She handed him a glass and Coop lifted his big, heavy head from the nap he’d been taking on a pile of old rags. He gave a soft “wuff” in happiness and staggered to his feet. This took him a minute because his hips were really bothering him today, but he shook it off and trotted over to greet the love of his life.
Mick’s mom’s face lit up as well. “Oh look at you, my handsome boy!” She pulled a doggy treat from her pocket. “Don’t tell your daddy,” she whispered. “He thinks you’re getting fat.”
“He is getting fat,” Mick said as Coop wolfed the treat down without so much as tasting it.
Coop slid him a look.
Mick shook his head. “The vet said you had to lose ten pounds, man. Don’t blame me.”
Mick’s mom squatted down and gave Coop a big hug, whispering in his ear that she’d made dinner and saved him some.
Mick gave up. He couldn’t win all the battles. Plus, it was good to see her smiling. Between his father’s death and his sister Wendy’s vanishing act, she’d had it rough.
“Watch out,” he said, dragging a heavy box of crap to the driveway, tossing it into the back of his dad’s old truck, which Mick had been driving around while in town so he could dump the trash at the end of the day and also pick up supplies as needed.
She looked at the big pile of things in the driveway that Mick still had to discard, more stuff he’d dragged out of the garage to get to the dump, and frowned. “That’s my old rocking chair,” she said.
“Old being the key word.”
“I want it back, Mick.”
“Mom, it’s broken beyond repair.” He nudged it with his toe and another rung from the armrest fell off. “See? And admit it, you’d completely forgotten about the thing until you saw it just now.”
“Not true,” she said. “I know more than you give me credit for.”
He set his empty glass down to take her gently by the shoulders. She was frail, and he hated that. He turned her around to face him, looking up at him with dark brown eyes identical to his own. “I want you to tell me—without looking,” he said, “which stuff in that pile are things you want to keep.”
She bit her lower lip, trying to hide a smile.
“Just one thing, Mom,” he said, and had to laugh when she rolled her eyes.
“You always were too smart for your own good,” she said. “An answer for everything. No wonder you and your dad never got along.”
True story. Mick had been born with an insatiable curiosity. He’d questioned everything, and his dad, a manual laborer all his life with only an eighth-grade education, hadn’t had the answers, which had brought out his temper, hating that Mick’s questions made him feel small. Adding to the unpinned grenade was the fact that his dad always had to be right.
“All of these things are memories to me,” his mom said, looking around them. “I know you don’t understand that because, like Wendy, you were always so unhappy here.”
“Wendy was born unhappy,” he said and she smiled sadly because it was true. Wendy had always had big plans. She’d wanted to be an esthetician, so Mick had sent her to school. Twice. Neither time had stuck. Her latest plan was to become rich and famous, and Mick wished her nothing but good luck on that. “And I wasn’t always unhappy.”
“When?” she asked with a hopefulness that stabbed him in the chest. “When were you happy here?”
He slung an arm around her. “When you baked strawberry pies.”
She snorted and pushed him away. “I made those pies to sell at the farmers’ market and you’d steal them. You were always hungry. A bottomless pit.” And then, as if the memories were all too much, her smile faded and suddenly she looked every bit of her sixty years as she sipped her “lemonade.” Her eyes were too glassy and she was flushed.
“Mom,” he said quietly. “This is all too much for you. Running the house by yourself, keeping it and the yard up. I want you to reconsider—”
“No,” she said. “I don’t want to sell and move.”
Mick lived and worked in San Francisco, two and a half hours north. The commute to check in on her every week since his dad’s death was starting to hurt his business. He was a structural engineer in a firm with three partners, although he’d recently turned his attention to buying up properties and leasing them out to a wide assortment of businesses. But even without his crazy-busy schedule, the five-hour weekly round-trip to Wildstone was killing him.
When he was in town, he stayed at the Wild West B & B, a property he was actively looking at buying since the owners were in financial trouble. Mick’s mom wanted him to stay here in his old bedroom, but luckily for him it was still stuffed to the gills with more old stuff he hadn’t gotten to yet.
His mom was a Hoarders episode waiting to happen.
Normally, he came on the weekends, but he was staying all week to expedite necessary renovations on the house. “The guys I hired to haul some of this stuff away should’ve been here today.”
She bit her lower lip.
“What?” he asked.
“They showed up a little while ago and I turned them away. I don’t need help,” she said when he groaned. “I’ve got you.”
“Mom.” He rubbed his temples, but it didn’t ease the headache. “It took me three weeks to get them here.”
She crossed her arms, her face set. “I didn’t like the look of them.”
He had to laugh, but honestly there was no way he was going to even try to squash her ’tude. His dad has been a stern and dominating force that Mick had never managed to get along with. But if his mom wanted to grow a backbone at her age, he was all for it. “Fine,” he said. “You win. You’re never going to be serious about selling this place anyway.”
“Now you’re catching on.” She patted him on the cheek. “I love it here, honey. I just wish you loved it here too.” She paused, waiting for his reaction.
But he couldn’t give her the one she wanted.
She sighed. “You spent the last two weekends renovating my kitchen, and you know what? I think you secretly enjoyed it. You handled it far more capably than I could ever have imagined.”
“Guess the old man taught me something after all, huh?”
Her smile faded and he felt like an asshole.
“You’re not being fair,” she said quietly. “Yes, he was tough and demanding, but it’s not like you suffered for it. Look how well you turned out.”
Still sticking up for the bastard.
“He was hard on you,” she said, “because he saw your potential early on.”
If his dad had seen Mick’s potential, this was news to him. All he could remember was being refused every request to do anything, even though he’d been a decent kid who’d stayed out of trouble.
His mom looked at the shovel and rake hanging from hooks on the wall. Beside them were painted outlines of other tools that were now either lying on the floor or missing entirely, and she smiled sadly. “I’m surprised you haven’t painted over those outlines.”
Mick shrugged. He was trying to do things methodically and not let his emotions get the best him. “I’ve got to clear things out before I can paint.” But the truth was, he couldn’t wait to obliterate the physical proof of his father’s need for complete control. He straightened and felt the ache in his back and shoulders from the work. “I’m going to knock off for the day. I want to go shower.”