AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“There’s a baby in my belly,” she’d told me, pressing her own hand there.
All I could muster as a five-year-old was, well, “How?”
Let’s just say that my mom wasn’t really ready to give me the sex talk right then, so she explained instead that she had a new friend, and that her friend put the baby in her belly, and that when the baby came out, her friend would be the baby’s daddy.
“My daddy too?” I’d asked, all hopeful innocence.
To that, she gave me a smile. But it wasn’t until I was an adult looking back at that moment that I could see the strain around her eyes. “I don’t know, baby. We will have to see.”
I’d been excited then.
About the baby because I’d been heavily into baby dolls at that point, and I was naive enough to think a real baby would be just as fun to play with.
But also about having a dad. Because I’d started school at that point, and it was the first time it became painfully obvious that I was a fatherless child. It wasn’t something that had occurred to me much before then.
Once I knew, though, it was a sort of insecurity I could never shake when other kids would talk about their dads.
I remember even starting to say after my mom said that to me that I was getting a daddy.
My perception of time was different then. Back when Christmas felt like it took two years to arrive once December started. Now, hell, I blinked and Thanksgiving was over and Christmas was the next day.
I was pretty sure, though, judging by my mom’s growing belly, that it had been several months of uncertainty. Our lives went on mostly as they had before.
Then, suddenly, I was sitting at my booth at her work, and my mom’s friend came in and slid into the booth across from me.
“So, you’re Avery,” he’d said.
I remember him being intimidating. Tall, dark-haired, wearing a fancy suit.
The intimidation factor didn’t get any better over the course of that introduction while my mother stood behind the counter, tapping her fingers on the counter with one hand while the other rested on her rounded belly.
Frank Lombardi had made me shift-in-my-seat uncomfortable.
And I couldn’t be completely certain about this fact, but I am reasonably sure it was when I developed my nail-chewing habit.
It didn’t matter, though, because my mom had made up her mind. She was choosing stability and an easier life for herself. A father for her son that was due in a few months’ time.
As for me, well, I got a step-father who refused to give me his name.
“She’s not mine, Patty,” I remembered him saying. Not once or twice. Continually. Multiple times a year my entire life growing up.
If my mom came to him about some issue I was having at school, the answer was always something to the effect of, “You handle that. She’s your kid.”
Sure, I guess we could give some credit where it was due. He housed, clothed, and fed me. I never wanted for anything. The stability he gave my mom allowed her to be home all the time. Which meant I got more time with her.
But that was where it ended.
He never advised me, sat me down and had talks with me, took me to the park, came to my events at school. None of that.
“You deserved better than that,” Emilio said, pulling me out of those memories for a moment. And it felt good to surface. I didn’t have a lot of happy feelings about my childhood.
“I think all kids deserve parents who love them. Regardless of DNA,” I agreed.
“You have a brother?” Emilio asked.
“Right. Yeah. Cage.”
“Cage?” Emilio repeated, a smirk toying with his lips.
“Yeah. I don’t know where that one came from. But Cage was born about four months after we moved in with Frank. And Cage was the light of Frank’s world,” I said, trying to stay neutral about it.
The truth was, though, in those early years, I had been so damn jealous of my little brother. To the point that I was downright mean about his existence. I wouldn’t give him his pacifier if my mom asked me to. Or kiss his cheek for pictures.
Because Cage had everything then that I didn’t. My mom’s full attention. Frank’s love and adoration. His last name. A “real” family. While I felt very much like the outsider.
Cage had been doted on and spoiled.
Even as an adult who now loved my brother, I have to admit that all the attention that got bestowed on him as the heir had kind of made him, well, a brat.
“I’m not using that term lightly,” I rushed to add, not wanting to be judged for thinking it. “I think kids deserve to be spoiled. But there’s a difference between being spoiled and being spoiled rotten.”
