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“Like berries for the picking,” she muses.
“Exactly. And yeah, I was that way. Many of my teammates are. But I guess I want something more.”
“Ready to settle down?” she asks.
“I don’t know if that’s what you’d call it. Maybe not quite, but definitely something more solid. That’s what I was trying to attempt with Tracy.”
I almost expect her to pull her hand away, because the reasonable implication would be that I want the same with her. Stevie was hesitant to go out with me, and I don’t want her to think I’m rebounding.
I definitely don’t want her to think I’m looking for something deep.
I don’t know that I am.
I don’t know that I’m not.
I just know that I like her, and I want to see her again after tonight. “Just a heads-up, I know the night isn’t over yet, but I’ll be asking for a second date.”
Stevie pulls her hand from mine, but only to take her pilsner. She holds it up, prompting me to do the same.
As our glasses tap against each other, she says, “I’ll drink to that.”
CHAPTER 5
Stevie
My mom saunters down the sidewalk toward me, looking in shop windows and getting distracted twice as she peers in at something. Mandi Seegar is a woman who transforms herself over and over again, depending on the man she’s with.
When she was married to my father, she rode on the back of his Harley and dressed like a biker babe. During her marriage to Cameron Seegar, she wore designer labels and cut her hair into a conservative bob.
These days she’s dating a fitness trainer named Randy who’s ten years her junior, so her preferred clothing is workout leggings, sports bras, and zip-up hoodies. Her dark brown hair is pulled into a high ponytail, and her makeup is flawless.
I’m not sure if my mom cared about her appearance back when she was married to my father the way she does now, but she’s without a doubt a little vain. I don’t hold that against her because she’s always used her looks to snag a man to take care of her and thus they are sort of a necessity. She not only couldn’t take care of her kids because she neither wanted nor knew how to, but she can barely take care of herself. It’s been a source of pride for her when we get together that her boyfriend is ten years younger, or as she sometimes puts it, “He’s only ten years older than you, Stevie.”
My mom got pregnant by mistake, and my dad did what he called “the right thing” by marrying her. It was a stupid decision since he didn’t love her, and she most certainly didn’t love him. I was the product of a hot, wild hookup, but whereas my father was willing to give up his rowdy, free-spirited lifestyle to become a parent, my mother was not.
The difference between me and my father is that I’ve learned to forgive my mother for her weaknesses and he never will. As my dad has repeatedly pointed out, it’s not so much that she was absent as a mother, it’s that she was absent as my mother. Because after she abandoned me, within just a few years, she remarried and bore two daughters for her new husband. Granted, she left them the way she left me, but for a time, she put all her energy into her new husband and children while I was nothing but a piece of her past.
I was lucky if I saw her a handful of times a year and usually only after my father browbeat her into it. He doesn’t think I know that, but I overheard his calls to her.
“Jesus Christ, Mandi… for once in your life, can you put your daughter above your needs?”
Despite having an incapable mother, I grew up incredibly happy. My father provided enough love and stability to compensate for my mom’s shortcomings. It meant the difference between being deeply hurt over my mom’s abandonment versus being irrevocably crushed. My dad and his parents created an environment that made me believe my mom was the one who was losing out. That her inability to be a mother was squarely on her shoulders and had nothing to do with who I was. I love them for instilling that in me.
Sadly, I don’t think those lessons ever got passed on to my half sisters by their own father. They’re two very bitter young women who have essentially shunned our mother and want nothing to do with her.
It’s probably why she clings to me a bit more desperately. Now that her daughters are adults and we can take care of ourselves, she wants to be part of our lives. Liza and Maggie won’t give in to her, but I do.
My father doesn’t like it at all, but he’d never stand in my way. He also understands that there’s something about her needing me now that fills a little of the hole she left behind. I’m enough of an optimist to believe something might be built from the ashes.
