Thick & Thin (Thin Love, #3)(16)
The Adirondack chair across from me skidded against the patio and toppled onto its side when I kicked it and for a second, I forgot that I wasn’t in my Miami condo, that it was pushing two a.m.
It took minutes, maybe it was hours, but that glass door leading inside slid open and my mother approached, her hair mussed but pulled back into a low bun and one of my father’s oversized Clayborn-Prosper University—our alma mater where my father ran the defensive line—hoodies draped over her tiny frame.
“You trying to wake everyone up?” But she didn’t appear to be angry, and even as she scooted next to me, moving my legs so she could sit at the end of the lounge chair, her movements were calm and relaxed. It was an effort—to steady her irritation so that I wouldn’t know just how pissed off or happy she was, whatever her mood was at that moment.
“I’m sorry.” I wiped my face, slumping into my chair again and Mom pulled her legs up, covering her knees with the hoodie so that only the bottoms of her cotton sleep pants and the purple on her toe nails were visible.
She didn’t speak at first, but touched my wrist, giving it a squeeze as though she knew I needed the silence. “She doesn’t love him.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because I know it’s true.” Mom took a breath, then exhaled, a long, slow motion, releasing whatever she tried so effortlessly to keep from me, moving from her chest with her breath. One glance at her pale skin and the sunken cast of her large eyes and I noticed for the first time since I’d landed back in New Orleans just how tired she looked.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked.
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“Don’t change the subject, Mom. What’s up?”
Mom wouldn’t hold back; we had always been there for each other. Mine had been the ear she’d bent from the time I was six, when talking to her best friend Mark or his boyfriend Johnny about the stresses of our lives back then wouldn’t suffice. There wasn’t much she didn’t tell me and though she swore she didn’t want to hear all the details, there wasn’t much I’d ever kept from her. But that was the way of a single parent life. My father hadn’t had a clue that Mom had been pregnant when she left New Orleans all those years ago. He hadn’t sought her out and sometimes I wondered, all these years later, if we all hadn’t been in the same marketplace when I was fifteen, if Kona hadn’t seen me—the boy who looked so much like him—walking away from Mom, if he ever would have discovered the secret she’d kept from him all those years.
But Kona had found out about me and the years of constant worry and struggle had been wiped clear, displaced in my parents’ reunion and their desperate effort to make up for the time they’d missed. Still, that hadn’t ever stopped Mom from talking to me when things were overwhelming, when she needed my comfort, my pathetic advice. It seemed she still did, and when I nudged her leg, a silent attempt to get her talking, she stopped hesitating.
“Getting the label off the ground is more trouble than it’s worth and I’m slammed between writing songs for Cass, getting the buzz out about him, dealing with your brother and sister and trying to find out what Kona…” She waved her hand, the sentence dropping off with a shake of her head, as though there were too many complaints and she didn’t know which was most important.
Her label, Wildcat Records, was a dream some twenty years in the making. She’d established herself first as a song writer, then a producer with very little help from anyone. Sometimes I thought that my mother’s gritty determination would enable her to tilt the world if she got the urge. Founding an indie record label would be nothing to someone as driven as she was. But my mother was also an involved wife and mother. She didn’t want to miss a thing, and I sometimes wondered how she did it. How could any woman raise a family and maintain a career without letting something go a miss? Women really were the stronger sex, no matter what any misogynistic chest thumper might claim.
Her struggles had started again with the founding of the label and the discovery of her first real artist, Cass Colson, a wiry cowboy type from Arkansas who had talent, so Mom said. I hadn’t met the guy, but he was all my mother could talk about when she’d discovered him singing like a thousand other wannabe artists around Jackson Square with a cowboy hat on the ground filling with quarters and ones and fives. She’d be the expert, I supposed.
She stretched her shoulders, eyes shut tight as she inhaled one long breath through her nose. “Never mind all the stuff I don’t have time for and you…” She stopped talking, rubbing her neck when I relaxed against the back of the chair. “You look defeated.”
“Maybe because I am.”
“No, honey, you’re not.” She moved closer, pushing my leg to the side so she could sit next to me, forgetting her own troubles with one long look over my face. “This isn’t just Aly.” She paused, looking down at her hands before she looked back at me and the worry was right there in her features. “She wasn’t wrong.” Mom touched my face, shaking her head as she watched me. “I worry too, you know, about the concussions, there have been so many, honey. It bothers me, the potential of you being permanently damaged. But you know, Ransom, that’s not the main reason Aly left.”
“Mom, this isn’t…this is so complicated.”