Hold On (The 'Burg #6)(7)

Slicking another thick, strong coat on that layer of hard I’d built around me, I reminded myself again.

And I did it in a way that I’d never forget it.

Not again.

Not ever again.

Until the day I died.

Chapter Two

Ironic

Cher

I drove home because, caught up in visions of life actually not sucking for once, I’d stupidly not taken my grocery list with me.

And as I drove to my and Ethan’s rental—a crackerbox house on a street that was full of tiny crackerbox houses—I knew that, even if it wasn’t yet ten in the morning, my shit day was about to get shittier.

This was because Trent’s beat-up, piece-of-shit car was at the curb in front of my house.

Ethan’s dad.

He’d bailed on me the day after I told him I was pregnant.

I’d been cautiously excited. He had his problems, but I was young, stupid, and misread the situation (not unusual back then and, apparently, now), thinking I saw a decent guy underneath him smoking anything he could get his hands on—pot, meth, crack, whatever.

When you were young, you could go crazy, do stupid shit, then pull your life together, or that’s what I’d thought. And people bounced back from that all the time; I’d thought that as well. If they were in too deep, they found reasons to get clean; I’d thought that too.

And I’d been good to him. I was in love with the decent guy I saw underneath, and I was all in to pull that guy together and give him happy. We were young, so I had time to fix whatever was broken in him and build a good life.

We’d had great times. I wasn’t a nag, not about his drug use, not about anything. I was generous with the money I earned waitressing at a rundown bar since he couldn’t hold down a job. I’d thought it was him being a good-time guy, but looking back, he was a full-blown junkie.

And I thought there was no better reason to get your shit together, to grow up, to start your real life, than the fact you were bringing a kid into the world, making that kid with someone you loved.

When I’d told him Ethan was on the way, Trent had acted ecstatic. We’d celebrated. He’d gotten loose, doing it saying it was the last time, promising he’d get his shit sorted starting the very next day, and we’d had sex all night before both of us passed out.

The next morning, I woke up and he was gone. I knew it regardless of the fact that he didn’t take anything but some of his clothes, the money out of my wallet, and the huge jar of coins I threw all my change in.

I didn’t see or hear from him for years.

Not until the shit hit with Dennis Lowe.

I aimed the tires of my car to the two strips of cracked cement that led to an old, one-car, unusable-except-for-storage garage, doing this repeatedly glancing at Trent’s wreck, watching him fold out of it and make his way to the sidewalk.

By the time I’d parked and got out, he was at my front stoop.

As I moved toward him, it gave me no joy to know that I’d not been wrong. There was a decent guy under all his bullshit.

The problem was, when he got his shit together and got himself a steady job, he’d found himself a steady woman (who was obviously not me), married her ass, knocked her up, and only then did he come clean to her that he had another kid out in the world.

She’d lost her mind. She’d told him he was out on his ass unless he made good with his new kid’s brother or sister.

He’d balked at this and they’d gone ’round about it, but when my name hit the news alongside a serial killer, he sought me out.

This was one reason why I’d legally changed my name and moved out of Morrie’s old apartment that Colt and Feb had moved Ethan and me in to after Denny Lowe committed suicide by cop. Too easy for all sorts of trash to find me.

Dennis Lowe played Cheryl Sheckle.

Now, me and Ethan were Cher and Ethan Rivers.

I’d thought about doing it up big, finding some fancy romance novel heroine’s name and giving it to me and my son. But in the end, that just wasn’t me, and I didn’t want to do anything that might make Ethan a target for snotty kids at school.

And I liked water. Lakes. Oceans. Rivers. Even streams. I didn’t have much calm in my life, but anytime I was around water, I found it.

So Rivers it was.

“Hey,” Trent called.

“Yo,” I replied, making my way toward him, needing food in my stomach and another cocktail of hangover cure.

I scratched swinging into McDonald’s before I hit Walmart on my to-do list as I arrived on the stoop.

I looked up at Trent.

He was good-looking, always had been, but it was better now that he wasn’t gaunt and strung out because he’d rather smoke than eat. And I was grateful to him for giving me one thing—or giving it to Ethan—that being sharing with my son all the good stuff he had to give. Thick, dark blond hair, a long, sturdy frame, nice bone structure.

But Ethan got his momma’s brown eyes.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“You got a second to talk?” he asked back.

I didn’t. I didn’t because I didn’t, and I didn’t because I felt shit, and I didn’t because my morning was even more shit than I felt, but I also didn’t because I never wanted to take a second to talk to Trent.

He might have gotten it together, but he still left me alone, pregnant, and in love with a junkie * who, in the end, didn’t give a shit about me.