Just Let Me Love You (Judge Me Not #3)(20)

“I’ve been a bad mom to you boys,” she says in a pained tone.

I don’t want to lie, but I don’t have it in me to be brutal. I choose to go with a half-truth. “You did the best you could, Mom.”

She sometimes did.

We look at each other meaningfully for a few seconds, and then she says, “You don’t have to say things that aren’t true to try and make me feel better, Chase.”

I let out a long, tired breath. “Still, the past is the past. Not much we can do about it now.”

My mom touches my forearm. “Honey, I should never have sent you away.” She sighs deeply. “You ended up in prison, for God’s sake.”

“You helped me get out early, though,” I offer.

“Small consolation,” she snorts.

“Hmm…” I nod.

And then she lays it all out there. “Don’t let me off the hook so easily, son. It’s time I admit what I did. I gave up on you. I chose the easy way out. Sending you to your grandmother’s only made things harder for you. You were already paying for your father’s sins and suddenly, there you were, paying for mine.” Her eyes fill with tears, and she covers her mouth to stifle a sob. “You reminded me so much of your father back then. I couldn’t deal with it. Every time I looked at you, I saw Jack. And seeing your father in you reminded me of how much I had failed him.”

Mom chokes back a sob, and I put to words what I accepted today at my father’s grave. “You didn’t fail him, Mom. None of us did. Dad was fighting his own demons…and he lost.”

“But to kill himself,” she hisses as she swipes away tears.

I raise a brow. For so many years my mom has maintained that Dad driving off a cliff was an accident. She used to tell me and my brother she believed Dad had been running away that fateful night, that he had taken off so he could start a new life in California.

“You believe it, now?” I ask my mother in a low voice. “Are you saying you no longer think Dad was running away to start a new life? You finally believe he killed himself?”

“I think I knew it all along,” she admits. “I was in so much denial. I just loved him so much. He was my life, Chase, and I didn’t want to accept that he could so easily end it all.”

My father was my mom’s life, and, in many ways, she was his. I remember their love well. They were sweet and kind to each other, they loved hard and played hard. No matter what has transpired, I can’t deny that Jack and Abby gave me the tools to love like that myself.

My love for Kay is as true and pure as my parents’ love once was.

I only hope and pray our love doesn’t have a similar tragic ending.

I glance at Mom. She’s sobbing softly, wiping away tears. She still feels the pain from all she’s lost. All of the money she has nowadays means nothing. Fancy cars, a huge home, the best of everything and still, Mom’s as broken as before.

I put my arms around her and give her a heartfelt hug. “Hey, I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m sorry all this happened to our family.”

She holds onto me for dear life. “We were good once, weren’t we? The four of us really did have perfect lives. Tell me it wasn’t just an illusion, Chase. Tell me it wasn’t some image I conjured up in my head by always looking back.”

“It was real,” I choke out, closing my eyes.

My mom and I hold onto one another, adrift on the choppy seas of our post-destruction lives.

Mom finally speaks first, whispering, “I really messed things up after Jack died, didn’t I? I was gone all the time, lost in my own grief.” She leans back and looks up at me, sorrow in her big green eyes. “I was never around, Chase. No wonder you turned to drugs.”

Shaking my head to let her know not all the fault lies with her, I take a step back and say, “Your absence back then doesn’t excuse all the things I did. And, Mom, trust me, I’ve done far worse things than drugs.”

“Do you mean you did some bad things in prison?” she tentatively asks.

“Both in and out,” I admit.

It’s the truth. I’ve beaten men, I’ve used women. I’ve lied and cheated, and I’ve stolen things. I’m a would-be drug dealer and a one-time drug user.

And I still deal with temptation every day.

But I am learning.

“You don’t do any bad things now, right?” My mom wants to know.

Hearing the hope in her voice is nothing short of heartbreaking, and I think about some of my most recent transgressions—using Missy by letting her blow me behind the Anchor Inn, beating the junkie who hurt Kay, getting drunk and high at Kyle Tanner’s, threatening Doug Wilson, keeping secrets from Kay. Shit.

I could easily lie to my mother, but what’s the point.

“I’ve done some things recently,” I confess. “Things I’m not proud of.”

Fear darkens Mom’s eyes.

She knows the hold one drug in particular used to have on me. And that is what surely prompts her to ask, “No cocaine, though, right?”

“No cocaine,” I assure her.

She visibly relaxes, her shoulders slumping. “Thank God.”

She sighs, like the possibility of coke ruling me again might be too much for her to bear.

I hear `ya, I think.