To that, his lips twitched. "You were trying to blame me for every one of our arguments. Even though you are a pain in the ass too."
"Right. Well, I recall that you have started most of our disagreements."
"The way I remember it, you took everything I said out of context."
"Memory is funny," I said, nodding. "Like how yours is clearly always wrong."
"Agree to disagree then," he said, shrugging a shoulder. "Maybe we can call a truce. Just for the holiday," he clarified. "For your parents' sake."
"That might be a good idea," I agreed. "My father is pissed enough at me, I think."
"I think you may get your temper from him."
"That depends."
"Depends?" he asked, brows furrowing.
"On whether you subscribe to the nature or nurture mindset."
One more thing I could always count on alcohol for. Loose lips.
"What are you talking about?"
"He's not my biological father," I told him.
"Wait... what?" he asked, shaking his head. "I saw pictures of him with your mom in the hospital room after you were born."
"Yeah, he was there," I agreed. "But have you ever, I don't know, taken a look at me?"
"Yeah, Princess, I've looked at you."
Something about the way he said it made my belly wobble in a way that was too delicious. Clearly, this was another side effect of drinking. One I'd never had before. But there was no other explanation.
"Well, then you've noticed that I have dark hair and a round face and a stockier build."
"Christ, you're not stocky, Jett."
"I'm not bashing myself. I'm just not... you know... delicate like my mother. And I have brown eyes," I added.
"Plenty of people don't look like their parents."
"I do, though," I told him. "I am the spitting image of my paternal grandmother. On my biological father's side. The same round face, high cheekbones, honey brown eyes, more olive skin."
"This is a weird question, but does your father... does Mitch know?"
"That he's not my father?" I clarified with a smirk. "I think it would have been hard not to know seeing as my mom was seven months pregnant with me when they married."
"You can't just let the story drop there. Is it a big secret?"
"No. I mean... my mom explains a big part of her story every Christmas to a bunch of people. I don't think she'd mind if I told you."
"Are you going to?" he asked when a long moment passed.
"Oh, right. Well... where to start."
I guess the start, when it came to my mom and the man who came to be my father in every way but genetics, meant I had to go all the way back to middle school. Where they'd met.
My father had been new in town, having failed out of his third prep school. His parents—the socialites they were—had a bit begrudgingly taken him back, enrolled him in the local public school as punishment, and all but washed their hands of him, leaving him mostly to be raised by the house and groundskeepers.
Unfortunately for them, my father didn't take public school as a punishment. In fact, he started to thrive. Then he developed an all-consuming crush on my mother. Who didn't want anything to do with him.
"Believe it or not, way back then, my mother was someone who had a thing for the bad boys," I told Trip, shaking my head. Even knowing how her story went down, even knowing her patterns, I found it really hard to imagine my sainted mother wanting anything to do with the typical muscle-car-driving, cigarette-smoking- heavily-partying, bed-hopping bad boys.
So he went ahead and became her friend, just wanting to be near her even if she didn't share his feelings.
All through high school, she would fall for some tool, become obsessed with him, get pulled around by the heart, then brutally dumped. And my father would be there to help put her back together, build her confidence back up. Then off she went to the next guy.
It was their toxic pattern.
And, as much as I hated to think anything negative about my mother, it was unkind of her to string him along when she knew all along his feelings were different than hers.
"She's not responsible for his feelings, though," Trip told me, surprising, and I realized that maybe I had painted him in my mind as someone shallow, when there was actual depth to be found there.
"No, you're right. And I think her past traumas and unstable family life made it easy for her to fall for these jerks who reminded her of her own absentee father."
After graduation, though, they both went off in different directions. Adulthood was calling for drastically different paths for the two of them.
My father went off to Cambridge, attending his father's Alma Mater, doing what was expected of him by getting his business degree, so that he could come back and run the company.
My mother, however, followed a flame out to California where he promptly dumped her, leaving her to attempt to juggle community college classes in design as well as waitressing and trying to pay her bills at the ripe old age of eighteen.
Much to her credit, even bouncing from bad relationship to bad relationship, she did get her degree, and was even planning on opening up her own little business.
"Then she met my father. My biological father," I clarified.
Honestly, my mother had never given me a lot of information about him. Aside from the fact that he was an electrician who had been working on her apartment building at the time. I wasn't sure how things progressed, how they got to the point where they were living together, and she was suddenly not working, relying on him for everything.
"Just the cycle of abuse, I guess."
She finally found a guy who told her he loved her, that he'd take care of her, that he would never let her get away.
Where many of us would have heard sirens and seen red flags, all she saw was the hurt little girl who just wanted to be loved, had never healed from that early abandonment.
So she fell into him, into his life. It became all she knew. It isolated her. It twisted her thinking in such a way that she believed him when he said he was sorry after leaving bruises, that he would never do it again.
She lived like that for two years, hardly ever leaving their apartment, waiting on him hand and foot, giving up any dreams she'd ever had for her own life and future.
"And then the stick turned blue."
It was a new prison, another rope tying her to a man who would show her nothing but misery.
"But it also gave her more freedom than she was used to. Suddenly, she had all these appointments to go off to. And my father would let her use the car because he couldn't be bothered to take her himself."
It was on one of those outings, when she'd been treating herself to a hot chocolate with some money she had found forgotten under his front seat, that she happened to run into a familiar face.
"She told me that running into him again at that point in her life was like seeing him clearly for the first time."
They'd talked for hours before she realized she needed to get home, knowing she was going to get into a fight when she did for being gone so long.
"Dad said he saw something when they were parting, that there was a fear in her eyes that he didn't feel comfortable with. So he, ah, followed her home without her knowing."
He admits it was a creepy move, that normal people didn't react that way.
"He was worried about his childhood crush," Trip said, shrugging.
"Yeah. And I think we can all agree that it was the right move. My biological father seemed ready to kill her—and me—that night."
My father could never really tell me what happened in those moments after he burst through the door, drawn by the sounds of her screams, but my mother told me that he'd nearly beaten my biological father to death that evening.
"Then he had turned to my mom, pulled her off the ground, and told her that she was coming home with him."
"And she did," Trip guessed.
"And she did," I agreed.
There
had been no romance at first. She'd simply moved in with him back in their hometown, recovering physically, healing mentally and emotionally, taking care of herself so she could take care of me when I came.
"And in that healing, I think she saw what she had been too damaged to see before. That my father was always who she was meant to be with. When she finally came to that conclusion, they decided to stop wasting time, to get married, to raise me together."
"That's quite a story."
"Yeah. It's why the two of them eventually opened the women's shelter."
"You guys spend Christmas there, right?"
"Yeah. We bring gifts from the wish lists—and add some things in for the moms too—and sneak them under the tree. Then we stay behind to cook and serve a big meal so the rest of the staff can go home to their families. Thanksgiving is really our only family-only holiday."
I continued, "Well, that and the pie. And the fact that gifts aren't required. I am a terrible gift-giver."
"Really?"
"It's not that I don't try! I spend all year trying to find something good. But I never manage it. I am not one of those people who seem to pick out the absolute best gift for a person. And then I feel awful about my less-than-spectacular gifts. And it ruins it for me. I like that Thanksgiving is only about food and togetherness. No expectation of anything else."
"Adjusting to holidays without family is going to be rough," he admitted. "Maybe I'll find somewhere to volunteer too."
"I'm sure my father would be happy to have you at the shelter."
"Just your father?"
"Well," I said, smirking. "Maybe my mother too." He let out a small chuckle. "You'd like it, I think. It's nice to give back. It means a lot to my mother. Plus, you do still get to do some shopping and wrapping, so you can be in the spirit."
"You guys spend the whole day there?"
"We head out late that night, meeting back at my parent's house to indulge in some extra sweets."
"You don't exchange presents at all?"
"No. We really don't need anything. Well, my dad always gets my mom something. But other than that, no. What did you and your mother usually do? The whole big meal and baked goods and giant pile of presents thing?"
"Well, we always had a big meal. But my mother was a horrible cook. Ever since I was a kid, we always ordered enough takeaway on Christmas Eve to feed an army, then just ate that all through Christmas day."
"Wait... what did you do on Thanksgiving if your mom didn't cook?"
"We went out on Thanksgiving to eat. So we generally got a lot of the same things."
But restaurant Thanksgiving wasn't homemade Thanksgiving. It didn't give you the endless servings so that you couldn't fit another bite, so that your pants got too tight, so that you needed to shuffle the few feet over to the living room and drop down on the couch for a nap.
It was sweet that they had their own traditions, but I had to admit that I was maybe even a little bit excited for him that he would get to experience a more traditional Thanksgiving celebration. It would have been too depressing to imagine him sitting alone at a restaurant on Thanksgiving. Sure, he would still be missing his mother while he was here with us, but at least he wasn't on his own.
"Are you excited to have a home-cooked Thanksgiving?"
"Yeah. Your mom is a good cook."
"If you thought these last few meals were good, you're in for a real treat tomorrow. She gets up at four a.m. to get started. We are usually eating around three in the afternoon. And then usually hitting it all again later. And then dessert."
"I'll feel guilty sitting on my ass while she runs around cooking."
"We."
"Hm?"
"We. I cook too. I am usually up right after her. We both get to work on the baking first, always trying to outdo each other on the pies. And then we get started on the meal."
"No parade?"
"We take breaks to glance at it. And we always take a minute for the end."
"What does Mitch do?"
"Watches the games. Tells us that everything smells good. Drinks beer. We don't mind it being a traditional gender roles thing. It's nice to be able to have some time alone with my mom to cook. We used to cook together all the time when I was home. I'm happy to eventually get back."
"Get back?"
"To Pennsylvania. That was always my plan. Get my career in order. Save some money. Then move back home, find a fixer-upper, make it my own. Maybe host Sunday dinners with my family."
"Save money," he scoffed, eyes rolling.
"Yes, save money. To buy a house."
"Princess, you have stock in the company. And a trust fund."
We were back to Princess, back to that cool tone he so often used with me.
"Yes," I agreed, reaching for the wine once again, feeling the buzz slipping away, my shoulders lifting, my jaw tightening. "I have stock. I believe you have stock as well, so I don't know why you have that tone about it."
"I saved up and bought into it."
"And because I was gifted it, you get to look down on me."
"No one said I look down on you."
"Your tone implies it."
"You're inferring things based on your own insecurity."
"I'm defensive," I corrected, not wanting to admit my own insecurity, my own issues with imposter syndrome. "Since you seem to think you are better than me because you weren't born wealthy."
"I believe in hard work."
"And I work hard, Trip." My voice was loud, my tone sharp.
"After turning your back on the family business."
"You don't know what you're talking about."
"I know your father believes in the family legacy."
"But he never believed in me." The words were out before I could stop them, landing hard and heavy, making me wish I could suck them right back in, bury them back where I'd been keeping them for years.
"What are you talking about?" Again, that cold tone, that condescension.
Something in me snapped—my ability to control myself, to keep in all the ugly I had been harboring for years.
"You think I didn't want the legacy? That I didn't pin all my hopes on it? That I didn't believe it was my future? I wanted it. I started working at the company as soon as I was able to. Everything seemed fine. But he hated everything I suggested, shot down every single idea I ever came to him with about the future of the company. He didn't want me to take over. I wasn't what he had in mind."
"What do you mean you weren't what he had in mind?"
"He wanted a son, Trip," I shot back, flinging my wet hair over my shoulder. "The company always went from father to son. That was how it worked. He wanted a son. A true heir to the Kensley family."
"Jett..."
"But he couldn't have an heir," I charged on, barely registering the sudden softness in his voice. "Because of me."
"What do you mean because of you?"
"While delivering me, my mom had a uterine rupture. I slid out of her uterus and into her belly. The only way they could stop the bleeding was to remove the uterus. Making it impossible for her to give him an heir."
"Jett, come on," Trip said, shaking his head. "It wasn't your fault that they couldn't have more kids."
"Any," I corrected. "They couldn't have any kids."
Though, of course, I knew it wasn't actually my fault. It was a freak happenstance due to the fact that my mother had scars from getting fibroids removed in her early twenties. No one could have known. Had they known, they would have insisted on a C-section which would have made it possible for my mother to carry again, though she would always need to have a C-section in the future.
It was just a tragic situation.
For her.
For the family they had wanted to build.
"Come on, you think that Mitch doesn't think of you as his daughter? He loves you. He raised you. What?" he asked when my gaze fell, trying to hide the pain I knew was in my eyes.
"He loved my mom. I was just pa
rt of the deal."
"Oh, fuck off with that," he snapped, making my gaze shoot up. "I get that you maybe would have insecurities about the whole situation. As a kid. But you're a grown woman, Jett. Mitch loves you. Him not liking your ideas has nothing to do with him not being biologically related to you."
"He loves all your ideas," I told him, knowing it was true because my father gushed about them all the time when we got together.
"Because we think the same way, have the same idea of where the company is going. It has nothing to do with blood, Jett, or even that I am, what, the son he never had. It's about having the same vision. We think alike. You don't."
"That's why you act all superior? Because you think like him when I don't?"
"I don't act superior, Princess."
"And yet you insist on calling me that."
"You were born a princess, Jett. As close as you could be in this country. You grew up without a care in the world. You never had to struggle. You are the only heir to this insane empire."
"I didn't choose any of that." And I absolutely had my own struggles.
"No," he agreed, nodding. "But you did choose to be a brat and leave without notice, run off to a new town."
"A brat?" I snapped, anger bubbling up hard and fast, replacing any of the remaining bits of sympathy I felt for the man. "Excuse me, but you have no idea what led to my leaving."
"I know that your father felt blindsided. And walked around the place in a daze for weeks, unsure what to do, who would fill that void."
"And you so helpfully stepped into that place, didn't you?"
"Someone had to."
"It's pretty rich that you look down your nose at me for being born rich, yet you think being an opportunist is somehow superior."
"I worked to get to my position, Princess. Did your sudden absence leave an opening for me? Yeah, it did. And it doesn't make me an opportunist. It meant I was in the right place at the right time and had the right skill set to provide what was needed. You can be a child about it and think that your father would just leave the space open indefinitely if you want, but I would suggest you grow up already, have a conversation with your father, and get over your issues."
There Better Be Pie Page 5
