Chapter Nineteen
Matt sat in his truck and stared at the house he’d grown up in. He’d left his bed, and the woman in it, to get over here and sort this out. So, he really should get his ass out of the truck.
Jo peered out the kitchen window and raised her hand in greeting.
“Damn.” Part of him wanted to turn his truck around and get out of here. Seventeen years he’d been sorting crap out in this house. He had some vague memory of a time when stepping into the house didn’t fasten claws around his neck. He sighed and climbed out of his truck.
Jo opened the kitchen door, and stood there with her arms crossed and her shoulders hunched.
“Hey.” He raised his chin at her.
Jo unclenched her arms and came in for the hug. He loved his sister, really he did, but shouldn’t her fiancé be here and doing this stuff for her? Which raised a good point. “What’s this about you not getting married?”
She sniffed and pulled away from him, scrubbing her hands over her eyes like a four-year-old. With her head bowed and her slumped shoulders, she didn’t look a lot older than that. His baby sister. He pulled her back for another hug.
“I was talking to Pippa at Bella’s.” The words got a bit muffled by his shirt. “She’s really easy to talk to.”
Yes, she was. And really easy on the eye and really, really nice to wake up with. “What did she say?”
Jo shrugged. “She didn’t say much. I was trying on the dresses and I didn’t feel like a bride, and then I got to thinking that was because maybe I didn’t want to be a bride.”
He thanked God for that, and took a deep breath. “And why’s that?”
“I’m not sure I love Lance.”
That made it time to say good-bye to Lance the Loser. “And now?”
“I dunno.” Jo wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. “I mean, I must have wanted to marry him, otherwise I wouldn’t have said yes.”
“It sounds like you should talk to Lance.” If he pushed, Jo would shove back. Still, even making the suggestion made him want to spit it out of his mouth. “Is he coming back soon?”
“He didn’t say.”
Matt did a slow ten count in his head. “But, he’ll be back before the wedding.”
“If there is a wedding.”
“Jo.” He gripped her upper arms to get her to look at him. “You gotta level with me. Either you want to get married or you don’t, and if you’re this unsure, then maybe that’s your answer right there.”
She peeped through her lashes at him. “You won’t be mad?”
Where the hell had that come from? “Why would I be mad?”
Jo shrugged and dropped her gaze to her feet.
“Jo-Jo? Talk to me.” This used to be so much easier when she was little. He bent his knees to see her face. “Do we need to go to the treehouse?”
Jo gave him a wet chuckle. “It’s still there.”
“Come on.” He tugged on her hand. “It’ll be easier to talk up there anyway.”
“She’s still in her room.” Jo jerked her head toward the house.
The grip around his throat tightened. “I’ll see her before I leave.”
Getting his six-four frame into the treehouse took some doing, but Matt managed it. Jo scampered in behind him. The old treehouse creaked and groaned under their weight, but he and Eric had built this thing strong.
“So?” He waited for Jo to get settled. “Why would I be angry with you?”
Jo picked at a splinter of wood, her face difficult to read from this angle. “Not so much angry as disappointed.”
Something Eric had said to him piped up in his head. “Why?”
“Because you always seem so sure of things.” Jo sighed. “You make decisions, never look back, and I know you worry about us all the time. I mean, with Mom the way she is and all.”
He did worry about them. It was his job. Or was it?
“Dad died,” Jo said. “And you stepped up, and it’s been that way ever since. Just once, I wanted to do something that wouldn’t need you to rescue me.”
She knocked the wind out of him. “You do lots of stuff that doesn’t need a rescue.”
“Oh, yeah.” Jo raised her eyebrow. “Name one.”
“You graduated with a four point oh GPA.”
“You sat with me and did my homework, nearly every night.”
Night after night, so tired from working all day it had been hard to keep his eyes open sometimes. “You got your job at the bar on your own.”
Jo pulled a face. “We both know I should have gone to college instead.”
He’d even tried to fill out the applications for her, but Jo didn’t want that. “You could still go to college.”
“You’re doing it again.” Jo glared at him. “Stepping in and being my fixer.”
He shut his mouth.
“Don’t you ever feel like you don’t know the answers?” Jo cocked her head as she looked at him.
Christ, most of the last seventeen years had been like he was caught in a pinball machine. “All the time, Jo.”
“Really?” She frowned and went back to working at her splinter. “Because you never seem that way.”
Jo had always been his baby sister. He got that she was growing up, but he didn’t really understand what that meant. Jo was a woman now, with her own strengths and weaknesses and she didn’t need her big brother to fix things for her anymore. “Jo.” This honesty thing was a fucker. The desire to make her world happy and keep her feeling safe was set deep inside him. “I was nineteen when Dad died, and so scared and shocked, I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“You never looked it,” Jo said.
“Yeah, well, I felt it.” It was weird admitting these things. He’d always protected Jo, from everything, including himself. “Dad’s business was in the toilet, Mom was . . .” He shrugged. “Mom wasn’t coping and you guys were so young. Jeez, Jo-Jo, you had your eleventh birthday three days before Dad had his heart attack. Somebody had to step up or we were all screwed.”
“You turned down that scholarship to do it.”
God, why wouldn’t she look at him? He needed to see her face, gauge how this was all going down. “Yup.”
“Do you regret it?”
Every day of his life until that dream drifted out of age range. “Sometimes. I loved football, I wanted to go to college.”
“But you still did it.” Jo looked at him. “You’re like a saint, Matt, and that makes the rest of us look like screwups.”
Matt tried to take that in. It was the second time someone had called him a saint in the last three days. Eric accused him of being stuck, and keeping the rest of them stuck with him. How had they all gotten this screwed up? It had broken him to make the call that would end his scholarship chances. He had driven out to Lovers’ Leap after the call and sat in his truck and cried like a baby. Cried for his chance gone by, cried for the loss of his dad, cried because he was so fucking scared of the load that had landed on his shoulders. Part of him was pissed with Jo for saying that, but the bigger part was shocked. Reeling.
“I’m not a saint, Jo-Jo.” He managed to find some words to express the crap tangled in his head. “I was mad as hell about the way things turned out. It still gets to me. I’m thirty-six, running my dad’s old construction company and living in the same town I grew up in. I want out too sometimes. I want my life to be the way I dreamed it would be when I was a kid.” He shook his head. “I’m not a saint.”
“I love you, Matt,” she said. Her words made his throat dry up. “And I feel like I owe it to you not to get into any more shit.”
“You don’t owe me anything.” His throat was so tight it was hard to work the words out. “I did what I had to do.”
“Nope.” Jo’s dark hair swished around as she shook her head. “You did more than that. Plenty of people wouldn’t have done the same as you. They would have left it to Mom to cope.” Her face lost its soft look. “She should never have let you do it.”
“She was a mess.” Hadn’t he said the same thing to himself? So why the need to defend his mother?
“She was the mother,” Jo said.
Matt didn’t see it as quite as cut and dried. Maybe because he was older and had noticed more of how things worked with their parents. Dad had been the tower on which their mother leaned. When he was taken away, and so suddenly, their mother collapsed. Matt had known what his dad would have wanted him to do and done it.
“Enough about me.” This conversation made his skin feel too tight over his bones. “Now that we’ve gotten it clear that you shouldn’t get married because you don’t want to disappoint me, what are you going to do?”
“Call off the wedding?” She said it like she was asking his permission.
It was all great and good to tell him all this crap about not wanting to be a burden, but that went two ways. If Jo wanted to stand on her own two feet, she needed to get up off her ass. “Don’t ask me, Jo. This is all on you.”
She frowned as if that hadn’t occurred to her. “I want to call off the wedding.”
“Okay, then.”
“And pay you back for all the money you’ve spent on it so far.”
Wow, she really did have it in her head to go all out. “That’s not necessary.”
“Yes, it is.” Jo set her jaw in a stubborn line. All the Evans kids had that way of sticking their jaw out, like they were bracing for the punch.
“Dad would not have made you pay it back,” he said.
“You’re not Dad.” There was no arguing with that. If she needed to do this, then so be it. “I can pick up extra shifts at the bar until I pay you back.”
“Okay.” The idea of taking her money didn’t sit right, but their conversation had gotten him thinking. It rang too close to what Eric had said. Maybe it was time to step back a bit and give everybody some room to breathe. Isaac had taken that room for himself, and maybe Matt needed to let him do it.
“I enrolled in an online college.” Jo dropped her head again, hiding her face.
He stamped hard on the urge to go paternal and congratulate her. “Studying what?”
“I’m not sure yet, but something in the sciences.” Jo shrugged. “I don’t know yet, but I figured it was time to get back on the horse and see where that led me.”
Jo had more brains than all her brothers put together. She wasn’t so hot on the street smarts, though. She did have a way of getting herself into trouble. Maybe it was time to give her the space to get herself out of that trouble. “Let me know if there is anything I can do.”
She rolled her eyes at him.
“What?” He shrugged. He couldn’t change seventeen years of habit in one small conversation.
“Are you going to take Eric’s offer?” Jo asked.
“I don’t know.” This conversation was certainly giving him a new perspective. “I need to think about it.”
“You should take it,” Jo said. “I think you need something like this to get on with your life.”
She smirked at him and shuffled out of the treehouse through the hatch and down the ladder.
He went much slower, his big feet scrabbling for traction.
Jo dropped to the bottom and stared at the house. “Are you going in to see her?”
“Yup.”
He strode toward the house. He couldn’t put this off much longer. His mother already knew he was here. She would have heard his truck and would be waiting for him.
“Matt?” Jo stood where he’d left her, arms crossed. “What if you didn’t go?”
“Where?”
“Into the kitchen.”
He glanced back at the house. A curtain twitched at the upstairs window to his mother’s room. “I don’t know.”
And that’s why he went, because it scared the crap out of him what might happen if he didn’t.
* * *
As afternoon gave way to evening Matt let himself into his house. Tired didn’t begin to cover it. Sitting in his mother’s kitchen, trying to keep track of business and keep his mother stable had eaten up his entire afternoon.
He’d been a dick to Pippa this morning. Eric had called him, special-like, to let him know. He really needed to talk to her, but first he needed to grab a bite to eat and a shower. His mother’s desperation clung to his skin.
Condom wrappers littered the floor next to the bed and he bent and snagged them. His mother had a way of barging into his house and cleaning. Pissed him the fuck off, but sometimes you had to pick your battles, and he got a clean house out of this one. Pippa’s perfume clung to the sheets in a subtle reminder of their night. And just like that, he didn’t feel so tired anymore.