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They were both quiet as he plugged in his GPS and let it lead him to the Heron. The direct route without the picturesque offshoots was a boring expanse of sleeping land. The mild winter didn’t give them snow to look at, but it had been cold enough to kill off all the vegetation.
She swiped through the functions on her phone. Her attention was down on the small gadget instead of on him when her soft voice broke into the silence. “Tell me about your mom.”
His heart gave a kick of surprise. “What do you want to know?”
“What was she like?”
“She was sweet and cheerful. Never had a bad word to say to anyone.”
“How did she meet Lawrence?”
The ache in his chest spread. How did he explain to her that Larry had come in and simply taken care of his mother? She’d been biddable and deferred to Larry. She’d always been head over heels for Kendall’s father.
“She’d been a bookkeeper for one of Larry’s clients. I was really young when she’d first met Larry. Maybe five. I was too young to remember much, but I do remember her singing around the apartment. She was happier than I’d ever seen her. I had lots of babysitters when she went out on dates. I didn’t get to meet him the first time they went out.”
“You were five?”
He nodded. He’d done some of the math himself and realized his mother was having an affair with Larry. “From what I can figure, she saw him for less than a year, and then he was just gone. And my mom was never quite the same. She was so sad, and she cried every night for a good long time.”
Kendall swiped a hand under her nose. “He was cheating on my mother with yours,” she said quietly.
“I think so.”
“I don’t remember that far back. I was a toddler.”
Shane merged into traffic as they got on a main interchange, and he could finally go faster than the winding roads allowed. “The only thing I can think of is that my mom didn’t realize she was the other woman, and when she did, she tried to break it off.”
“You lived in New York?”
He shook his head. “When my grandmother was alive, she used to travel for work. And I think one of the places was in New York. I just don’t know where.”
“I don’t know much about my father. Just that he was bicoastal for work. He traveled a lot. Evidently a perfect way to have more than one woman in his life.”
The bitter edge to her voice sliced at him. “I don’t know, Kendall. I do know that he wasn’t a part of my life until I was eight. All of a sudden my mother said we were moving into this house in California. And she wasn’t sad anymore. The only thing I remember about the time Larry came into our lives was that my mom went to the hospital a lot.”
Kendall looked up at him sharply. “Hospital? Was she sick?”
“They never talked about it. I was a kid. How was I supposed to know if she was sick? She went to the doctors a lot, but it wasn’t cancer. She always seemed so frail to me, but then again, she was even tinier than you are.”
Her voice quieted. “I was always afraid to ask my mother about Lawrence. She’d get so sad when I talked about him that I just stopped doing it. He never came back after he left that one day. He didn’t even say good-bye to me.”
Shane popped his knuckles. Her voice was toneless. None of that made sense to him. The day he’d moved in with Larry, there had been only a booming laugh and kindness. He’d never felt like a burden. Hell, he’d ended up calling Larry Dad within the first six months.
Had his mother’s sickness really drawn Larry away from his other family? Just how sick had she been? And why the hell didn’t he know about it?
Larry had loved his mother; of that he had no doubt. They’d always been laughing, the two of them in their own little world. Sometimes Shane felt separate from them, but the love had been there. And when his mother died, all Larry’s focus had gone to him.
It still didn’t explain why Larry had cut Kendall out of his life.
“Even after my father left, my mother never stopped loving him. I heard her cry every night, but she smiled every morning for me. Eventually she stopped crying and we went on with our lives. There must have been some money coming in, or he’d left her with some, because she didn’t work until I was about ten years old.”
Shane scraped his palm down his jeans. “We never wanted for money. Some years were better than others, but I couldn’t remember a time when Larry ever complained about finances.”
“He must have stopped giving my mother money in the lean times, because she went to work while I was at school and started taking on boarders at the house. When I was sixteen, I convinced her to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast to earn extra money.”
He tried to picture Kendall with strangers around her all the time. And he found that it wasn’t a stretch to imagine. She took people in and made them feel comfortable. She never lacked in kindness and never lost her temper with anyone other than him.
They lapsed into silence, her attention on the landscape and the endless rows of trees in varying colors between gold and red. They pulled into a rest stop just outside the New York state line.
