Swing and a Mishap (Summersweet Island 2)

“Your freezer is now stocked with comfort food. Chicken noodle soup, chicken paprikash, my homemade beef stew, meatloaf and mashed potatoes, and chicken pot pie, so that should make you look a little less like garbage,” she tells me while she moves my kitchen towels to a different drawer.

My stomach doesn’t even growl when she lists off all my childhood favorites I watched disappear into my freezer a few minutes ago. I haven’t had much of an appetite since Wren told me the only reason she got pregnant by a complete piece of shit who left her all alone all these years was because I was a pussy. I must make some kind of pitiful sound, because my mom pauses with her hand still in my new towel drawer that used to be where I kept my placemats, her head whipping around on her neck to look at me.

“All right, that’s it!” she says, slamming the drawer closed and marching over to the other side of the island opposite me. “When I asked you what was wrong this morning, you said nothing. When both your sisters called you earlier and asked what was wrong, you told them nothing. I can clearly see it isn’t nothing, Shepherd Christopher Oliver, so spit it out. What happened? Is it baseball? Do you miss it that much? Oh, honey, I’m so sorry. I wish I could—”

“It’s not baseball,” I quickly cut her off when she reaches across the island and places both her hands on top of mine. “I told you when you called last week everything is great on that end, and it still is. I made the right decision. I’ve got a great group of kids I’m coaching, and I can’t wait for you to meet them and see a game.”

She gives me a smile, but it’s one filled with just a tiny bit of sadness, even though she tries to hide it. My mom has been more upset than I have about the end of my career. She always said nothing made her happier than watching me play, and she admitted a few months ago that it made her kind of sad to turn on the television and not see me playing anymore. Even though I’m almost thirty-five, she’d been watching me play since I was four years old. She said it was tough knowing she was getting old and she had to come to terms with the fact that the time of watching her baby boy play ball was finally over. I’m just hoping watching me coach will fill that void for her a little bit.

“Well, if it’s not baseball, then what’s going on?”

I start to explain to my mom just what happened the other night, but I quickly realize she’s going to need more than that to get the full picture. Taking a deep breath, I start from the beginning. The very beginning. Once I start talking, I don’t stop until I’m finished, the words tumbling out of me quickly, because no matter how many times I’ve relived this over and over the last few days, it hurts even worse saying it all out loud. My mom stands quietly on the other side of the counter with her hands still resting on top of mine, her eyes getting bigger and bigger as everything pours out of me, until twenty minutes have passed by the time I finish.

“…and if she would just read her messages, she would know all this, she’d finally understand, and maybe she’d let me see her again.”

At least two solid minutes of complete silence ticks by in my small kitchen until my mom finally processes everything I just word-vomited and will hopefully give me some much-needed advice.

“I’m so sorry, Shepherd,” she whispers quietly, giving my hands a squeeze. “But I agree with your dad. Wren Bennett? You really should have aimed lower.”

Just like my dad when I was thirteen, my mom snorts and shakes her head at me.

“I’m so glad you stopped by. I feel much better now,” I reply drolly, which just makes her roll her eyes at me.

“You’re not getting any sympathy from me. You made one of the sweetest girls I’ve ever met cry. Probably more than once,” she reminds me, my shoulders sagging as my head drops to stare at the counter so I don’t have to see the disappointment in her eyes.

“I know,” I mutter.

“First things first. I’ve been meaning to ask you this, but I kept forgetting. Why wasn’t there ever any kind of statement made about you and that self-involved, vapid, waste of oxygen breaking up?”

My mom only met Alana once when she came out to Washington for a long weekend just to hang out when I had a few days off. When my mom opened her arms to give Alana a hug in greeting, Alana just turned and held her phone up and took a selfie of the two of them instead. The rest of the weekend was spent wrapping my arms around my mother and pretending like I was giving her a hug every time she started to lunge for Alana to snatch the phone out of her hand during one of Alana’s thousands of selfie sessions.