The One Who Changed Everything

Chapter Four

“So I saw your half brother today,” Tucker’s mother, Nancy, told him that night.

She’d called him to see if he could come over and fix a leak in the U-bend pipe beneath the kitchen sink and change the lightbulb at the top of the stairs. At sixty-one years old, she was pretty good about most of that stuff.

He was proud of her, actually. She mowed her own lawn, changed all the lightbulbs she could reach, paid her bills on time. He’d in fact forbidden her to change the one at the top of the stairs, since it involved climbing onto a chair and leaning precariously into space.

With a trim, energetic figure and hair she’d allowed to remain its natural silvery gray, she could have married again if she’d wanted to, Tucker was certain, and yet to his knowledge she’d never come close. A couple times he’d almost asked her about it—“Did you love Dad that much?” Or maybe, “Did Dad scar you that badly?” But in the end he’d stayed silent.

“Oh, you did?” he said to her carefully now, about Jonah.

“He’s working at Third Central, the branch on the corner of Maple and Twenty-second Street, and I had checks to deposit,” Mom explained. “I don’t usually go to that branch, but I had a delivery down that way.” She had her own business as a florist now, having started in that field as a sales assistant after his dad became ill. “He’s looking so grown-up, I guess he’d be twenty-one by now.”

“About that, I think.”

“He didn’t recognize me.” She added, “Or if he did, he was pretending, the same way I was.”

There wasn’t much else to say. Jonah had been three years old at their dad’s funeral, a difficult imp of a kid who didn’t understand what was happening. Tucker’s mom had been horrified that Andrea would bring him. How could she do this? she’d said over and over. How could she do this?

She’d been devastated at Andrea’s presence, exhausted by the effort of dealing with it. Jonah crying and struggling in his mother’s arms had been the last straw on top of more previous last straws than Tucker could count.

His mom had found out about his dad’s affair three months after she’d learned about his cancer. Three months after that, she’d found out that the woman involved was eight months pregnant with Dad’s child.

But the order she’d found out about it wasn’t the order in which it had all happened. Dad had known he was ill months before he’d told his family, and he’d started the affair almost immediately “as a reaction.” The justification he’d used still made Tucker queasy with anger. I had to follow my guiding star. I had to go with how I felt. Me, not anyone else. I had to live life to the full, while I still had the chance.

That’s not how you react, Dad. Cancer is supposed to bring you closer to the people who love you, not send you off on a self-absorbed wild-goose chase for your lost youth.

Yeah.

What did you say about all that, eighteen years after Dad was gone?

“It’s not Jonah’s fault,” Mom said, as she’d said before, and it was true.

She’d talked a lot, at one time, about getting to know him. “He looks so much like you and Mattie when you were that age, Tucker.”

But it was impossible. There was still too much anger and mess, no possibility of any forgiveness between Andrea Lewers and his mom. His mom blamed Andrea for the affair because she couldn’t cope with blaming his dad. Andrea blamed his mom for shutting her out and dismissing her grief because somehow she’d loved his dad, too.

In the end, Tucker had steered his mother away from the idea of making any kind of connection with his half brother, and so they barely knew him. They knew him from a distance because Mom hadn’t been able to stop herself from keeping track of him.

“You didn’t go to that branch because you knew he was working there, did you?” Tucker accused gently.

She looked at him and sighed. “No, I didn’t. I’ve been so good about that these past couple years. No, it was a total coincidence. You’re right in what you’ve always said. Too much mess, and Jonah himself doesn’t need to be dumped in it.”

“I really think that’s the only way to go.” He felt a wash of relief on realizing that he didn’t have to argue the case.

“Speaking of mess, though...” his mom said.

“Yeah? Are we?”

She took a breath, a certain very mothery kind of breath. “Emma called a couple days ago, and we had a talk.”

“Oh, you did?” His wariness kicked in.

When his mom brought Emma into the conversation, the result was rarely a relaxing chat. Her manner turned plaintive, and she couldn’t hold herself back. “Tucker, I don’t think she wants this divorce, and I don’t understand why the two of you haven’t tried harder.”

He sighed. “Because that wasn’t the agreement. You know that.”

“You can rethink the agreement. I think that’s what she wants, at heart. For you to work at it and turn it into a real marriage, instead of just letting it go.”

“No, she doesn’t. She really doesn’t, Mom.”

She ignored him. “You could have such a great partnership. Everyone would be so happy about it. You’ve had a broken engagement, and now a marriage that isn’t what it could be. I’m not sure what it is that you want. I don’t understand why—”

“I think you’re wrong.”

“About the marriage, or about what Emma wants?”

“Both. It’s not like she and I haven’t talked about this.”

“She’s scared to say it. She needs it to come from you.”

“No, Mom. We’ve been married three years. If there was any possibility of it turning into the real thing, it would have happened by now. There’s no chemistry and there never has been.”

“Chemistry? You get on so well together...”

“Because we’ve given each other plenty of space. Because we’ve been clear about the whole arrangement.”

“Emma wants the arrangement to change,” she said firmly, then added as a signal that she wasn’t going to keep on about it. “Now, are you staying for coffee and a bite to eat? I have cake.”

“Sure, I have time. That would be nice.”

When he’d finished the coffee and cake that his mom had pressed on him and they’d talked about Carla and Mattie, and how well they were both doing in New York City, and how it would be nice if one or both of them moved back closer, as well as easy things like TV shows and the weather, he left with that familiar sense of having hosed down a potential emotional crisis.

Or two of them.

His marriage, and Jonah.

Although this wasn’t fair, because his mom had changed the subject pretty fast both times, and when it came to action rather than talk, she’d behaved as sensibly and decently about Dad’s affair and Tucker’s own unusual marriage as she possibly could.

And that was exactly the way he was going to behave about Daisy Cherry. Sensible and decent.

Maybe it was good that his mom had run into Jonah today. It gave Tucker a very necessary reminder of how much he hated complicated, emotionally messy entanglements. Giving in to an attraction to his ex-fiancée’s sister while his green-card marriage was still a legal reality was quite a bit more complicated and messy than he wanted.

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