad’s sister, but he used to be engaged to Aunt Casey, and apparently at some point he was married to you, and—oh, hell.” Her mouth closed abruptly.

  Eyeing the girl with curiosity, Colleen said, “What?”

  “I just realized. You’re Mikey’s mother.”

  “Um, yes. I am.”

  “Well. That’s—” For an instant, the unflappable Paige seemed impossibly flustered, and Colleen wondered what that was all about. Recovering, the kid said, “Anyway, there’s usually fifteen or twenty of us, give or take. All the cousins show up. And usually Paula and Chuck. They’re best friends with Aunt Rose and Uncle Jesse. Sometimes, Harley and Annabel come, too. But not always.”

  “Sounds like a nightmare, if you ask me.”

  “You think it sounds bad now, wait until you hear Dad’s idea of good party music.”

  “As much as it pains me, I think I’ll have to pass. You can give my sister my regrets. Tell her I just came down with the Asian Flu and I’d really hate to spread it around.”

  Paige grinned. “I think I like you. By the way, I heard Dad telling Casey that he wishes you were staying around because as much as he loves Ali, you’re ten times the assistant she was.”

  Colleen’s eyebrows went sky high. “Your dad said that?”

  The girl finished her Coke, stood and pulled her jacket on. “You know, when I first came here, I hated him. I thought he was a flipping idiot.” She reached up and pulled her hair free from the collar of her jacket. “Not to mention an asshole. My mom told me all kinds of lies. She said he’d left us because he didn’t want me. I had no reason to doubt her. But the truth was that she didn’t tell him about me. I guess I’ll never know why. It’s funny how time changes your perspective. I realize now that Dad’s a good guy with a huge heart, and he’s the most honest—and probably one of the smartest—people I know. He wouldn’t say it if he didn’t mean it.” She studied Colleen with open curiosity. Said, “Thanks for the Coke.”

  And she was gone.

  Colleen stood at the door and watched her descend the stairs, her red parka disappearing into the darkness beyond the yellow arc of illumination from the light mounted outside the door. Tiny flakes of snow had begun to fall, the kind that signaled a bitterly cold night. The entire Bradley-Lindstrom-MacKenzie clan could have their damn party, and more power to them. She had no interest in partying, had even less interest in meeting Jesse’s new wife. She wasn’t ready for that, not yet. Sooner or later, it would happen. It was inevitable; this was a small town, and her ex-husband had married Rob’s sister. Her introduction to Rose MacKenzie Lindstrom could wait for another Saturday night. Tonight, she was staying inside where it was warm, with a roast beef sandwich and a good book for company. The last thing she needed was some ridiculous family gathering, where all the ghosts of her past would rise up to bite her on the ass.

  When a full stomach and fifty pages lulled her into a drowsy state, she turned off her bedside lamp and drifted off to sleep. After several hours of her customary patchy slumber, she’d finally reached REM sleep when a loud banging ripped her out of the bizarre dream she’d been having, something about a red bicycle she was pedaling past the Palm Beach house wearing winter boots. She lay flat on her back, trying to figure out where she was, for a full ten seconds before it came back to her in bits and pieces: Jackson Falls. Casey’s house. Apartment over the studio. Colleen reached out, scrabbling around in search of the lamp. She finally found it, switched it on, and sat up, her eyes blinking at the sudden light, her movement dislodging the book that had been lying open on her chest. The banging came again, and she realized that somebody was hammering on her kitchen door. The bedside clock read 1:42 a.m. Who the hell would be at her door at this hour?

  Her first thought was of her pregnant sister. Had something happened to Casey? Frightened, she sat up and swung her legs off the bed, fumbled for her slippers, finally gave up and padded barefoot to the kitchen. Through the closed blinds she could see the silhouette of a man, illuminated by the outside light she’d forgotten to turn off before she went to bed.

  When she switched on the kitchen light, the banging abruptly stopped. Colleen hesitated for a brief instant. In south Florida, nobody would answer their door, especially at this hour, without checking to see who was on the other side. Or without a semi-automatic weapon in their hand. But this was Jackson Falls, where, like it or not, everybody knew everybody else. And half of them were related, if not by blood, then by marriage. This was no serial killer. There had to be some kind of emergency.

  She unlocked the door and flung it open. A gust of arctic air rushed in, creating instant frostbite in her toes and raising goose bumps on the rest of her. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it when she recognized the figure standing outside her door. White flakes of snow gleamed on his shoulders, his eyelashes. The duffel bag he carried looked like he’d wedged everything he owned into it, and what in bloody hell was he doing at her door at two in the morning when he was supposed to be three thousand miles away?

  “Can I come in?” he said. “It’s freezing out here.”

  She held the door open wider. He brushed past her and dropped the duffel bag on the table, then stood there, blowing on his gloveless fingers. Colleen slammed the door shut, turned the lock, and switched off the outside light. Eyes narrowed, she said, “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in California?”

  Her son blew on his fingers again. “I’ve left school,” Mikey said. “And I’m not going back.”

  ***

  “Dad’s livid.” Mikey shoveled spoonful after spoonful of tomato soup into his mouth, so rapidly that she didn’t know how he could swallow it without getting second-degree burns. The toaster popped, and she buttered two slices of toast, then smeared them with grape jelly, the way she knew he liked them.

  “Can you blame him?” She took a plate from the cupboard, set the toast on it, then placed it in front of h
er ravenous son.

  “He doesn’t get it. He never gets it.” Mikey folded a slice of toast, dipped it in his soup, and ate it. Through a mouthful of soggy bread, he said, “Dad has tunnel vision. He can’t see anything except what he wants to see. Anything that doesn’t match his point of view isn’t relevant.”

  “He’s worried about your future.” And the big bucks he shelled out to send you to Stanford, she thought, but didn’t say it out loud.

  “But he doesn’t see that school’s not for me. With Dad, everything is black or white. Either I get that college degree and the whole world opens up to me, or I quit school and spend the rest of my life living in a cardboard box on a street corner in Portland.”

  “Mikey, you’re eighteen years old. How can you even know what you want to do with your life?”

  “Exactly!”

  “But college is the place where you figure that stuff out. It’s a place to experiment, to try on different hats, until you fall in love with something, and realize it’s what you were put on this planet to do.”

  “I’ll tell you this much.” His brows drew together, those elegant blond brows so like his father’s, that same vertical line of frustration arching between them. “I may not know what I want to do with my life, but I’m damn well not going to find it at Stanford.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “Jesus, Mom, I thought you’d be the one who had my back. There’s a whole big world out there. I don’t want to spend four years sitting in some classroom. Just because it was good enough for Dad doesn’t mean it’s what I want. I want to be a free man and explore the world. You, of all people, should understand that. It’s what you did!”

  Not exactly, but now wasn’t the time to tell him that. Someday, when he was older, maybe she’d tell him the truth. At this point, it would simply look like she was being defensive, making excuses, trying to assuage the guilt she wouldn’t be feeling if there wasn’t some truth to his words.

  Without conscious thought, she reached out and brushed a scruffy strand of hair away from his face. He’d learned a few new tricks at Stanford. The last time she’d seen him, at Thanksgiving, his hair had been neatly trimmed. Now it fell in a ragged blond tangle over his ears. “It’s late,” she said. “We can work this out tomorrow.”

  Grimly, he said, “There’s nothing to work out.”

  “I’ll talk to your father. For now, let’s go to bed. Things will look different in the morning.”

  “Right,” he said, getting up and carrying his dirty dishes to the sink. “Whatever.”

  “The spare bedroom’s on the left. Bathroom’s at the end of the hall. Are you too big to give your old mom a hug?”

  He let out an elongated sigh that carried the weight of the world and wrapped his arms around her. She squeezed him, this little boy who’d been her cuddle-bug until the day he started school and found out it wasn’t cool for guys to accept affection from their mothers. The little boy who’d brought her wildflowers from the side of the road, and Mother’s Day cards fashioned from crayons, construction paper, and kindergarten paste. Now he stood a head taller than her, and she didn’t know whether to kiss him or take him over her knee and, as her dad used to say, whale the tar out of him.

  Blinking back tears, she ordered, “Bed, or you’ll get no cartoons tomorrow.”

  He grinned, so like his father that for an instant, it was like going back twenty years in time. “Goofball,” he said, stepping away and shouldering his duffel. “Night, Mom.”

  “Night, sweetheart.”

  Back in her bed, she lay in the dark, listening to the sounds of her son settling in. Drawers opened and shut. The bathroom door closed a little too hard. Behind it, the toilet flushed, then she heard the buzz of his electric toothbrush. Two-thirty in the morning, and he was brushing his teeth. He might look a little scruffy these days, but underneath that scruffiness, Mikey was still his father’s compulsive, neatnik son.

  Jesse. She’d hoped to postpone facing Jesse, but that wasn’t going to happen now. Somehow, despite their differences, they were going to have to figure out together how to deal with this catastrophic turn of events. Somehow, she was going to have to convince Jesse to let their son stay with him until they managed to tag-team him into caving and returning to school. It wasn’t that she didn’t want Mikey. It had been her dream for years, to have her son back in her life. Being a part-time, long-distance mother was heartbreaking.

  But the timing was all wrong. She wasn’t planning to stay here. If she let herself get tangled up in Mikey’s problems, where would that leave her? Despite what the family chose to believe about her, she wasn’t one of those mothers who ate her young and then spit them out. If Mikey hurt, she hurt. It had been that way since the first moment she’d laid eyes on him, eighteen years ago, all bloody and red-faced and squalling. She might have been just seventeen, but motherlove had been instantaneous and all-encompassing. In those eighteen years, nothing had changed. He was still the one person on this planet that she would take a bullet for.

  But there were other considerations, practical considerations. She’d watched him inhale those two slices of toast and that bowl of soup as if they were his last meal. Mikey might be eighteen, but he still had a growing boy’s appetite. And Rob might be paying her well, but not that well. Except for the piddly sum she’d placed in her escape fund, she was broke until payday. There was enough food in the house for one person, but how the hell was she supposed to feed Mikey? If she used the escape fund to feed her son, how would she ever manage to leave this shithole of a town?

  As much as she loved him, as much as her heart beat faster in gratitude because, due to some inexplicable miracle, he was here, in the room across the hall, this situation with Mikey had disaster written all over it.

  With a sigh, Colleen rolled over, plumped her pillow, and lay on her side, watching the big red numbers on her bedside clock change with agonizing sluggishness. When she finally fell asleep, sometime well after three-thirty, she was still turning it all over in her mind, looking for the magic answer that would make everybody happy.

  Except that there was no magic answer. Colleen Bradley Lindstrom Davis Berkowitz had stopped believing in magic a long time ago.

  Mikey

  He took the stairs outside his mother’s apartment two at a time, walked around the corner of the studio and stood for a while in the driveway, looking at the house. It was an ordinary house, yellow, tastefully trimmed in plum and sage, with a wraparound porch, a turret, a roof with lots of different angles. A gingerbread house. There was nothing remotely intimidating about it. So why did it seem so formidable? Maybe because this was a fool’s errand. The last time he’d tried to talk to her, she’d thrown him out of the house. There was no reason to think anything had changed in the past eight months. But if he went away again without even trying, he’d never know.

  Hope and terror warred in his heart as he navigated the icy path to the front steps. Four steps up, four more across the porch, and he was at the door. He rang the bell, then crammed his trembling hands into the pockets of his jeans.

  Paige’s father answered, eyes widening in surprise. “Mikey,” he said. “I thought you were away at school.”

  “I was. Is Paige home?”

  The warmth in Rob’s eyes cooled considerably. There was no hostility, but the man obviously knew something had gone down between them, and he wasn’t happy about it. “Did she know you were coming?”

  Hands still in his pockets, he rocked on the balls of his feet. “No,” he said. “I haven’t talked to her in eight months.”

  Rob looked at him, long and hard, then said, “I’ll tell her you’re here. But if she doesn’t want to talk to you—”

  “I won’t push it.”

  He stood in the foyer, feeling out of place as Rob’s footsteps climbed the stairs. He heard a soft rap, a door opening, muffled voices, one male, one female. Then nothing. The wait went on forever. He was about to turn tail and run when light foot
steps descended the stairs and there she was, standing wordlessly in front of him, so beautiful she took his breath away.

  He examined every inch of her face, that gorgeous face that haunted his dreams, the strong jaw, the sculpted cheekbones, those huge MacKenzie green eyes. The fall of blond curls that, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t tame. Her long, slender legs were encased in denim, the rest of her lost in the folds of a man’s white cotton dress shirt. “Hi,” he said.

  She squared her jaw. “What?”

  So she wasn’t going to make this easy for him. Barely daring to breathe, he said, “Can we talk?”

  “I wasn’t aware there was anything to say.”

  “There’s plenty to say. Look, I’m just asking you to hear me out. No expectations. I just want to talk. Will you come for a ride with me?”

  Paige looked at him for a very long time, much the way her father had, as though he were a bug to be examined under a microscope. Without speaking, she went to the hall closet and took out a bright red parka and put it on. The color was stunning, set against her wild hair and her strong features. She moved soundlessly to the foot of the stairs. “Dad?” she shouted up the staircase. “I’m going for a ride with Mikey.”

  She didn’t say a word as they crossed the porch and headed down the flagstone walk to the driveway. He’d parked his truck around the corner, next to a beat-up Vega that could only belong to his mother. Aunt Casey wouldn’t be caught dead driving something like that, and Paige’s dad would have long since sent it to the crusher. He helped her up into the cab of the F-150, then walked around the hood and got in on the other side. Paige busied herself with the seat belt, pointedly ignoring him. At least she’d come with him. She hadn’t opened the front door and shoved him back out onto the porch. That had to mean something.

  He started the truck, backed it into the circular drive, turned around and headed west on Ridge Road. Beside him, Paige sat stiffly, eyes straight ahead, hands shoved into the pockets of that red parka. Five minutes passed in silence. Ten. Mikey cleared his throat. “You never answered my letters.”