you would explain everything." Dawn shrugged and grabbed her foot, pulling it back in a quad stretch. "I'm running while you do the explaining. I'll come home and cook so you can work out. Sorry, but I'm bailing on you." She dropped her foot and stretched the other quad.
"God, has it been that bad?" She put her lockbox on the high shelf out of sight and dropped her purse on the table with her keys.
"Bad? No. Hard for me not to sit him down and explain everything from my point of view? Yes. I'm not going there. This is on you." She dropped her foot. "I'll be back."
She watched Dawn jog from the garage and take a left at the street.
"Mom?" Gage called from behind her.
She spun and smiled. "Hey, buddy."
"Did you talk to him today?"
"I did. I spent the day with your father, actually." She slipped off her shoes and put her hand on his shoulder.
"At work?"
"Yeah, your dad and I are going to be working together. Come on, let me in. I need a bottle of water. Auntie Dawn said you had a lot of questions."
"Yeah, but she wouldn't answer them. She said I needed to hear the answers from you."
"Well that's true." She opened the fridge and grabbed a water. "Want one?"
He shook his head. "Why didn't you tell him about me?"
"Oh, gosh, the big questions right off the bat, huh?"
"Sorry?" His face tightened. Confused and maybe upset.
"No, come on. Let's crash on the couch." They moved into the living room. Gage plopped down right beside her, and she dropped an arm on his shoulders. "Okay, how do I explain this?" She held her water bottle in front of him, and he opened the top for her, keeping the cap. She took a drink. God, this was harder than she'd imagined. "I dated your dad for a long time. We met in high school. We didn't date then, but we knew each other. Then when my momma got really sick, I moved here with Auntie Dawn and my dad and stepmom."
"Yeah, I know. I remember pictures of Granny Dot and Grandpa Wallace."
"Right, so I didn't see your dad for a couple years. Then after I graduated high school I went to the junior college and then to the university. Your father was in most of my classes at the university. We were both majoring in Criminal Justice."
"You did two, right? Criminal Justice and Accounting." He smiled up at her.
"Right."
"You still suck at math. Why is that?"
"Well I don't suck at all math, only the stuff you do in the fifth grade." God knows the way they taught her son to add, subtract, multiply and divide was baffling. He got the right answers, but damn, how he got there was beyond her.
"I'm not buying it, missy." He narrowed his eyes at her and made his voice deeper, only to giggle when she tickled his ribs.
"Don't you get too big for your britches, mister."
He squirmed away from her and twisted on the cushion to look at her. "Finish telling me, Mom."
"Okay, well, we dated in college and in our senior year we moved into an apartment together."
"Were you married?"
"No."
He lowered his eyes to the water bottle cap he was spinning in his fingers. "Did you love him?"
"Very much. With all my heart." She blinked back the emotion the answer released.
"Did he love you?" He looked up at her. His big eyes, those beautiful blue eyes with darker rims of navy blue stared up at her.
"Yes, he did."
"Then what happened?" His innocent question almost broke her, but she owed him the answers.
"Well, have you ever been really afraid of something and run away from it?"
"Like the mean kid at the skate park that one time?"
"Kind of like that. See, when I was growing up and I was your age, my mom wasn't well, up here." She tapped her temple. "I didn't know that. She was my mom. She told me every day how marriage had trapped her, had killed all her dreams and prevented her from living the life she wanted. That if she hadn't married Dad, she'd have had a wonderful life. She told me the day I got married was the day my life was over. I heard it so many times. Every day, so many times a day, for the entire time I grew up. When your dad asked me to marry him, I got scared because what my mom told me was stuck in my head.