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“Good Lord, Landry. No wonder she isn’t speaking to you.”
“So what do I do?”
She motioned in front of the car. “Pull forward.”
“About Sloane?”
“I knew what you meant. I’m thinking.”
I opened the window and took our order from the hands of a girl who looked really familiar.
“Hey, it’s you,” she said. “Remember me? From the pizza place?” The girl bent down and looked into the car. “Is that your mom?”
I groaned, rolled up the window, and drove away.
“I can tell you what not to do. Under no circumstances should you bring Sloane here for ice cream.”
I drove back to the park, and we sat in silence, eating our ice cream. My mom looked lost in thought, which I hoped meant she was preparing to tell me what to do.
Finally, she spoke. “Let me ask you this. Do you love Sloane?”
Of all the things she could’ve asked, that was the hardest for me to answer. I mean, of course I loved her, but was I in love with her? In love enough to marry her?
“Before you make Sloane any other offers—or in your case, demands—decide how you feel about her.”
I glared at her over the demand comment. “I meant well, Mom.”
“Beside the point, Landry. You bulldozed over Sloane’s feelings. You are aware she has feelings, right?”
“Do you not understand how hard this is for me?”
Apparently, that was the absolute wrong thing for me to say, given the look she gave me was the same as ones I’d seen from Sloane.
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’m glad you said that, because it’s exactly what you need to think about, Landry. How hard is this on you versus how hard it is on Sloane. She’s five-months pregnant, and until tonight, it sounds as though the only person she’s been able to lean on is Knox.”
“Right.”
“What are you prepared to offer her? What kind of life, Landry? Do you plan to take over your father’s construction business one day? Is that how you’ll support your family? Or are you planning to continue working in intelligence?”
I started to answer, but she held up her hand. “Where do you plan to live? And the most important question of all is, if you don’t love her, why would you think she would agree to marry you?”
As I listened to my mother’s questions, I thought about the many I’d asked myself when
I left Sloane’s place. It hadn’t occurred to me until now how much I was like her, at least in the way we processed through our thoughts and emotions.
“Landry?”
“Yeah, Mom?”
“How do you feel about having a child?”
“You gotta ask the hard questions, don’t you?”
My mother laughed and shrugged. “Do you have an answer?”
“It’s changed from what I would’ve said yesterday.”
“Tell me yesterday’s answer first.”
