Bayou Baby - Lexi Blake Page 0,112
come to plead her case? Had she realized how hard the world could be?
If she had, then they would talk like adults. She’d had time to think about it and calling off the wedding would simply cause a scandal, and that wasn’t good for anyone. She would pay for the wedding and it could proceed. They had a lot to work out, but Angie was her daughter. She couldn’t simply cancel her daughter’s wedding at this point.
Perhaps Harry would still come to the wedding and she would have a chance to talk to him again.
“Hello, Mom.” Cal walked into the room, tossing his jacket over the back of the couch. “I thought you would likely be up plotting.”
Well, of course Cal was upset with her, too. He’d made it plain on the phone earlier that he’d thought she’d lost her mind.
“If you’ve come to talk sense into me, you’ve wasted your time.” She turned back to staring at the fireplace. It wasn’t lit, but there was still some comfort in it.
Every Christmas they would light a fire—even when it was warm outside—and they would open their gifts. Then after Ralph and her mother-in-law had gone to bed, she would sneak down and give her babies some candy since Beaumonts didn’t eat candy.
“I didn’t come to talk sense into you. I can’t do that. But I think he can.” He moved around until he was standing in front of her, holding out a piece of paper.
Celeste stared at it. “What is that?”
“Wes’s last letter to me. I got it about three weeks after he died.”
Emotion threatened to well and she realized there was something so much worse than rage.
Grief. Never-ending, soul-splitting grief.
“He wrote to you?” He hadn’t written to her. He’d been silent those months before his death.
Cal seemed to understand she wasn’t going to take the letter from him. He took a step back and sank into the chair opposite her. Those chairs were supposed to be for the man and lady of the house. Instead, for years her mother-in-law had been the one to sit beside Ralph.
Would she have done that to Seraphina if Wes had insisted on marrying her? She rather thought Sera would have had a problem with that.
“We got close when he went to college,” Cal admitted. “I think he liked the freedom of being outside of Papillon, though obviously there were things he missed here.”
“Sera. Do you understand their relationship? I’ve been going over and over it in my head. Why choose Harry over Wes? I know Harry’s more handsome, but Wes wasn’t bad to look at.”
“You view marriage as something entirely different than the rest of the world. Or maybe just our little part of it. You married Dad because he could give you a better life. Sera wanted to build a better life with someone she truly loves. She viewed love as the foundation of that life. Your foundation was money.”
“You have no idea what it’s like to go hungry.” She didn’t need this judgment from her son. “You were given a car on your sixteenth birthday. My mother took the bus to work every day, and my father worked on cars he could never afford. When he could work. You don’t know what it means to not be able to afford medication, to wonder if you would even have a roof over your head. That was my childhood. You think yours was rough.”
“I wasn’t making a judgment, Mom. I truly wasn’t. I haven’t walked in your shoes, but you don’t understand what it feels like to be in Sera’s.”
That was the irony. “I don’t know about that. We both got pregnant by Beaumont men, and neither of us was married at the time.”
Cal’s lips curled up in what seemed to be a truly delighted grin. “Everyone knew I wasn’t a preemie. I weighed damn near nine pounds.” His grin faded. “I know you had it hard. You had to make choices based on how you grew up, on what you valued.”
“I know you won’t believe me, but I valued you. I valued your sister and your brother.”
Cal was silent for a moment. “Yeah, I know.”
He didn’t believe her. “Cal, I love you.”
“I do know that. I know that Wes was sick, and even when he was well, you kept waiting for it to all go to hell with him. I can’t understand what it means to potentially lose a child, but I bet Seraphina is feeling that right now.”
“Don’t you compare the