off the wedding. She was beside herself. How would this reflect on her. She ordered me to go back to Avery and to make everything right. Demanded, Remi. She didn’t care how I felt, how his cheating had affected me.” Tears swelled in her big blue eyes. “She is still insisting that I need to apologize for overreacting and get over myself.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Yes, yes you are,” Gen laughed and sobbed at the same time. She dabbed at her eyes and sniffed before she shook her head. “Sorry, bad joke.”
“But it would appear in this case, it’s the truth.” He didn’t like his mother on good days, although as her child he’d always love her, just not the same way he loved his father. Theirs was “a house divided” personified. Celest’s rooms were away from theirs; his father’s rooms were next to his and Gen’s. Celest and his father hadn’t shared rooms for as long as he could remember. There was a mutual respect but no love between the two of them, and he often wondered what kept his father in a loveless marriage. Celest’s drive to parade both Gen and him around at pageants, her need to be in the limelight and be the center of attention, her incessant need to have the latest and best of everything had a handful of clinical diagnoses, all of which gave him an empathy for his mother. “Why would she insist you get back together with that cheating asshole?”
“Dad thinks it’s because of Avery’s family.”
“The Montagues? I’m not sure I understand.”
Gen stood up and took his bowl—which he realized was empty—and filled it again. “The Montagues are an old family. They don’t have money like Dad, but they have status. A status that Celest couldn’t obtain even if Dad becomes Governor someday.”
He thanked her for the second helping and leaned forward. “How much pressure is she putting on you?”
Gen lifted a finger and went to the counter to get her phone. She opened her mail and handed the cell to him. He scrolled… and scrolled… and scrolled. “Wow.” The implications of the obsessive emails concerned him. He cleared his throat. “Okay, so this is what we’re going to do. I’m going to call Dad and have a talk with him. He needs to know the extent of this situation. Then I’m going to ask you to consider—just consider—giving her an inch. Maybe reach out to her on a pay-as-you-go phone.”
Gen sighed and took her cell back. “She’s mental. If I give her an inch, she’ll take a mile.”
“That is an astute diagnosis. What manual did you get it from, Doctor Wheeler?” He lifted an eyebrow and Gen laughed.
“Well, she is, and you know it.”
He agreed, but the assessment wasn’t as clinical as he was thinking. The manic behavior needed to be addressed. “I’ll talk to Dad.”
“Thank you. I’m not going to give her my number. Not yet. If she’s this obsessive with emails, I couldn’t imagine what she’d do with a telephone number.”
He nodded. Gen’s relationship with their mom had been more turbulent than his. He’d tried to intervene and provide a cushion for his little sister, but once he grew and was no longer a cute little boy but a gangly adolescent, Celest lost interest in him. Thank God for the time they spent with Grandma and Grandpa Wheeler. They showed both Gen and him what a normal and loving relationship looked like.
“Want another beer?” Gen asked.
“I do. Thank you.” He finished his second bowl of food and leaned back in his chair. “I plan on earning my keep. Let me help you downstairs and do some things around the place, like replace those damn stairs.” For both her and Eden. The thought of them crashing through the rotted wood would make that his first project.
Gen handed him a drink. “You know, you don’t have to do that, but sometimes it is crazy busy and things like the stairs get overlooked. This little town is bigger than you’d think.” She stopped. “Hey, you never told me about the bar fight.”
Jeremiah chuckled and walked his dirty dishes over to the sink. He regaled her with the previous night’s activity and him ending up on Eden’s couch while he did the dishes and she dried.
“Oh, dang, I bet Zeke was fit to be tied this morning. He has his eyes on Eden.”
“Yeah, I got that loud and clear.” And he’d walked away from it. No matter how attractive he found the petite