“Shut up.”
I feed Griff, his pouty, little lips scarfing down the food, and I laugh to myself. He’ll eat pretty much anything. I guess the longer he doesn’t know how awful this tastes compared to just about everything else, the better.
“Happy to be home?” Noah asks.
I nod, feeding the kid more and more. “Yeah.”
“You gonna stay out of trouble?”
“Nope,” I reply.
Noah chuckles as he lies next to us.
Dad is in California a lot now, Van der Berg Extreme merging with JT Racing about four years ago. Since the owners of JTR preferred to stay at their home base in Shelburne Falls, Illinois, it ended up being pretty perfect. Dad runs the California branch, and Noah races our bikes with their engines.
Tiernan and I moved into the house here, but just until construction on our own place—a little lower on the mountain—is finished. Which will take more than a year, I’m sure.
The only thing other than a house that Tiernan demanded on the new property was a place to land a helicopter. There was no way she was letting me stitch up our kid if he got injured. She wanted him airlifted to a hospital with local anesthesia.
I’ll continue customizations, she’ll design homes, décor, and furniture as the weather permits, and we’ll live for the winter and the warmth and our family with some adventures on the side.
I keep feeding Griffin, but I feel Noah’s eyes on me, like he has more to say.
“What do you want me to do with her ashes?” he finally asks.
Her ashes…
I don’t look at him, scraping the container and doling out the rest to the kid.
I shrug. “Take ’em, I guess.”
This is why he’s back. Why my father returned. Why we decided to go camping and be together and remember what we have to be grateful for as a family.
Anna Leigh is dead. My mother.
Our mother.
My throat tightens as Griff looks up at me, his big, emerald eyes watching me.
I force a smile for him.
“It’s surreal,” Noah says quietly. “I think she was really someone very different down deep. If not for the drugs.”
Why would he think that? She wasn’t on drugs in prison. She was in there fifteen years total, with some spells on the outside in between, and the only time she touched base was for money. Theft, robbery, dealing…negligence with her child. She was a bad person.
And I do remember. I still have to ride with the windows cracked in the car.
“Maybe she wanted to be different,” he goes on. “Someone who laughed with her kids. Played games with us and wanted a man to hold her with love.”
An image of her on her back as she propped me up on her feet so I could fly flashes in my head. She smiled. I laughed.
“That’s what everyone wants, isn’t it?” Noah asks. “To not be alone?”
He doesn’t have any memories of her. Only a year younger than me, but too young. Cancer crept up in March, and it worked quickly. She died in prison a couple of weeks ago.
Maybe he’s right. If she’d never had that first taste, maybe she would’ve been different.
“I just want to remember her as she should’ve been.” His voice falls to a whisper. “I’m too tired at this point to hate her anymore. When it’s over and done, maybe all she wants is to not be alone now. To know that we think of her sometimes.”
Tears fill my eyes, and I don’t want to fucking do this, but I can’t stop it. I cough to cover the emotion choking me up, because fucking Noah. Goddamn him.
She’s dead, and I’m wrapped warm every night in a family I love. Why should I hate her?
“Ah, fuck it.” I dry my eyes and gather up the food and sippy cup. “Leave me half of the ashes. I’ll spread them on the mountain.”
I don’t look at him as I leave the shit and grab my kid, getting out of the tent before I embarrass myself further.
Holding Griff close to me, I draw in some deep breaths, slowly letting it go. Fucking Noah.
My dad stands at the edge of the water, and I head over, turning the kid around, so he can see the waterfall. The first time we brought his mom here, she sat on a beach towel right about here.
Dad glances over, smiling at Griff. “I can’t tell who he looks more like.”
I look down at my son. His hair is darker than Tiernan’s, but much lighter than mine. He has my eyes, though.
“As long as he’s loved, I don’t care,” I tell him.
“That he is.” He reels the line back into the spool. “If you want to have a few more, I won’t balk,” he says. “It’s nice to have a kid running around again. I can be better with him than I was with you two.”