Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 68390 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 342(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68390 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 342(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
I scoff. “Ignoring someone who is supposed to be her best friend and all that.”
Weland winces, and even though I’m trying to defend her, I feel like the bottom end of a jackass, and I think that’s all ass to begin with.
Waving a hand, I quickly add, “Sorry. Ignore me. I don’t know anything about it. I’ll tell you about me instead.”
“How bad is it?” She wraps the leash around her hand one more time like she’s preparing for Beans to tug her off her feet, but really, I think she’s trying to ground herself so she doesn’t get knocked off her feet by what I’m about to say.
“Oh, just regular bad. You’ll be okay.”
Her brows shoot up, and she gives me a wild look. “It’s not me I’m worried about.”
No, she wouldn’t be. I don’t think she ever worries about herself. She’s the least selfish person I’ve ever met. But self-sacrifice can be too far and too much as well. “My mom was a single mom. She was close to her family. She never did tell a soul who my dad was, which became a real issue later, but in the earlier years, they helped her out. She was young. She had me when she was nineteen. When I was three, she started dating again. I don’t remember, but that’s what my grandma always told me when I asked.
“Everyone always described her as being like the sun. Bright, beautiful, but a little bit unreachable and untamable. Granted, that was always coming from her own mother with a hell of a lot of hindsight behind it, so I’m not sure I can count that as accurate. I think there might have been a lot of jealousy involved too, even for my grandma. I think my mom lived life to the fullest every day and in every way. I’m not sure anyone really understood her. She dated a series of guys, as my grandma liked to put it, and one of them kind of stuck. They’d been dating for a few months, but she never brought him home. My grandma would see his bike pull into the driveway to pick my mom up and then back again at the end of the night. She didn’t know much more about him than that. Later, she knew his name because it was in the papers. She knew it from his obituary. He was a few years older than my mom but still way, way too young. Driving a bike late at night in the rain, they were hit by a truck. Neither of them survived.”
Weland makes a gargling noise in the back of her throat, and when I glance over, I see unshed tears glistening, and they turn her eyes a dark shade of blue, somewhere near cobalt or sapphire. As much as I try to feel anything about my past, all I feel is regret about what could have been and what wasn’t. I don’t feel grief. I was three, so I don’t remember any of it. But I do feel longing. Longing to know the woman who gave me life, who loved me, and who was taken from me before I could even properly recall anything about her. All my life, I wished that night never happened. I wished I had a real mother instead of a grandma and an aunt and cousins.
“I lived with my grandma for a few years after that. She was heartbroken, though, and losing my mom was hard on her. I didn’t understand it as a little kid, but as an adult, it was clear. When I was eight, she passed away. She wasn’t overly old, but I don’t think heart attacks pick and choose.”
“Good god, Sterling,” Weland gasps. “You said it wasn’t that bad.”
“That’s all the grief and losing people in my story. It’s done there. My mom’s dad died super young, when she was a teenager. Maybe that had something to do with her wild streak or why she tried to live life and love life to the fullest. I’m not sure. I’ll never be able to ask her. There was no one other than my aunt. She was five years older than my mom, and by the time I came into her family, she already had three kids. Two older and one a year younger than me. She didn’t want another, but she made room for me anyway, and she loved me in her own way.
“From what I could gather, she was so different from my mom. Her husband was a banker, and later, when she went back to work, she worked at the same bank. They were both so…proper and upright. Stodgy, I guess. I don’t know what it was, but she also encouraged the worst kind of sibling rivalry, except it was between her kids and me. The three of them against me. That’s the way it always was. Three boys. She called them her Gaggle of Greedy Gretchens. So, full disclosure: I didn’t come up with that myself. They hated that. They hated that she compared me to a saint or an angel all the time because I was quiet and never asked for anything. I never wanted to draw attention to myself, but it never worked out in my favor.