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Her lips curved. “Yeah.” But then she sobered. “But did you ever have a night out where you weren’t thinking about your siblings? About me?”
“Mom—”
“In the years since, have you ever fully detached from us, had a weekend partying with your buddies and not spared us a second of worry?”
He paused.
But it didn’t take long to know the answer to that.
It was no.
He’d spent the majority of his life worrying about them—about his mom and if she was overwhelmed, about his siblings and making certain they remembered their dad, that they were happy and healthy. He’d helped with homework and college applications. He’d taken them to movies and talked about girlfriend problems.
“Have you even hadonenight of that?” his mom pressed.
“Mom.”
“Did youeverknow what you wanted? Or did we always shadow every decision?” Her hand came to his arm, gripped tight. “Do you even know what you want now? Or is all of it tangled together, knotted so tightly that you can’t look into your own mind and make a decision that isn’t somehow connected to whatweneed?”
His nostrils flared when he sucked in a breath.
And that was answer enough.
“I was wrong to let you do that,” she whispered, eyes glimmering with tears. “Hewas wrong to engrain that in you, but I should have put a stop to it.”
He released that breath. “You worked your ass off. We had to come together to make it work.”
“Maybe.” She rubbed her hands on her jeans and sighed.
His heart was pounding.
Because he was thinking about all of those questions, and he was thinking about the answers.
He didn’t know what he wanted—except that he wanted Teresa.
He didn’t know if he’devermade a decision for himself.
He hadn’t had a weekend where he wasn’t worried about his mom or his siblings—fuck, he had six of them. There was always something or someone to worry about.
“That wasn’t your job then,” she said. “And it isn’t your job now.”
It was instinct to want to argue, but the conversations with Mel, with Teresa, with his mom before, they were all floating around his brain, telling him to slow down, to think about the answers to those questions that hit hard and fast and deep.
It wasn’t his job to take care of everyone in his life.
Itwasn’this job.
“It’s easy, you know,” she whispered when he didn’t reply. “Easier to spend so much time making your life about everyone else.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you spend all of your time worrying about everyone else, you don’t have to think and reflect. You don’t have to look closely, to consider what you want, todream.And if you don’t have time to do any of that, then you get to stay in your safe little box, never putting yourself out there. Neverriskinganything. Spending your life hiding.”
He inhaled sharply. “Ah, hell, Mom.”
“Sorry, honey. I should have said these things to you long ago.” She touched his cheek. “And if it happened today, if I lost your dad and was back being a single mom with seven kids today, I would have done so much differently.”
He was still reeling from her words, but he managed to say lightly, “Hindsight.”
