All Grown Up(42)

***

Saying the tension in the air was thick on the ride home was an understatement. Ford cursed at the car in front of him for making a right without a blinker and banged his hand on the steering wheel.

“Ford?” Annabella’s weak voice came from the backseat. She’d been lying down since we’d picked her up at the precinct. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

Ford mumbled a string of curses and pulled down a side street. Bella struggled to work the door handle and stumbled out of the car. She took a few steps and bent her knees, leaning forward in a position ready to vomit. I reached for my door handle, but Ford stopped me.

“Don’t.”

“But…she could choke. She’ll get her hair in it.”

“She’ll be fine. I’ll keep an eye on her from here. I’m not babying her, and I’m not letting you do it either.”

“Ford…”

He turned to face me. I’d never seen him truly angry before. His jaw was hard, his lips flattened to a grim line, and his voice had all the sternness of one very pissed-off father.

“She’s old enough to go to bars with a fake ID, buy weed, and get herself high and arrested, then she’s old enough to hold her own hair back. I’m not an asshole. I’ve sat in the bathroom and held her hair plenty when she was actually sick. But she’s on her own with this shit.”

While I struggled with watching a teenager get sick alone on the side of the road, it also wasn’t my place to decide how to parent her. I was a mom; I coddled people when they were sick or down—tough love wasn’t in my genetic makeup. Though I knew my ex-husband would probably be the same way if it were our son.

Watching Ford at the police station while he’d advocated on her behalf, and now seeing him angry and disappointed in his sister, I think I realized for the first time that he truly wasn’t a typical twenty-five-year-old. The life circumstances he’d been dealt had forced him to mature faster than most people his age.

He’d earned his adult card the hard way. And my treating him like he was still a boy had been insulting to him on so many levels. It was one thing to not want to date him because I wasn’t ready, but another altogether to hide behind an excuse that slighted him.

I looked out the window and checked on Bella, who was still dry heaving, then reached over and put my hand on Ford’s. His face softened infinitesimally, and he took a deep breath and laced his fingers with mine.

The half-hour drive home from the Hamptons took twice as long as it should’ve. We had to pull over three times for Bella to get sick—or at least because she thought she might get sick. As much as it pained me, I stayed in the car for all three stops. But when we got back to the house, I had to at least help her into bed. She babbled to me as I took off her shoes.

“Sometimes when I’d play at the beach all day, I’d be so tired after my bath that I’d fall asleep before Mom came in to brush my hair.”

I sat down on the bed beside her and pulled up the covers. “The beach knocks us out.”

“But when I woke up in the morning, my hair wasn’t a mess. Mom used to brush it while I slept.”

That made my heart hurt, whether she was wrong for what she did tonight or not. I smiled sadly and stroked her hair. “Moms have superpowers like that.”

“I miss her. She loved it out here so much.”

“It’s beautiful in Montauk, but I think what your mom probably liked best was being out here with her family without the everyday distractions.”

Annabella curled into the fetal position. I tucked the blanket all around her so she was wrapped like a sausage and stayed, rubbing her hair until she fell asleep.

I found Ford downstairs in the living room drinking an amber liquid from a tumbler.

“She’s asleep.”

He nodded and tilted the glass back to swallow the remnants in one gulp. “You want a drink?”

“Sure. But I don’t think I can drink whatever it is you’re having.”

Ford stood and walked to a wine rack in the kitchen. “I have the cab you like.”

I watched from the doorway while he pulled it out and proceeded to uncork it before filling a glass for me and refilling his own with liquor.

Returning to the living room together, he handed me the wine glass.

“You just happen to have the wine I like?” I bumped shoulders with him playfully.

“I also bought more of the cologne you said you liked last week.” Ford sat down and leaned his head against the back of the couch, looking up at the ceiling. “I’m sure my eagerness is a sign of immaturity to you. But I just want to please you.”

I shook my head. God, I’ve been such a jerk.

“Actually, I find attentiveness in a man to be incredibly attractive.”

Ford lifted the glass to his mouth and drank like he was taking medicine. “Let me guess, you find attentiveness attractive, but in your mind I’m just a boy, not a man, so it doesn’t apply to me.”

I sighed and set my wine glass down. “I’m sorry I’ve been treating you the way I have.”

He sat up and nodded, though his eyes were hesitant to accept my apology.

“Watching how you handled your sister tonight made me realize that you’re right—age isn’t what’s important.” I shook my head. “I know plenty of forty-year-old men who act like they’re teenagers.”