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“Just ask me a question that indicates you want to get to know me as a human being.”
“Right.” He nodded. He thought for a minute. What would he like to know about Edwina, besides everything? Except for her relationship with Nigel. He did not want to hear about that. “How did your parents meet? Your mom wasn’t from here, was she?” He was curious how she’d ended up in New York with her mom.
“Oh, good question. No, my mom wasn’t from here.” She nodded encouragingly. “My parents met at a basketball game at Madison Square Garden. My father was in town for his cousin’s wedding in New Jersey and it was the first leg of the bachelor party. My mother had grown up on Long Island and won tickets on the radio. They were sitting next to each other and started talking. My mom and her girlfriends ended up spending the night hanging out with the bachelor party and apparently much beer was consumed by all.” She gave him a long look. “I think you understand what I mean by that.”
He’d practically written the book on that particular topic. He nodded. “Got it.”
“Two months later she called my dad from the business card he gave her and told him she was pregnant. They got married. Isn’t that crazy? Total strangers and they just got married and she moved here. It was doomed from the start.” She shrugged.
“I love the optimism though,” he said. He did. There was something wildly romantic, if not totally naïve, about just jumping in headfirst. His own parents had done the exact same thing.
“I don’t know. It probably would have been smarter to just co-parent right from the beginning.”
Sullivan pondered that. “Maybe. But then you would have never played hockey.”
She laughed. “True. And maybe then my mom would have never met George, my stepfather, who’s a great guy. So who knows, right?”
“You’re close with your stepfather?”
“Yes. He’s always been super supportive. He’s the reason we moved to New York. My mom had gone to visit family and met him at a coffee shop. They got married when I was fifteen, which really bugs my dad. I get that my father was jealous that another man was spending time with his daughter, that George was the one there for my prom and to give my money to go out with my friends on the weekends, and that we did family vacations, but what did he want, me to have a crappy stepfather? For some guy to be horrible to me?” She shook her head. “It’s a lose-lose I guess.”
“Yeah, that’s complicated stuff. Divorce is tough.” He picked at the label on his beer, reflecting on his own childhood, which had been a little lonely when it came to parental affection. His father had tried, but he’d wanted a mom. Everyone had a mom. Except him and Sloane.
“How did your parents meet?” she asked. “What was your mom like? Do you remember her?”
He wasn’t sure the last time anyone had asked him about his mother. Everyone around Beaver Bend seemed to have forgotten she’d ever existed. “No, not really. My dad was a bartender here, before he bought the place. My mother was in town for a funeral with her parents and she somehow managed to sneak away and get into the bar, even though she was only eighteen. She did look older than she was, given the pictures. Anyway, Sloane was born nine months later.” He took a sip. “And then me not too long after that, and then she decided being twenty-two years old with two kids sucked ass so she left. I always played the what if game too. What if she’d left but she’d stayed in our lives, would that have been better or worse? Who the hell knows?”
He suspected it was better that she’d been gone altogether but it wasn’t like he knew that for sure.
“The ‘what if’ game is definitely a hard one to play, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “When I was a kid I used to hope that my dad would get remarried so I could have a mom. I wanted a mom who baked cookies and gave hugs and who went to all my hockey games. Like my friends had. My sister would tell me that all stepmothers are horrible, but I was convinced that my stepmother would be just like the mom I always wanted, the kind who packs your lunch and is the homeroom mom and sends brownies to school on your birthday.”
He hadn’t thought about any of that in a long time. The past was the past and he couldn’t change any of that.
“That must have been hard.”
“It was. And my dad never got remarried and now he’s dating Lilly, which is great for them, slightly awkward for me, I have to say.”
“Who is Lilly?”
“Lilly Ferguson. She was Kendra’s best friend.”
“Right, I remember Lilly and Kendra always being together. But I wasn’t in their social circle at school. They were the girly-girls and I was… not.” She grinned. “I’m sure you remember.”
He didn’t really remember her much from school at all, but he wasn’t going to admit it. He suspected she’d been in honors classes and he had not been. On the ice, she’d been competitive and passionate. “I remember you were very serious about hockey.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“Do you still play?”
She made a sound that was almost a snort. “No. Not since I left Beaver Bend.” Then she paused in lifting her wine glass. “Wait, did you say Lilly Ferguson is dating your dad?”
“Yep. And yes, she’s our age, which makes her twenty years younger than my father. It’s a very recent thing. As a matter of fact, that’s why I was laughing that day on the sidewalk when you were parking. It had nothing to do with you. It was ‘what the fuck did I just see?’ astonished and horrified laughter.”
“What did you see?”
“Nothing anyone ever wants to see their father doing to a woman half his age. Or to any woman, really.”
