I picture him, his hormones and emotions raging. What’s he like when he’s in love?
He sighs. “It was sexier than any bikini. I never wanted that summer to end. We couldn’t stay off each other. I was totally gone for her.”
But she’s not here now.
“One night your mother…”
“My mother?” I dart my eyes up to him.
But he’s avoiding my gaze, and his lips are tight.
“Your mother was a rising star, and your parents had just started dating,” he explains. “She took Flora out and got her drunk, and when Flora woke up, she was in bed with another man.” He finally looked over at me, pausing in his work. “Another man who wasn’t me.”
My mother too
k her out, got her drunk, and…
“My father,” I say, putting the pieces together.
Jake nods. “Your grandfather knew I wasn’t going to let her go, so your parents helped get rid of her.”
I blink long and hard. I can’t believe I defended them to my uncle. To him. No wonder he hates them.
“She felt so guilty, thinking she’d had sex with another man,” Jake continued, leading me into the stable to fill the horses’ food, “it was a piece of cake for the family to convince her our relationship was over unless she wanted me to find out what she’d done. ‘And hey, here’s fifty grand to cover moving expenses. Disappear, kid. Don’t call him.’”
“You never tried to find her?”
“I did,” he tells me. “I found her in some apartment in San Francisco.”
He falls silent for a moment as he pulls on his gloves. “She wouldn’t even let me through the door,” he says. “Couldn’t look me in the eye. Said she couldn’t see me anymore and didn’t want me to call.”
He cuts open the hay bales, and I take a rake and start to spread it around the stall.
“When did you find out what they really did to her?” I ask him.
He remains quiet for a moment, and when he finally speaks, his voice is almost a whisper. “About a week after I left her apartment and her sister called to tell me she’d died.”
Died?
I stop. “Suicide?”
He nods and continues working.
“Oh, my God.”
“And six hours after that, I packed a bag and never looked back,” he tells me, giving me a tight smile. “Got on the road, planned to head to Florida, but I got here and…never wanted to leave.” His eyes soften, and things I thought I knew start to melt away as the pieces of the puzzle come together.
“I moved onto this land with a run-down trailer and no indoor plumbing. Now I have a house, a shop, a business, and my sons. Things turned out far better for me than I deserved.”
Why would he think he didn’t deserve what he had? It wasn’t his fault. He tried to find her. If they wanted to get to her, they were going to get to her.
My parents. Would they have intervened like that if I’d fallen in love with someone who didn’t fit the image?
“I’m sorry,” I rush out. “I’m sorry they did that—”
“Your parents, Tiernan,” he says, cutting me off and looking me in the eye. “Not your fault.”
It’s hard to make sense of, though. My mother wasn’t so different than Flora. Just as poor, but at least Flora had a family. My mother had been a foster kid with no one. How could she not be on the girl’s side?