Total pages in book: 42
Estimated words: 39689 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 198(@200wpm)___ 159(@250wpm)___ 132(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 39689 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 198(@200wpm)___ 159(@250wpm)___ 132(@300wpm)
“Still feeling like a birthday girl?” he asks.
I lick the hot fudge off the back of my spoon. “All that’s missing is the candles.”
He laughs. I fill my mouth with warm chocolate and cold cream, but there’s a burnt taste on my tongue that even the sweetest dessert can’t mask. Ever since that night Jonah said he wanted to put a baby inside me, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about having kids. Meeting Cherise’s daughters at the barbecue and seeing all the parents with their kids triggered a longing to hold my own baby in my arms. The desire to be responsible for someone else, and to be there for them in ways my parents weren’t there for me.
I don’t remember much about my mom, but I remember how she made me feel. Something like loneliness and longing braided together. I can still picture her glassy-eyed stare whenever I tried to get close to her. She rarely wanted to deal with me, so most of the time, she just...didn’t. How could I ever be a good mother if I don’t even know what it feels like to have one?
“Penny for your thoughts, little girl?”
God, I love it when he calls me that.
“I’m thinking about what you said the other night,” I tell him. “About us making a baby.”
“What about it?”
I cut a line through the whipped cream atop my sundae. “Is that what you want?”
“More than anything, angel. But what I want is only half the equation. What do you want?”
I rest my chin on my fist, my gaze drifting to a neighboring table where a mom’s wiping chocolate off her son’s face.
“I’m not sure if it’s a good idea,” I say.
“Why would you think that?”
No longer hungry, I push my half-eaten sundae away.
“Did Mary tell you about me? About where I come from?”
“She didn’t tell me much. Technically, she’s not allowed to, and she wouldn’t want to betray your privacy.” Jonah scoots my chair closer so he can draw circles across my back.
“You want to talk about it?” he asks. I really don’t, but it’s the only way he’ll understand.
“I told you my mom started doing drugs after my dad took off. That wasn’t entirely true. She did drugs before he left. I think they both did. It just got a lot worse after he was gone. My mom would lay on the couch for days, not moving, not even to go to the bathroom. I remember our apartment smelling like alcohol and ammonia. She rarely made me take baths, so I smelled awful. My teachers noticed—on the days my mom bothered to wake me for school.”
My stomach curdles at the memory of the stench, and I’m suddenly grateful I decided not to finish my sundae. Jonah cradles the back of my neck, but doesn’t say anything, content to let me tell the story at my own pace.
“She only went grocery shopping every couple of weeks. Probably the same time she went out to buy drugs. I don’t know where she got the money because she could never keep a job. Sometimes she would come home really excited and want to braid my hair or play with me. Then she’d get bored and ignore me for three days.”
I can feel Jonah’s body tensing as I speak, even as his touch remains gentle. Breathing deeply, I steel myself for the worst of it, the memories I rarely let myself go back to.
“One day she left and never came back. I was all alone. At some point, the power got shut off, and everything in the fridge spoiled, so I ate whatever I could scavenge from the cupboard. The upstairs neighbors heard me crying and called the landlord, thinking I was someone’s abandoned dog.”
Jonah’s arms tighten around me. “Do you know how long she’d been gone?”
“A little over three weeks, I think. If I wasn’t sleeping, I was waiting, so I slept a lot.” I lean into his sturdiness, thankful for the support of his body, and his love. “I was put into the system after that. Most of my foster moms tried hard to connect with me, but I never bonded with them. Jonah, if that’s the only kind of parenting I know, then how could I ever be a good mom?”
I rest my head on his shoulder as he massages my back. I wait for him to push for more details or ask a million questions, like a psychologist would. But he doesn’t. He just holds me, comforting me through the awfulness. It comes so naturally to him. He’s going to make an amazing dad someday to a kid of his own. But what if his instincts aren’t enough to make up for my shortcomings?
“My sweet angel.” His beard tickles my face as he kisses me. “It breaks my fucking heart to think of you as that starving little girl. But against the odds, you’ve grown up into a bright, resilient, beautiful young woman. There’s no reason you couldn’t be a fantastic mother, too.”