A Mother's Homecoming(51)

Leigh narrowed her eyes. “I breathe just fine, thanks.”

Rather than get sucked into an intense argument about how easygoing his sister was, he turned to Gwendolyn. “And you! Your biggest goal in life seems to be keeping Faith away from Pam, but by demonizing her mother, you’re not only potentially harming Faith, you’re making her more curious and rebellious. When I talked to Pam about it—”

“You spoke to her?” Gwendolyn demanded. “Recently?”

“Two days ago. She came over for lunch. She loved your soup by the way.”

Gwendolyn, a normally dignified woman who disliked anyone making a scene, looked nearly apoplectic. “I knew this would happen, I knew it! You’ve never been able to stay away from that woman, and this time is no different. Didn’t I warn you?”

Nice to see they’d taken his comment about not overreacting to heart. “It was just a quick lunch to talk about Faith, figure out a parenting strategy.”

“She is not Faith’s parent,” Gwendolyn said in a low, dangerous voice. “Pardon my crudeness, but she was an incubator! She never cared for that girl. She didn’t put bandages on scraped knees or teach her multiplication facts or sing her to sleep at night. We did all that. We’re Faith’s family! Pamela Jo Wilson is merely a bad influence. It’s as I told her in the craft store—”

“You talked to Pam?” Nick was beyond affectionately annoyed now and moving into downright pissed.

“I didn’t show up at her house in the dead of night,” Gwendolyn snapped, “I merely ran into her while shopping.”

“And were no doubt your charming self,” Nick drawled sarcastically. He recalled all the subtle digs his mother had made over the years, the times he’d had to defend his girlfriend, “the daughter of that low-class Wilson woman,” to his mother. He didn’t think Gwendolyn was technically an evil person, but she was snobby and prejudiced when it came to anything involving her children.

What bothered him, remembering those many squabbles they’d had about Pam, was the way they’d suddenly stopped. When we got married. He’d been so shaken by the discovery that he was going to be a father, had felt so guilty and dependent on his folks, that he’d stopped voicing a dissenting opinion. He’d needed his mother and father to tell him everything would be all right, so he’d overlooked the less than warm reception they gave his bride. While Gwendolyn hadn’t been expressly hateful, neither had she rolled out the welcome mat.

“Oh, Nick.” Gwendolyn sat at one of the chairs around Leigh’s kitchen table—Leigh always ate at her table; she was the good sibling. “I don’t care whether I was charming to Pam when I saw her or not. What I care about is you and Faith. She needs to leave the both of you alone. I tried to appeal to her sense of decency, although that would assume she has one, and—”

“Mom, shut up.”

“Nicholas!”

“I should have asked you to butt out thirteen years ago. If I had, maybe I’d still be married.”

Gwendolyn’s eyes doubled in size. She was spluttering inarticulately, unable to form a whole word.

Leigh stepped in on her behalf. “Surely you’re not trying to blame us for what happened?”

“I blame all of us. Her, myself.” Before the baby came, when Pam had shut down emotionally, she’d tried to talk to him about his parents, the way their disapproval had chafed. But, needing his family’s support, he let himself believe she was exaggerating her pain. “You guys weren’t nice to her. She was a scared, teenage girl who didn’t have the benefit of coming from a stable family like I did. You two have always been so protective of me. If you’d extended even a little of that to her, made her feel like one of us, maybe …”

He clenched his fists together, wishing he really could do things over again. “Or maybe not. We’ll never know now, will we? The past is done. But this the present. And the two of you. Will. Be. Nice.” He felt like a comic strip character, the words appearing in a dialogue bubble over his head in all caps. “You’re not the mob. You don’t get to make her disappear or send her on a little drive.”

“We love you.” The way Leigh brandished a rubber-tipped spatula at him as though she might thwap him upside the head was at visual odds with her words. “You can’t honestly expect us to sit by and say nothing if we see you making mistakes!”