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“Do not call me that,” Jake snapped. “My name is Jake.”
“Joaquim—”
“It’s Jake, dam
n it! I’m American, not Brazilian.”
“Jake.” The name tasted foreign on Sarah’s tongue. “Son, please try and understand. I met your father—-”
“Call him Enrique. Or Ramirez. But whatever you do don’t refer to him ever again as my father.”
“I was working in a shop. He came in to buy something. He was handsome and charming, and I—”
“You slept with him,” Jake said coldly, “and he left you when he learned you were carrying his bastard.”
“No!” Sarah rose to her feet. “He never knew.”
“Why? Why didn’t you tell him?”
Jake’s eyes held a glimmer of hope. Sarah knew what he wanted to hear, something romantic about her not wanting to burden Enrique with the truth, but she’d lied enough. She’d buried herself in lies years ago.
“I couldn’t,” she said quietly. “By the time I realized I was carrying a child, your—Enrique was gone.”
“And you had no way to reach him,” Jake said bitterly.
“None.” This was the final humiliation. “The only thing I had to remember him by was you, Joaq—you, Jake. And I loved you, always, with all my heart.”
“You lied to me,” he said tonelessly. “My whole damned life has been a lie. All that crap about honoring the memory of my old man, the hero—”
“Would you rather I’d told you the truth?”
She had a point, but Jake wasn’t in the mood to concede it. “You didn’t have to embroider it the way you did.”
“At first, it was enough to let you think your father was dead, but things changed. You were seventeen, you were running with a bad crowd—and then you got into serious trouble.” Her voice took on a touch of anger. “I did what I had to, to keep you from prison.”
Jake stared at his mother. She looked as if she’d aged a decade in the last few minutes.
“I did what I thought best,” she said.
In his heart, he knew that. Right or wrong, what she’d done was for him. By the time he was seventeen, he hadn’t given a damn about anything. He hated school, hated the slum they lived in, hated the bleak future that swallowed everyone he knew.
He’d “borrowed” a Cadillac, taken it joy-riding. To impress his friends? To impress himself? To this day, he didn’t know the answer. All he knew was that after he was caught, his mother had worked miracles.
First she’d talked a stern-faced judge out of sending him to a juvenile facility with a story that would have softened any heart. She’d spoken of a young couple in love, of a soldier who was only a boy, of his death on foreign soil and the child he had not lived to see.
Then she’d convinced Jake to use his intelligence to get good grades and a university scholarship instead of using it to get into even worse trouble.
“If you won’t do it for yourself, Joaquim,” she’d said, “do it to honor the memory of your father.”
And he had.
Jake turned toward his mother and looked at her again. He saw her as she must have been when she met Enrique Ramirez. Young, probably innocent, swept off her feet by a rich man with too much money and no morals, if the rest of the letter was true.
He’d almost forgotten the rest of the letter.
“Jake?”
Jake squeezed his mother’s hand. For now, that was as close as he could come to acceptance.
