the child she had lived to bear.”
“Come again?”
“Laurie had a bad heart,” he said.
I nodded. I knew this.
“And her whole life, all she wanted was Kenna, even at the expense of her health.”
“Oh.”
“She told me the two of you hadn’t had enough time to exchange phone numbers, that you didn’t even know Kenna’s last name. But she could see it in Kenna’s eyes that the girl was in love, and she wanted me to hold off from telling you until she had…” Dad took a deep breath, and I knew he was fighting the floodgates. “She just wanted a little more time with her baby, Philip. I promised her I’d wait until she was gone before I would tell you.
“When you told me you had found the girl of your dreams, it was so hard to hold on to my promise. To see you like that…I knew that you had a touch of the madness that had consumed your mother—”
“What?” I gasped. I’m not that fuckin’ mad! Am I?
“It’s not necessarily a bad thing, son,” he tried to assure me. “Laurie used to tell me that you had to have it in you to be able to pull music out of the air like you do. Not as bad as your mother. She never could control it on her own. But you…you turned it into a gift. You found the way to unleash it. But in your grief over losing that girl, I saw it in you, and I was desperate to tell you how to find her.”
“I paid a private investigator who turned up nothin’!” I hissed at him, feeling the inferno heating up once more. Calling me mad hadn’t helped either.
“I paid that investigator to find nothing,” the traitor so fuckin’ informed me. “But let’s stay on point for now, okay? You were in Texas with the boys when Laurie passed on. I didn’t call you to come back to go to a funeral for a woman you likely didn’t remember even if you never forgot about your Baby Girl. I wanted to be alone with my grief anyway. And I wanted to see the young woman who had had your heart her whole life and never knew it.”
“So, why didn’t you tell me after the funeral?”
“Betty begged me not to,” he replied.
“You put that old fuckin’ woman ahead of your own son?” I raged. Smoke, smoke, smoke. Think of Kenna, waitin’ in our bed, naked and wet just for me.
Yeah, that just sparked another fire elsewhere in me.
Dad looked at me in misery and fury. “That old fuckin’ woman was like a mother to me. And no, I didn’t put her ahead of you, you little shit. When I finally saw Kenna…”
“What?” I barked, hating that he had looked upon my Baby Girl, had seen her and denied us each other.
“She needed you,” he whispered. “I saw it in her, Philip. She was broken in ways I knew only your love could heal. I almost told Betty that I couldn’t do it. I had to let you heal that poor broken spirit. But then…”
He wasn’t making this any easier, for either of us, the more he talked.
“Just fuckin’ tell me!” I snarled, trying hard to keep my voice down for the neighbors and whatnot.
“She told me that Kenna was all she had left. She had just lost her only child, and she couldn’t lose her granddaughter to the madness that had taken Laurie away from her, too. She wasn’t strong enough to lose them both at once. Kenna had made the decision to go back to school. After everything, she was going to make something of herself. Laurie hadn’t done that. She had met Sigmund and up and left all of us, barely eighteen.
“Betty wanted Kenna to be something before she lost herself to you. What she said made sense to me. Because I wanted the same for you. You and the boys, a bunch of brilliant jackasses, the lot of you. I knew you’d all take this thing you had and make something of it, just so long as you stayed focused.”
“You—” I choked, trying my fuckin’ hardest not to lose my shit again. “You have no idea how fucked up—how I fucked up everything in my fuckin’ life over her. How I came so close to givin’ up, how much I hated myself for what I was turnin’ myself into—”
“Why?”
“I blamed her! I hated her and hated myself!” I cried, my vocal beast rising up.