“Son,” he said, his voice choked. “Oh, son.” He gave me a good, hard shake. “It’s so good to have you home.”
Wide-eyed, I looked over his shoulder at my mother. She was dabbing at her eyes with her napkin.
My father released me and clapped me so hard on the back I almost pitched forward. I caught myself in time and took refuge in a chair, where I sat looking between the two of them with trepidation. My mother reached over and grasped my hand. A miracle.
A servant deposited a glass of orange juice on the table in front of me. “Breakfast, sir?”
I waved my hand, and the servant melted away. I couldn’t deal with food right now, but the orange juice was too great a temptation, so I chugged it.
“We owe you an apology,” said my father, instantly prompting me to choke.
He had to pound me on the back several times before I was able to catch my breath, and even then I wasn’t able to speak, only stare at him in watery-eyed, gasping disbelief.
“Oh, now don’t gimme that face,” he said, snapping his napkin over his lap. “You’re not innocent in all of this, either! You never even told us we had a grandson!”
The sound that came out of me wasn’t technically a word, but my father snorted like I’d disagreed with him.
“Yes, Bianca told me you adopted Christian’s son, and I’m damned pissed off that you’d keep that from us! You know how much your mother wants grandbabies! And you could’ve told me what really happened with Cricket—it would’ve saved us years of grief!”
He looked at me, stricken. “Not that it was anything like what you probably went through, of course. I didn’t mean that. Only . . . well, shit, Jackson. You never gave your mother and me a chance to be there for you. You just disappeared, and when Rayford found you, he wouldn’t tell us anything, either, and we never saw either one of you again! It was like the two of you went into the witness protection program!”
It took a long time for me to recover from that. “But . . .” I looked at my mother. “I gave you a stroke.”
She sighed like she was disappointed she’d given birth to such an idiot.
Exasperated, my father trumpeted, “You can’t take credit for that, boy! Your mother’s been on a blood thinner for twenty years because she’d had a minor stroke before you were born and the doctors were tryin’ to prevent another one! Sticky blood runs in her side of the family! Jesus H. Christ on a crutch, what nonsense! And this is why you stayed away?”
My temper snapped. I stood, shoving back my chair. “I stayed away because you loved Linc more than you ever loved me!”
My mother gasped. My father gaped at me. The servant silently excused himself from the room and disappeared.
“Jackson Walker Boudreaux,” said my mother in a halting, horrified whisper. She was white as a sheet. Her eyes filled with tears. “That is a terrible thing to say, and untrue!”
My father said crossly, “Well now you’ve done it. Congratulations, boy. You’ve made your mother cry.”
He went to her, took her hand and held it, crooned soothing words to her as she wept and I looked on, convinced I was in a state of shock so severe I’d had a mental break with reality.
Finally when he’d calmed her down, he pulled himself to his full height, straightened his shoulders, and let me have it.
“Now you listen to me real good, son, because I’m only gonna say this once. We love you. We love you now, we loved you then, we’ll love you until we die. You’re our son. We know we weren’t perfect parents, but you were a handful. Maybe we didn’t always know the right way to deal with you, but we never loved you less than your brother. Never. And we never blamed you for his death, either, even though I know you think we did.”
When I blinked in shock, he nodded. “That’s right. I’m not stupid. You got my blood in your veins, you think I don’t know what you’re thinkin’? But you’re a stubborn SOB—just like me. Once you get your mind set, that’s it.”
My mother made a placating noise, and he heaved a great sigh. “But it was my fault for leavin’ it alone for so long. I shoulda . . . done something. I don’t know. Made you talk to me. But gettin’ you to talk is like pullin’ teeth.”
He waved a hand in the air like he wanted to dismiss that last part. “Anyway. The bottom line is that the past is past. We’re gonna have a new daughter-in-law. It’s time we started actin’ like a family again. By the way, we love Bianca. What a firecracker. Hopefully we’ll have another grandbaby or two by this time next year.”