Annie
“Mom?” I said.
She sighed, but didn’t respond verbally. This was the first time we had heard each other’s voices in years.
“Is Dad there?” I went on when it was obvious she had no desire to start a conversation with me. No desire to ask me how I was, how the boys were now that I had found them, not even how Diana and Walker were. She had always loved them like her own when we were young. But that ended when they took away her grandson. When my father and I let them.
“Yes, hold on,” she said. “Emerson! Your daughter is on the phone!”
I winced slightly at her words.
There was some shuffling in the background and then the sound of phone exchanging hands before my father’s voice came on from the other end,
“Andrea?” he said.
“Hi,” I said.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
I sighed and sat down, picking slightly at the fabric of mine and Reese’s old couch we had had since before we were married. I stared at the colors and patterns, letting myself get lost in them for a minute.
“Andrea?” he said. “Are you all right?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What happened?”
I hesitated. I had been debating over whether or not I actually wanted to tell him about this for the whole morning, surprised when I, by almost no will of my own, picked up the phone and dialed the numbers. I had a feeling he wasn’t going to give me an sympathy on this, just as Reese really wasn’t. I had kept something from my own son, many things from my own son, and now I was upset that he was upset with me when someone finally told him what he needed to know.
“Parker knows,” I said anyway, figuring if nothing, he would like to know that now he could address his own grandson as his grandson.
“I see,” he said. “You told him?”
“No,” I said. “Taylor did.”
“I see,” he said again. “And this upsets you?”
“More than a little,” I said. “He hates me.”
“How do you know?” he asked me instead of reassuring me that he probably didn’t.
“According to Taylor, he’s locked himself in his bedroom for the last four days and won’t come out. I tried to talk to him on the day he found out, but he didn’t want to talk,” I said.
“He told you this?”
“He didn’t tell me anything,” I said, “because he didn’t say anything.”
“Oh,” he said.
“He’s not giving me a chance to explain myself,” I said, aware that the dismay in my voice made me sound like I was very close to whining. “He won’t give me a chance to tell my side of things.”
“What would you tell him if he did?” he asked.
“I’d tell him I...I didn’t mean to hurt him. That I lied to him because I was scared to tell him. That I’m sorry for keeping it from him,” I said.
“Maybe that’s just not what he wants to hear,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The fact that you lied to him and why you lied to him, I’m assuming, have probably already been established. At least if Taylor did a good enough job of defending you when he told Parker,” he said. “I think maybe at this point Parker needs to work that part of it out in his mind on his own. Figure out that you meant well. What he might be more interested in knowing is more about why you suddenly showed up after twelve or so years of being gone. Tell him about you. Where you’ve been these past twelve years. Make yourself more of a person.”
Make myself more of a person.
“He already kind of knows me, though,” I said.
“He knows you as Annie Lawrence, Taylor’s unusually close friend,” he said. “He probably can’t connect Annie Lawrence with Andrea Whitney. He doesn’t see how you’re the same person.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Am I making sense?” he said and I could hear his smile.
“Too much sense,” I said. “Are you a psychologist or a doctor of emergency medicine?”
“Neither when it comes to this,” he said. “In this, I’m a grandfather.”
I nodded, aware that he couldn’t see me.
“Now is the real test, Annie,” he said. “Taylor was easy. He accepted you almost right away. He was very willing to get to know you. Parker’s going to be harder to gain trust from. He’s probably already built a defense against you in the years you haven’t been there, whether he knows it or not.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He probably has a few things he’d like to tell me that aren’t going to be pleasant when he actually says them.”
“You never know,” he said.
There was a long pause.
“Is that all?”
“Not really,” I said. “There’s also a slight situation with Taylor that I’m having trouble handling.”
“Oh?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, describing him vaguely what Taylor had vaguely described to me.
“Mmm-hmm,” he said slowly. “I can’t tell you much about that one.”
“I don’t know how to handle it,” I said. “I’m not sure if I should ask him about it or if I should just let him come to me. If he’d even come to me when he finally does feel like opening himself to conversation about it. And now with the whole Parker thing. It feels wrong somehow.”
“Honestly, Annie,” he said. “I don’t think Taylor’s situation is as much yours to handle as Walker and Diana’s. It’s true that they’re the ones he’ll probably go to first when he finally opens up more about what’s been going on. He might eventually come to you. But they are his parents. Moreso than you, maybe, as much as I know you don’t want to think about that. But they are. And right now I think your concentration should be more on Parker and what’s going on with him because right now he’s the one you need to be a mother to, all right?”
“Yeah, that makes sense,” I said.
Unfortunately, it did. It made a lot of sense. Of course Taylor wasn’t going to come to me with this. He’d go to Walker and Diana. They were his parents. They were the ones he went to with virtually everything for the past twelve years. He probably wouldn’t even think of trying to get comfort or an open ear from me.
“I’ll try to talk to Parker again Wednesday,” I said. “I’m apparently going over there for dinner again.”
“I think that would be a good idea.”
“Would you come with me?” I asked.
“Andrea, this is your battle to fight, I’m afraid,” he said. “If I go, I’ll probably only get talked into trying to go to him and talk to him myself instead of you.”
“Please,” I said. “I would just really like you there.”
“Should you be throwing so many long lost family members at Parker at once?” he said. “I’ve only talked to him once.”
“I want you there,” I said. “Please. I will talk to him. If he lets me. I won’t make you do it for me.”
He sighed.
“All right,” he said. “What time?”
“Be here around five. We’re supposed to be there around seven.”
“I’ll be there,” he said. “If I can remember how to get there.”
I smiled.
“Thanks, Dad,” I said. “I love you.”
“We love you, too,” he said.
Then we both hung up.
Okay, I know the Anti-Annie Club has something to say about this.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Fifty