Thick & Thin (Thin Love, #3)(58)

“I can’t breathe,” she said, sobbing, breath clear despite her protests. She clutched my shirt between her fingers. “I…I can’t breathe.”

And for what seemed like forever, neither could I.

We stood there for what seemed an eternity, my mother clinging to me as I held her, my strength keeping her from fainting away, never letting on that I felt weak and breathless, too. My mother needed me, needed me to be the strong one for once, and we stood there as her tears flowed, as she gasped for breath, and me desperately trying to be a rock holding her safe at the eye of the storm.





The heart breaks with a word.

Syntax that maims.

Syllables that feed you a meal

You do not want.

And there it is

The raw flesh

Untended,

Uncooked,

And you gorge on it,

Stomach every bite,

Because you believe it will fill you.





Fourteen





My mother’s studio was set apart from the rest of the lake house. A small hallway led beneath the stairs, toward the downstairs laundry room, between two guest rooms, to the place she had converted into a studio a few years back. It was fit for an up-and-coming label, especially one founded by a woman that had taught herself everything she knew about making music. A woman who had clawed through mountains of bullshit just to have her music heard. Now she’d cloistered herself away from life and the personal issues she refused to discuss. She’d rather write music, so she’d said. She’d rather work.

It’s where I found her the day after Mom discovered the paternity suits that Kona had kept from her. Dad hadn’t returned to the lake house but from the frequent vibrations her phone made rattling against the sound board in her studio, I got that he hadn’t quite given her the space she claimed to want.

“Stubborn ass,” she mumbled, keeping any other insults to herself as I walked through the door. “Hey.” She managed to grab her phone before the vibration fired off again and then chucked it onto the billowy sofa at the back of the room.

“You not gonna answer?” She shrugged, moving her legs from the chair next to her so I could sit. “Really, Mom?”

“How’s Aly?” That perfectly tweezed eyebrow came up and I got the hint: don’t pester her about her relationship and she won’t nag me about the non-existent one I had with Aly.

“How are you feeling?” I countered, leaning back in the chair as she tapped her nails over the plastic arm rest.

“I can at least breathe again.” The nail strumming stopped and Mom ran the tips of her fingers against the table surface, eyes unblinking as she stared out of the window behind me. “I didn’t think it would be possible, him…”

My mother tried damn hard to never cry in front of me. For the most part, she didn’t. In fact, I could count on one hand the number of times I remember her letting go completely with the waterworks. Once, it had happened when I nearly killed Mikee Sibley for attacking my friend. Mom hadn’t been able to keep from crying when she saw how scared, how ashamed I’d been. Another time had come when Bobby, the old woman who gave Mom a job in Nashville when no one else would, who sort of adopted us back then, had died after a long fight with stomach cancer. That had only been five years before and I’d never seen Mom cry that long or that hard since. Until yesterday.

When she held on to me, sobbing, losing it completely after hearing Dad tell her he’d been accused of fathering two illegitimate children, I realized not even Bobby’s death had rattled her so hard. Kona’s potential betrayal, and his unwillingness to share it with her, cut her deeper than anything had before. At least, anything she’d let me see.

She kept herself together, after Dad left. He had gone slowly, first settling his worried children. Promising them that this fight would not keep, that sometimes parents got angry with one another. He waited until they were asleep. Only then did he leave.

There was a glint in Mom’s eyes now and I thought that maybe she was going to cry again. There were no shakes or quivers that moved the features of her face. No twitching eyelids or chin wobbles. Still, those big blue eyes watered as she stared out onto the lake, thinking private thoughts that she didn't feel obliged to share with me. Mom was great at many things—staying mad was just not one of them.

I didn’t break her from her self-imposed trance. She needed her thoughts to get her past any lingering anger. Instead, I let her stare, keeping to herself; I leaned back in my seat, not thinking about a damn thing other than the room around us and how different it was since Mom had tossed out the guest bed and furniture.

The walk-in closet had been rehabbed into a small recording booth—the door fitted with a small window and the walls padded with egg crates covered with red fabric. The soundboard extended eight feet across the front of the booth next to a 42-inch computer monitor and keyboard and tall stacks of black speakers and monitors situated around the board like an arch. There were a dozen or so acoustic and electric guitars hanging from hooks fastened into the brick walls, lush carpets covering the hardwood floors and two leather sofas along the back of the room. But nothing concealed the large bay window. It was something Mom promised she needed to clear her mind as she worked—the lake, the waves and the silent activity she witnessed from her large office chair behind that board. My mother certainly wasn’t a typical homemaker. She was many things, great at all of them, but it was in this studio, in front of that board or holding a guitar that she held the tightest, surest grip on her self-erected throne.