Beauty from Ashes

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 34

You would think that in a situation like this, Patricia would storm out of the room. Except she doesn’t. It’s more like gliding, like she’s taking classes at charm school and balancing ten stinking books on her head.

I’m so mad I don’t even look at Jake. Obviously, he wasn’t the one who gave my kid Tylenol without asking me first, but if he wasn’t such a pushover, there’s no way the mother-in-law of Frankenstein would still be living under my roof.

I should have kicked her out that first week she was here. Fish and company both stink after three days, right? Of course I’m mad at her. And it’s not even the Tylenol. That’s just the final blow. No, what gets under my skin is the way she presents herself as so selfless and faultless. Like she’s a stinking martyr. Nobody asked her to put her life on hold to live in a trailer and suction out a sick baby round the clock. Nobody asked her to scrub this place senseless just to prove she works harder than the rest of us. Nobody asked her to make us bland casseroles every night and complain that our regular diet doesn’t give us enough fiber or vitamins.

The thing is, if I were to go to Jake and list all the reasons why he has to kick Patricia out, I wouldn’t have anything to say. That’s why I sometimes think she’s a literal genius. That woman hasn’t done anything but bend over backwards to help us out since she arrived on our doorstep. At least that’s the way she sees it, and that’s the way Jake’s bound to look at it, too.

Man, I wish I could get some settlement money out of the OB. Get a house in my own name. Patricia’s like a vampire. And no, I’m not talking about the sparkling types from those stupid teen romances. I’m talking about the old-school kind of vampire you have to invite into your home or they can’t get in. This is Jake’s trailer, so he did the inviting, but now there’s no way to undo it. Not unless he mans up and confronts her about her behavior.

But like I said, what behavior?

Take the Tylenol, for example. In Patricia’s mind, she was trying to help. And I’ll be honest with you. I never knew about giving your baby Tylenol before her shots. I never read about it in any of the mommy mags, and it never crossed my mind. Heck, Patricia might have even saved Natalie a lot of discomfort today by keeping her drugged up. Who knows?

I can’t hate her for giving Natalie the medicine. But it’s the stinking principle of the thing. Natalie’s my daughter. Mine. If anyone is going to be making decisions about her medical care, it’s going to be me.

Sandy told me once that you don’t just marry a person. You marry their whole family. At the time, she was trying to show me how it probably wouldn’t be in my best interest to marry Lincoln Grant. Talk about messed-up families. His dad was in jail on child porn charges along with Lincoln’s older brother. He had a sister who was arrested multiple times for solicitation, and his mom was a raging drunk.

So when Sandy gave me that advice, I thought she just meant you shouldn’t marry someone with that much family drama. Family psychosis might be a better way to put it, at least for the Grants. I should have listened better, and maybe I would have understood that even if your mother-in-law’s not a streetwalker or a druggie, she still has the ability to make your life an absolute nightmare.

Of course, I didn’t realize any of that when Jake proposed to me in the Ronald McDonald house. It was the morning after I wrote him that note where I told him I forgave him for what happened with Charlene.

At least that’s what I intended the message to be, but I spent about one sentence on Charlene and four paragraphs on how scared I felt about him going back to Orchard Grove. I think I was trying to stroke his ego or something. Assuage my guilt over those things Jake never had a clue about. He still doesn’t have a clue, by the way. I’ve never told him what I was going to say in that first letter, and I never intend to. But that’s probably why the second one turned out mushier than I planned.

I woke up at the Ronald McDonald house with Jake kissing me on the eyelid. He had the letter in his hand, and before I could even stretch myself out, he sat down on the side of the bed and started rubbing my arm. “Thank you for your note,” he whispered. For a split second, I thought he was talking about the first one, the one where I confessed everything. There’s nothing to wake you up like having your heart literally stop dead in your chest.

Then I saw the letter in his hand and remembered the original was now swimming with the fishes or slowly dissolving in chemicals at some water treatment facility. I still felt guilty though, so I put on my best behavior and gave him a smile. “You’re welcome, babe.”

And he kissed me again and stroked my forehead, and I don’t remember that he’d ever been that tender or loving with me since Natalie was born. Ripping up that confession was definitely the right call.

“I’m sorry I was a jerk,” he said. “I thought you were mad about Charlene. You could have told me sooner that you wanted me to stay here.”

I don’t know if it was the stress from not sleeping well or the postpartum hormones or how wretched I felt knowing that he had nothing to apologize for compared to what I’d done, but I felt myself getting ready to cry. “I just don’t want to be alone.” I know I wasn’t the most truthful of girlfriends, and I’m definitely not the most truthful of wives, but that may have been the most honest thing I’ve told Jake in my entire life.

The tears were burning my cheeks by that point. Real ones. I’m ok at acting, but I can’t muster up tears on command. And Jake wiped every single one of them away.

“You don’t have to worry,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere. I already texted Roberto and let him know.”

I sat up in bed and hugged him and cried on his shoulder. He probably thought I was relieved and that’s why I was going at it. Really, I was crying because I knew that if I told him everything, there’s no way he’d stay with me, letting me sob into his chest, saying such nice things and trying to comfort and soothe me.

He would never forgive me if he knew the truth.