All teasing lightness left my son’s eyes at the mention of his birthday. “Mom, we don’t have to do anything.”
Alexis paused her rhythmic chopping at my son’s tone. The pain in it.
I moved to face my son. I had to look up at him now. My hands clenched his strong neck. “Your birth is something I want to celebrate. Your dad would’ve wanted that too. And I’m not about to hire some washed up nineties band to perform in the backyard like the other mothers at Black Mountain do, but we’ll have some pizza. I’ll even let you drink a beer.” I winked.
He chuckled. The sound was forced, and I hated that. “Okay, Mom, but you know that Dad’s been sneaking me beer since I turned fifteen.”
Of course I knew that. It was my idea.
I frowned and stepped back. “Well, of course I didn’t know about it. A good mother would’ve definitely put a stop to that.”
Ryder reached forward to squeeze my hand. “Not good. Great.”
The lie spoken by my eldest was so convincing that I might’ve believed it had I known better.
I knew better.
“I wish he’d cheated on me,” I said, sipping my second glass of wine.
We’d had our dinner, then sat down to watch an episode of Schitt’s Creek together before Ryder left for his boyfriend’s place and Jax tucked himself into bed with an Ernest Hemingway book.
My sister raised her brows, regarding me over the rim of her first glass. She drank to enjoy the fifty-dollar bottle, I drank to numb myself. I barely tasted it. Would’ve been completely okay with ten-dollar crap. But people who drank a lot of cheap wine were more likely to be considered alcoholics whereas people who consumed expensive stuff were connoisseurs. Or European.
“You wish David had cheated on you?” Alexis asked. She had yet to mention when she was going back to Chicago, to her boring boyfriend, her life. Since she was a website designer—a very successful one at that—she could work from anywhere, and I loved that but didn’t want to keep her here just because she was worried I was going to hang myself from a shower rod and turn my children into orphans.
I’d never do that to them.
Or myself.
I was much too narcissistic to kill myself. Wallowing seemed to be more my speed.
I nodded at my sister. “Yes. I wish that some mistress had crawled out of the woodwork after he died, presenting his love child. Or I’d found something incriminating on his computer. Something to make me hate him. It would be much easier to get over him dying if I hated him.”
Alexis softened her gaze in the way she did with me now. Pity liberally splashed with sadness. She was the younger one, but somehow was always the more practical of the two of us, especially since our parents died.
“Honey, hating him in death would be just as hard as loving him.”
I winced at the truth of her words. “I do hate him. For dying. For leaving me here with two boys, having to deal with his fucking mother, the bitches at school. All the decisions about life that we were supposed to make together.” No tears trailed down my face—I’d dried myself out of those long ago.
Alexis reached over to squeeze my hand. “I’m here. I’m not going to let you handle any of this alone.”
I stared at my sister. “I wish Mom and Dad were here.”
Her eyes turned glassy. “Yeah, me too. The boys deserve two grandparents that weren’t born in the bowels of hell.”
I giggled at the break in sorrow.
Alexis had met my mother-in-law at various family gatherings over the years, but she’d seen her at full power after the funeral, on the day of David’s anniversary when she came over for dinner to ‘honor David’s memory.’
She was usually on her best behavior when Alexis was around, but it seemed that she had heard about the reputation I’d built for myself this past year and was not impressed, so her claws were out.
Alexis had casually disliked her out of loyalty for me before all of this, but it was safe to say she was ready to call a priest and have her exorcised.
“Thank you,” I said. “For coming. For having my back. For calling me every single morning after you left to get me up. You’re the best sister, the best friend I could ever ask for.”
“I know,” she said, sipping her wine with a grin.
I tried to grin back. Took a large sip.
Marley was right. Wine wasn’t going to heal anything, but it was doing a good job of numbing me.
“You have a new neighbor,” Alexis said, snatching a water bottle from the fridge. Sweat glistened off her in a way that managed to be almost sexy instead of disgusting.
Nevertheless, I was disgusted by her. It was seven in the morning and she’d already gone running. She did not look at all hungover after the two bottles of wine we had last night. I, on the other hand, was on my third cup of coffee and could barely think around my headache.
The five years between us were never more obvious than they were now.
I couldn’t wait for time to catch up to her, her metabolism to shut down, her tits and ass to sag. That lineless face to crease with age and stress.
It was an ugly thing of me to think but I felt ugly lately. I was jealous that my sister had youth, a different life, an area in her chest that still housed a beating heart and not just a jumble of minced up flesh.
I didn’t bother to look out the window. “Oh, yeah. The Hendersons moved out. He cheated on her with their pool boy or something.” I waved my hand in dismissal. Normally, I’d be filled to the brim with details of the entire scandal, down to the name, age, and physical fitness of the pool boy in question.
As it was, I had lost touch with the den of vipers I’d pretended to be friends with. I figured they got bored of the whole ‘wallowing widow’ thing after the first month. I didn’t begrudge them for it, it was who they were, and I’d likely have tried to poison them if they’d continued coming over with faux sympathy and wine.
My sister and my boys, that was all I needed.
And my best friend Lydia who’d spent a month sleeping in my bed with me when it all first happened. A month was a long time in Lydia’s world. She was a free-spirited, travel photographer who lived the fabulous life I might have if it hadn’t been for getting knocked up and married.
Not that I was jealous of her.
Not much at least.
She called every day, promised she would drop everything to come stateside if I needed her. Lydia didn’t make empty promises, but it was one I’d never make her keep. She was one of the most talented photographers I’d ever seen and she was brilliantly happy when she was capturing the world. When she wasn’t doing that, she lost her light.
I wasn’t going to be responsible for my one friend in the world—the one not required to be my friend because she was related to me—losing her light. I may have been selfish and mopey, but I wasn’t that bad.
“He’s hottttt,” Alexis said, dragging out the word like some teenage girl. Fuck was I happy I didn’t get one of those. Alexis was still looking out the window, and I was still trying to wake up and remember what I was supposed to do for the day.
Drop the boys off at school. Come back home. Cry in the bathtub. Pay bills. Try to figure out how to get on with my life, make money, be a productive member of society instead of a wallowing bitch. Pick the boys up. Take them to whatever sports practice was happening today. Cook an arguably mediocre dinner, or hope Alexis was going to do that. Put my youngest boy to sleep. Wait until the oldest was out of sight in order to drink enough wine so I can lapse into unconsciousness for a couple of hours.