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If he was a betting man, Blaine would put money on cinnamon French toast. No matter what he’d find in the kitchen, there would be enough to feed two dozen men, and Mom would probably make him take the food with him for his brothers.
He stepped to the door and rapped lightly as he entered. Mom had warned him that Daddy had been sleeping later than he usually did, due to his recent hip replacement surgery. It had been a little over a month now, but Daddy was still slow and still in some pain almost all the time.
Mom was very good at taking care of a sick man, and whenever Blaine even got so much as a sniffle, he came running to his mother for her herbal tea with lemon and honey.
“Mom,” he called as he entered the house. He closed the door behind him quietly and went past all the designer furniture and into the kitchen, where she stood at the twelve-foot island, peeling apples.
“Morning, Blaine,” she said with a pleasant smile.
He looked at the stovetop to her right, which had a griddle on it with nine pieces of nearly-done French toast. Grinning, he put his arms around his mother and hugged her. “Hey, Mom.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath of her.
She smelled like comfort in the form of some sort of cleanser. Good food in the form of vanilla. Tartness from the apples.
He smiled down at her as he pulled back. “How long have you been up?”
“Oh, Joey had to go out at four,” she said, like that was a normal time for a woman her age to be awake. “I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I just got up.” She glanced at him, and Blaine didn’t buy it for a reason.
She didn’t sleep for a reason, and he suddenly found himself wanting to know why. “Mom,” he said slowly. “Have you always been an insomniac?”
“Yes,” she said with a sigh. “Every few weeks, I just can’t stand being awake all the time, and I’ll take some pills.” She reached up and brushed her bangs off her forehead with the back of her hand. The knife swooped through the air as she returned to peeling the apples. “Just a couple, and I sleep for eight or ten hours. It’s glorious.”
A sad smile accompanied her speech, and Blaine’s heart went out to her. “Must be why Trey has such a hard time sleeping,” he said.
“It’s a curse,” Mom agreed. “But look, I’m almost done with this apple pie, and it’ll bake while we eat. You can take it home for you and the boys.”
Blaine watched her finish an apple, and he picked up the skin. It came up in one, long, curled string, and he marveled at the skills his mother had with a paring knife. “Can I just have the pie to myself?” he asked.
“You can do whatever you want with it, baby,” she said, moving on to coring the fruit.
“I think I’ll take it to Tam’s tonight,” Blaine said. “She’ll buy ice cream, and we’ll have ourselves a feast.”
Mom smiled at him. “That sounds nice. How is Tam? She’s been around the ranch quite a bit lately, I hear.”
“She helped every day last week with the breeding,” he said, nodding. His heart twitched in his chest, and he wondered how to tell his mother about the next level he and Tam had reached. “She hung out at the homestead on Saturday. I, uh, sat by her and her mother at church on Sunday. I see her every day.”
He had seen her every day. He’d held her hand every day. They’d talked, and laughed, and shared things old and new with one another. He had not kissed her again, because it hadn’t felt like the right time to do so.
“I stayed with her for a few nights after the accident too.” Blaine stepped around his mother and picked up the spatula sitting next to the stovetop. “Is this done?”
“The fire is off,” she said. “I just want to get this pie in the oven, and I’ll get everything together.” She looked at him. “Go sit, go sit.”
Blaine knew better than to get in Mom’s way in the kitchen. He did what she said and sat at the bar in front of one of the places she’d set. “Mom,” he said, and he waited until she’d looked up from slicing apples.
“Yes?” She paused too, obviously sensing that he was about to say something important. He wasn’t sure what was going to come out of his mouth, but he believed the right thing would.
“I broke up with Alex all those years ago, because she was cheating on me with two other men.” He refused to duck his head, as if he were the one who should be ashamed. He wasn’t—at least not anymore.
In the beginning, he’d felt like such a failure. Such a loser. Such a weakling.
“I knew for almost a month before I canceled the wedding. She never apologized, and she never gave the ring back.” There, that was it. The words he’d been hiding inside were gone now, and he didn’t need to go on and on. He wasn’t going to bad-mouth Alex. Mom could do what she wanted with the information; the important part was that she now knew it, and that it no longer seethed inside Blaine’s heart, mind, and chest.
“It’s been a long five years,” he said. “I’m not one-hundred percent sure if I’m ready to date again, but I’ve started seeing someone new.”
Mom’s eyebrows went up, the apple pie completely forgotten now. She still held the paring knife in the ready position, but she hadn’t so much as twitched since he’d said Alex’s name.
“It’s Tam,” Blaine said, wondering when she’d say something and save him from his own babbling. “She loves apple pie, and if I take that to her, I’m going to win some major boyfriend cred.” He grinned, told himself to stop talking, and looked from the half-done pie to his mother’s still-stunned face.
Like flipping a switch, her shock disappeared, and anger took its place. “That woman,” she spat. “I should march right down to that hoity toity little office of hers and dig around in that desk until I find that ring.”
