She groaned, as she sat here, her eyes closed. She tried so hard to make her mother feel at home, but the situation was just getting out of control.
Jasmine may have to look at putting her mom into a seniors’ home, and she knew her mother wouldn’t deal very well with that. If she slid into full-blown dementia, where she didn’t know anybody around her, then maybe that would be okay because her mom wouldn’t feel like she’d been abandoned. But she was lucid just enough times and just for long enough minutes that it wouldn’t work out. Her mother would feel completely lost.
As it was, her mom remembered all the bad things and none of the good things. How did that happen? Why would she be stuck in a time loop where she only remembered the things that she was upset at her daughter about? And there been plenty of those. Jasmine had had a wild streak, and she’d run hard and fast in the wrong direction way back then, particularly after Harley left.
She’d been heartbroken, devastated even, and had gone more than a little crazy for a while there. Finding out she was pregnant had calmed things down in her mind, but it just raised all kinds of hell with her parents. Particularly when she didn’t tell them until she was already well past her first trimester. She was close to twenty-three weeks when her mother made a comment about Jasmine getting fat, and she’d snapped back that she wasn’t fat, that she was pregnant. That had caused the storm of all storms. Not that she was particularly proud of her behavior at that moment, sharing the news, but her child didn’t have to pay the price.
As it was, her father had died not long afterward, and her mother had needed Jasmine in a big way but was already showing signs. But, if not for that series of events, Jasmine didn’t quite know where she would have ended up. Because she knew her parents were ready to turn her out of the house and had had consistent arguments about it. Jasmine was sure that her mother was in favor of kicking her out.
At the time it seemed more like her father didn’t want to toss her out but was more about looking for a husband for her. Something she just didn’t understand, but it came back down to her father’s belief that a female needed to have a man to look after them. But then this was all ground zero, and there was just no answer that would make it any better.
As she sat here, a huge black truck drove down the street and slowed in front of her house. She frowned, as she looked at the driver. Something was just so familiar about him. She hopped to her feet, trying to get closer, but she didn’t recognize the truck.
The driver turned the truck around, came back, parked on the opposite side of the road, and stared directly at her. She shook her head, not sure what she saw, but she walked over to the front steps, leaned against the pillar on the porch, and sipped her lemonade. When the man hopped out of the truck, slammed the door closed, and walked toward her with a rapid but slightly uneven stride, she still didn’t recognize him.
When he approached the sidewalk, he looked up at her. “Hello, Jasmine.”
She stopped and stared, and then her heart slammed against her chest. “What the hell are you doing here?”
He gave a small half smile. “Well, it wasn’t for you apparently. I came back to do a job.”
“I knew you would never come back, no matter what you tried to tell me back then.” Her back stiffened, as she leveled a glare at the only man she’d ever loved.
“Maybe,” he said quietly. “But you also knew that, being only sixteen, there was no way I could stay with you until you were an adult.”
“Yeah? And what happened when I hit that age?”
“Doesn’t matter. You found somebody else, either before I left or soon afterward,” he noted in a hard voice. “As rumors say, you have a child.”
“I do.” Her tone was defiant, having heard so much all her life about her single-motherhood status—and most of it unpleasant—she immediately glared at him. “And it’s none of your damn business.”
He slowly nodded. “Well, that’s true because I know it’s not mine. Did you tell everybody it was though?”
She shrugged. “I knew you weren’t coming back, so it didn’t matter what I said.”
“I made a good scapegoat, right? Everybody was more than willing to believe that’s who I was.” He shook his head, as if disappointed in her.
At that, she felt a twinge of remorse. “Honestly I wasn’t thinking very clearly at the time at all. I was only sixteen, as you remember, and about to have a baby.”
“And that’s my fault? Because that’s not fair.”
She hesitated and then slowly shook her head. “No, you’re right. It wasn’t your fault. I would have been happier if it had been your child.”
“Wouldn’t have happened. I told you that I made a promise to your parents.”
“Well, guess what? They didn’t believe me when I told them that the baby wasn’t yours.”
“Did you tell them?”
“I did, but my dad was already in a rampage, thinking it was yours, and I couldn’t dissuade him from that.”
“Did you try?”
He widened his stance, a little on the aggressive side for her liking. But she could kind of see his point. “I did. But he and I were already at loggerheads for him sending you away, and I wasn’t very happy when I found out I was pregnant anyway. And I didn’t tell them until you were long gone and until I was so many months down that pathway that they couldn’t force me to terminate the pregnancy.”
“Did you ever tell him who the father was?”
“No, my father died shortly after Jimmy was born.”
“I’m sorry about that.” Harley frowned.
“Dad was basically a good man, but he was hard.” She sighed, relaxing against the post. “But then you know that.”
“And I tried hard to play by his rules.” He walked up the steps toward her.
“You did, dammit.” She laughed. But she took a long sip of her lemonade. “You haven’t changed much.”
“I’ve changed a lot.”
“So I wonder, if now, present day, would you have left me behind?”
“Because I made that promise? Yes. My word means everything.”
“To even the woman you love?”
“You were a child and underage, and I needed to get away.”
She stared at him, her gaze thirstily on his face, as she studied the man she’d waited for, hoping against hope that he would someday return. “I didn’t sleep at night,” she said quietly, “hoping that I would hear you coming back.”
“I went into the navy.” His tone was harsh. “Coming back would only be when I was on leave. And apparently you were already pregnant with another man’s child, when I was on my first leave.”
“Did you come back here then?”
“No. I didn’t get leave. I ended up doing extra work on base because we had a riot happening,” he admitted. “That seemed to set the pattern for the next few years. I got very little time off. I was supposed to, and I banked it, but every time I thought about coming back here, I figured you’d moved on. And, of course, I was right.”
She stared at him flatly. “When I realized that you had rejected me, I went out to a big party, got drunk, and I don’t remember what happened,” she explained. “I somehow got home. Woke up the next morning, and my clothes were a bloody mess, and my body was bruised. I felt fine but sore, and I found out I was pregnant a few months later.”