Beyond Eighteen(93)

Below that Candi had written:

Happy 10th Birthday. I figured you’d like this instead of a Christmas card. Hazards of a Christmas birthday, I guess. I can’t believe you’re already 10. Well, hope Grams and Gramps are treating you right. Sorry no present but money is tight. Here’s a kiss, hope that’s good enough. Love, your Mom.

Just below her writing was a smeared kiss in red lipstick.

I felt the words strangle my throat. My heart felt like it had stopped beating and suddenly I was somewhere else. I just started to grab letter after letter, ripping them open, reading about her life without me. I could feel my heart ache, my tailbone becoming sore from sitting through each one. I continued to read as the letters from Candi evolved from a desperate kid to a self-sustaining woman. I know it’s strange, maybe even unbelievable, but I could smell her. Every place she’d been, every experience she wrote about. Every moment I wasn’t with her, spread across cardstock and lined paper. Events she experienced that were supposed to be for her and me as a family. She wrote about how hard it had been without me, how it took her three tries to get clean. She told me she never stopped thinking about me, how she met someone and was married, how she wished I was there. She told me that she went to school and is now working with young addicts, counseling them, trying to save even one girl from going through what she had. Letter after letter, the words methodically pulled her back into my life. She told me that I have a brother, Connor. That he looks just like me, and every day with him is like having me back. I kept reading for hours, the words she wrote intended for me at different stages of my life. Words that tore me apart while at the same time, somehow, finding a way to piece me back together.

J sat with me the entire time, taking each letter after I read it and putting it back into the envelope it came out of. She was a rock. When I would stop and cry, she’d take the letter and read it out loud. She could sense when I was about to lose it; that’s when she would nudge against me and rub my back. She didn’t have to say a word. All she had to do was sit there and be with me. Three hours later, we had read through all the letters and cards. My life without my mom chronicled perfectly in a shoebox. I was exhausted, like I’d been run through a washing machine on heavy duty.

I sat for a moment, silent, staring at the box.

“You okay?” Joanie asked. A gap of reflection, thick with what I’d just experienced, lay between us.

“I think so,” I answered.

“You know what this means, right?”

“Yeah, I do,” I whispered.

“Your mom never gave up on you. All those years,” Joanie said.

“Yeah. Changes things a bit,” I sighed. I stared at my grandfather’s button-up shirts and dress pants, my eyes burning from not blinking, my head searching, swimming toward some reasoning behind my grandparents keeping the letters from me.

“What are you going to do?” Joanie asked before chewing on the corner of her bottom lip.

“I really don’t know yet.”

I saw images of my grandparents tiptoeing into their closet and hiding the letters from me. Why? Why would they take that from me? I guess, deep down, I knew the answer. They were only trying to protect me. Keep me safe.

“Do you think your grandpa intended on giving you these letters?”

“I have to believe that they were going to give them to me once I turned eighteen. There is no other reason why they would keep them and go to all that effort to sort them by year. I really think I was meant to see them, J.”

Joanie stood up and held out her hand. I took it and she lifted me off the floor. Without having to relive the journey into my nonexistent childhood relationship with my birth mom, I gave her a hug for being my best friend in the whole world. In that moment, we both knew this was only part one of my new adult life. Tomorrow, part two…meeting with the lawyers of my grandparents’ estate.





Chapter Thirty-three


~ Max ~





Morning came faster than I expected. When I looked over at the clock, 7:55 glared at me. Shit. It felt like I had just closed my eyes. I wanted to get into the office before 8:00 so I could get as much done as possible and make my way to California to be with Wilson.

I tossed the blankets back and let the cold morning air rake across my bare skin. Normally I sleep with boxers on, but last night, well I didn’t…besides, when the chilly morning air found its way to my erection, I gave it a moment’s thought before I decided to get up and get my ass in the shower.

A shower was the perfect answer to jump-starting my day. It was quick, and of course productive when I soaped up my lower half.