“Right now, you’re both eighteen and in love,” Mam offered up. “But you won’t always be young, and you might not always be in love either.”
“If you are, then fantastic, you have nothing to worry about,” Dad chimed in, giving my mother a knowing smile. “But if you fall out of love with each other, if you grow apart, are you sure you’re both ready to deal with the consequences?”
“I’ve loved your daughter for six years,” Joey finally broke his silence by saying. “I can easily love her for another eighteen.”
Goddamn…
My heart skipped in my chest.
He wasn’t trying to sound sweet.
He was trying to sound convincing.
Still, I was ready to jump his bones.
“Love?” Teddy sneered. “You think loving each other is all you need to make this work?”
“It’s half the battle,” my mother replied in a curt tone.
“It’s bullshit,” Teddy argued, dismissing her, making it clearer every time he opened his mouth that he did not care for a woman’s opinion on anything. “I’ll tell ya something, Tony,” he continued, looking to Dad instead. “Your wife might have rose-tinted glasses on, but I know deep down you can see this for what it is. A fucking shit storm. That boy of mine is in no position to raise a baby. He’s on a fast-track to nowhere, and if you don’t want that young one of yours following after him, then you’ll put her on a boat to England and have her cut ties with him.”
“She’s not going to fucking England!” Joey spat, as he erupted on his father. “And you’ve got a lot of fucking nerve to sit across this table from me, offering up fatherly advice, and accusing me of not being able to raise a child.“
“Joey, son—”
“No, Tony, let me finish, because this needs to be said,” Joey argued, holding a hand up to my father, while focusing on Teddy Lynch. “You might have fathered six kids, but you sure as shit didn’t raise them.”
“Joey,” Marie choked out, looking anxious. “Please don’t go there.”
“And you sure as shit didn’t mother us,” he snapped, tone laced with accusation, as he glared at his mother. “Darren raised me and Shannon. Not you, and not him. Darren raised us – until your husband literally drove him out of the fucking country. And then, all of the raising was left to me. So, don’t fucking sit there and pretend that I’m incapable of being a good father to my kid when that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for yours since I was twelve!”
I didn’t open my mouth to stop him because these assholes deserved to hear his pain.
They deserved to hear the truth.
“I’m not him, and Aoife’s not you,” Joey continued to tell his mother. “And you can say what you want about me, old man,” he added, addressing his father now. “But you don’t know a goddamn thing about the kind of person I am.”
“I know exactly who you are,” his father shot back, unyielding. “You’re me twenty-four years ago.”
Nothing else he could have said could have hurt Joey more than that comparison, and I felt his hand grow limp in mine, as he leaned back in his chair, looking winded.
“It’s not true,” I hurried to soothe. “You’re nothing like him.”
And this time, when I said the words, I meant it physically as well as every other way. For a long time, I thought Joey bore an uncanny resemblance to his father, and to anyone not looking closely enough, it was certainly true. But sitting here, looking at both father and son in the clear light of our kitchen, the differences were obvious.
Beefy and paunch-bellied from years of alcohol abuse, even though he wasn’t a fat man, he weighed substantially more than his son.
There was a softness to Joey’s eyes that his father’s eyes were void of. He had his mother’s nose, I noted, and her high cheekbones, too. Similar to his sister, he had swollen, puffy lips that they had also clearly inherited from her. And sure, while they were both tall, broad, tanned, and blond, Teddy Lynch had cold, dead, emotionless, brown eyes, while emerald-colored embers of fire burned in his son’s eyes.
Joey might have shared his father’s height, hair color, golden-rich complexion, and stature, but the two were like fire and ice. He had a lot more of his mother in him than anyone realized.
“Everyone just calm down,” my mother interjected, holding her hands up. “We’re not here to talk about the past. All of that can be hashed over another day. Right now, we need to talk about this pregnancy, because in a little over five months, our children are going to have a baby, a baby that the four of us will be grandparents to.”
“If anyone at this table thinks that I’m going to let him anywhere near my kid, then you’re all fucking crazy,” Joey bit out, glowering at his parents. “Over my dead body.”
“Joey,” his mother sobbed, voice cracking. “Please.”
“Yeah,” I decided to pipe up, for no other reason than to let him know that I had his back in this fight. “What Joe said.”
“Aoife,” Mam sighed, with a shake of her head. “You’re not helping.”
I gave her a look that said so?
“You think I give a shit?” Teddy laughed cruelly. “I never wanted to see your face, boy. I still don’t, so what makes you think that I would want to see anything that came off ya?”
“My heart’s bleeding,” Joey drawled sarcastically.
“You’ll be bleeding alright, when I get my hands on ya.”
“Jesus Christ, Teddy,” Dad snapped, running his hand through his hair. “That’s your boy, you’re talking to.”
“Everybody needs to calm down,” Mam commanded, addressing the whole table. “This doesn’t have to get personal.”
“You know what, I think it already has,” Joey declared, as he shoved his chair back and stood. “I’m sorry, Trish, I am, but I won’t sit here and talk about a baby that I have no intention of ever letting these two fuckers taint.”
“Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?” Furious, his father stood up, rounded the table and roughly clamped his beefy hand around the back of his neck. “Sit your hole down, boy,” he commanded, forcing Joey to sit back down.
Jaw ticking, I watched as my boyfriend kept his hands at his sides, refusing to spill blood in my family home, as he let his father manhandle him.
It was degrading.
It was disgusting.
“Hey!” Unable to stop myself, the urge I had to protect the boy I loved so fiercely, I clawed at the hand he was using to grip his neck. “Get your filthy hands off him.”
“Aoife!”
“Don’t even look at her,” Joey snarled, rising to his feet to block me from his father’s view when he opened his mouth to respond.
“Joey,” his mother sobbed. “Please…”
“I’m done talking to you,” Joey told her in a shaky tone. “I’m done with you.” He turned back to my father and said, “This isn’t me walking away from my responsibilities. This is me walking away from a murder charge.” Blowing out a frustrated breath, he tenderly tipped my chin up with his knuckles and said, “Are you with me?”