taking care of her. But she also wanted it. And he...
Well, he wanted everything. He was starting to be able to identify that feeling inside of him. But he knew that in order to make it mean anything, he was going to have to give everything to her too.
And he didn’t know if she was ready to hear that.
He didn’t know if he was ready to say it. If he was really ready to try and identify all those feelings in his chest.
But he supposed he was going to have to get to a place where he was.
First things first, though. He needed to go talk to his and Emmett’s mother.
He was going to focus on that for now.
* * *
WEST HADN’T BEEN back to his childhood home in a long damned time. When he did go, paperwork in hand, he thought that he was prepared. But he wasn’t. The whole house seemed smaller, which was silly, since it wasn’t like the last time he’d been he was a kid or anything.
It shouldn’t seem smaller. He’d been the same height the last time he walked up this cracked old sidewalk.
He knew his mother would be home, because she worked night shifts, and it was a pretty decent time of the day for her to be up and around. He charged right to the front door and knocked.
She opened it a crack at first. Then the rest of the way. He couldn’t read the look on her face. Her brows were drawn together, her eyes shining a bit bright.
Her lips were pressed together firmly, as if she was holding something back. But for the life of him he didn’t know what it might be.
“Hi, Mom,” he said.
“Come in,” she said, backing away from the door.
To be honest, he had expected her to leave him there standing on the porch.
She invited him in, and he accepted, following her into the tiny kitchen.
One side of the table was clear, with a coffee cup still sitting in one of the seats. The other side was stacked high with magazines and scratch-off lottery tickets. It looked basically the same as it had when he left.
“I just came to talk to you real quick.”
“What?” She was guarded.
“Emmett is with me,” West said. “And I have him going to school. I need to be his legal guardian. I have some paperwork for you to sign. We may need to go to court and make it all official.”
“We don’t need to do that,” his mom said. “I can sign whatever.”
“All right,” West said, pushing the file of papers forward.
“How have you been?” she asked, flipping the folder open and staring down inside at it.
“All right.”
“You staying in Oregon?”
“Yes,” he said. “I bought a ranch.”
“That’s good,” she said, finding the places that he had highlighted and adding her first signature.
West hadn’t meant to come here to question his mother. There was spare little point. What was done was done. To both him and Emmett. But when she signed in the second spot he couldn’t stop himself. “Do you love him?”
His mother looked up at him in confusion. “Who?”
“Emmett,” he said.
She huffed a laugh and picked up a pack of cigarettes from the table. “He is my son,” she said, lighting it and taking a slow drag off of it. “I love him more than anything in the world.”
A laugh caught in West’s throat. “Is that so?”
“I did my best by you boys. I did the best that I could. But the money that Tammy Dalton gave us was only enough for this place. Sorry if it was too modest for you.”
“We could’ve lived in a trailer park, Mom,” he said, his voice rough. “We could’ve lived in a cardboard box. It didn’t matter. What mattered was knowing that you cared about us. And I can’t really speak for Emmett. But I can speak for me. You never did seem like you cared that much.”
“What more did you want? I care for you as much as I care for my own self.”
“We didn’t always eat. The men in your life... They treated us awful. The house was never clean and...” And suddenly as he said all those words he realized that what his mother had said was absolutely true.
She had cared for them the best she had known how.
She had loved them as much as she loved herself.
The problem was she didn’t love herself. Or she didn’t know how to. She didn’t feed herself. The men in her life treated