Montana Mornings (The Wildes of Birch Bay Book 3) Page 21

  “It was, actually. So good that I signed up for another this morning.” She broke eye contact as she added, “It’s not until next month, though.”

  At her words, he almost leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. Erica’s contract would be up by next month. She’d just said that she really did plan to stay.

  The three of them took their seats—Erica across from Gabe, and Jenna on the end between them—and Gabe found himself truly enjoying a meal with his daughter. It had been too long since that had happened. She laughed, was personable, and darned if she didn’t seem to bubble over with happiness. Erica was so good for her that he couldn’t help but believe that he and Erica being together would only continue to improve things.

  As the meal wound down and Jenna and Erica talked softly between themselves, discussing the ingredients used in each type of roll, Gabe let himself relax back into his seat and soak in the moment. He wouldn’t trade this for anything.

  “And what about this one?” Erica asked. She used her new chopsticks to dip a roll into one of the sauces she’d made, and held it out for Jenna. “Do you like this ginger sauce that I made better”—she narrowed her gaze, teasing with her eyes—“or the tempura sauce I bought from the store?”

  Jenna snickered as she attempted to pull a serious face. She ate the sushi, dipping it into each sauce, one at a time, then stated her decision matter-of-factly. “I like the store-bought one the best.”

  His daughter howled with laughter at the mock outrage on Erica’s face before admitting that she was joking. “I like yours the best, Ms. Bird. It’s a hundred times better.” She grew quiet for a moment as she picked at a few pieces of rice that had spilled onto her plate, then she tilted her head and stared up at Erica. “Did you know that my momma taught me to like sushi rolls? And she also likes ginger sauce.”

  Gabe tried not to tense, but his relaxed state immediately dissipated. Jenna had brought her mother into the conversation several times over the last week.

  “And when did she teach you to like sushi?” Erica asked.

  “When we lived in California. Momma loved going to Japanese restaurants, and they had a lot of them, so we went all the time. We had so much fun.”

  “Did you have a favorite type of sushi roll? Maybe I can make it for you next time.”

  “I liked two of them the best. The same ones as my momma. We liked the—”

  “Can we talk about something else?” Gabe bit out.

  Both females whipped their heads around at his outburst, but he didn’t back down. Jenna’s growing need to paint Michelle in a happy light wasn’t healthy. “Surely there’s some other topic—”

  “You never let me talk about her,” Jenna suddenly shouted.

  “Jenna.”

  “And you won’t let me see her, either! And I know she wanted to. I heard you tell Uncle Cord.”

  Dismay settled in his gut. She’d heard that? The look in Erica’s eyes let him know what she currently thought of him, too.

  “Maybe we should go.” He pushed back from the table, but Erica shot a finger out toward him.

  “Stay,” she gritted out. Then she leaned toward his daughter, and somehow, her demeanor flipped. She motioned to the other side of the room, an easy smile on her face. “Did you know that pole over there comes out upstairs in my bedroom?” she said to Jenna. “And that you can actually slide down it?”

  Jenna turned to take in the pole, and without waiting to see if she’d ask, Erica added, “Would you like to try it out?”

  Instead of agreeing, Jenna looked back at him. The anger in her eyes had turned to full-fledged hatred, and he found himself at a loss as to what to say next. What could he possibly say? His carelessness had set them back months. He should never have said anything to Cord.

  “I’d like to talk to your dad for a minute, Jenna. Could you please play while we do that?”

  Gabe watched as Jenna finally got up from her seat. She didn’t so much as glance his way as she headed for the stairs, and the second her feet sounded overhead, he forced himself to turn back to the other side of the table. Erica had not lost her disgust with him.

  “You don’t understand,” he said.

  “Then explain it to me.”

  Where did he even begin? “Her mother cares about no one but herself. She never has.”

  Jenna slipped down the pole, and without asking, headed back up the stairs.

  Gabe returned his attention to Erica and lowered his voice. “Especially not Jenna.”

  “And why is that?”

  He shook his head. “Because that’s who she is. There is no ‘why,’ she just is.”

  “Yet surely she loves her daughter. And clearly she wants to see her daughter.”

  Jenna came spiraling down the pole again, this time with a hint more animation, and Gabe bit down on the inside of his cheek until she left the room, then he leaned over the table. “Let this one go, Erica. It’s out of your jurisdiction.”

  Erica stuck out her chin, the action almost identical to one of his daughter’s favorite moves. “My jurisdiction is not only all the kids in my class, but the child of the man I’m supposedly dating,” she hissed. “And I’m not about to apologize for worrying about your daughter’s well-being. Why isn’t she seeing her mother? Why isn’t she talking to her? Why has it been months since she’s seen her?”

  He sat back at the last question. Clearly, Erica had been talking to someone other than him.

  “Jenna tell you that?” he asked. “Or was it my brother?” And then he got it. “Dani.”

  His sister talked to Jenna a lot. It wouldn’t surprise him to find out that she’d been using those conversations to mine for information.

  “Leave your sister out of this. She’s as worried about Jenna as I am.”

  “Yet neither of you need to bother.”

  “Why hasn’t Jenna talked to her mother in months?” she asked again.

  “Why hasn’t her mother talked to her?” he shot back. “I never told her not to call.”

  Some of the steam seemed to leave her. “Does that mean you did tell her not to see her?”

  Exasperation rose when he saw that she didn’t plan to back down on this, and he shoved back his chair. “Outside.”

  Erica followed, waiting to join him on the porch until Jenna had slid down another time. He could hear her inside, explaining that she and he needed to have a grown-up conversation, and that Jenna was welcome to keep sliding all she wanted.

  Then she stepped outside, softly closed the door, and looked down her nose at him.

  “Do not judge me,” he said. “You don’t know anything about what Jenna’s life was like before.”

  “Well, I would if you’d tell me.” She drew in a breath, making an obvious effort to get herself under control. “I may not have all the details, but I know something about what that child is going through, Gabe. She’s hurting. Surely you can see that. She’s improving, yes, but her issues are still there. She feels rejected, she’s alone. She has to be wondering if her mother doesn’t love her anymore. And I’d venture a guess that she’s blaming herself for all of it.”

  He swallowed.

  “What happened? Why would you make her mother stay away?”

  “Michelle was never a good mother to begin with, I told you that.”

  “Yes, and that’s all you’ve told me. Not a good mother. Not a good wife. She walked all over you.” She repeated the words he’d once said to her. “Are you sure your issue with Michelle isn’t more about you and your hurt feelings than about protecting your daughter?”

  Fury rolled through him.

  “Given the fact that I’ve never known you to be an unreasonable man,” she continued before he could get in another word, “I suspect there’s more to the story. But what I can’t figure out is what. How can any mother possibly be that bad?”

  “Be glad you don’t understand how a mother can be that bad.” His words were menacing, but he didn’t try to temper them. Instead,
he let his frustration mount. “Go back to Dani and ask for details about growing up a child of a narcissistic mother, why don’t you? About how your own flesh and blood will manipulate you any and every time an ounce of attention might be placed on you instead of on her. About how she’ll pit you against your siblings, ensuring that she’s the center of your world—while at the same time, the center of your world is sucking the very life out of you. Talk to her,” he roared. “Then you might start to get a clue. It’s not pretty. Not every mother gives a shit about her kids, and that’s just the facts. My mother hated all of us. And trust me when I say it can have lifelong effects on a person. So no.” He shook his head, his rage in full steam. “I will not have that happening to my daughter. Not on my watch. And I won’t apologize for it, either.”

  A bit of Erica’s anger had evaporated as his increased, and she looked from him to her front door then back to him. “Narcissistic?” she asked. “Michelle is, too?”

  “At least she isn’t as bad as my mother. I’ll give her that much.”

  “Okay.” Erica nodded, and Gabe could see the wheels turning in her head, still trying to “fix” the situation. Still determined it could be made right. “It was a bad environment for Jenna to live in. I get that. But that still doesn’t mean she shouldn’t see her mother on occasion. How did you get a judge to grant that?” She pulled in a sharp breath before adding, “Or are you simply ignoring court orders?”

  Gabe stared in through the wide window framing Erica’s living room, wondering how the afternoon had gone downhill so quickly. This was not the conversation he’d wanted to have. He never wanted to talk about his marriage. How he’d stood around for years ignoring the fact that being around Michelle was damaging his daughter. How he’d almost let that go too far.

  But when he brought his gaze back to Erica’s, he recognized that if he wanted them to go beyond this moment, then it was a conversation he had to have.

  He muttered a curse, and called upon a patience he wasn’t sure he’d ever had.

  “I brought up divorce late last summer,” he started slowly. “Right before school started. We’d been fighting, all three of us were tense every minute of the day. I was tired of it. Jenna hid in her room most days, her mother had nothing to do with her, or if she did, more times than not it left her in tears. Divorce seemed like the path we needed to take. Only, Michelle convinced me otherwise.”

  He dragged a hand down over his face at his gullibility.

  “She spent the next few months showing how she could change. It wasn’t perfect, but I could see her trying. We started doing more things together—like going out for sushi every week. And she started paying more attention to Jenna.” He stared at the sky so he wouldn’t have to see her when he admitted the real kicker. “She even convinced me to try for another baby.”

  He still couldn’t believe he’d fallen for that one, but thank goodness it hadn’t happened.

  “Then Christmas came.” He looked back at Erica. “Everything had been going great for months, but Michelle didn’t want to come to Montana with us. She wanted to go see her mom. Or so she said. But she promised Jenna they’d do something special when we returned. Just the two of them. Only . . .”

  Only, his wife was a selfish, self-centered bitch.

  He sighed, his own anger beginning to lift, and finished in a monotone. “When we got home after the holidays, Michelle was gone. No good-bye to Jenna, no note, no call. Just gone. Her clothes, her jewelry. She’d moved out.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she could.” His ex’s irrationality had never made sense to him, but if she could hurt either him or Jenna, then Michelle seemed to do it. “She doesn’t care, Erica. I’m not making that up. She thinks of no one but herself. I found out that she’d spent the holidays and the week after on her boyfriend’s new yacht, and I did what I should have done years ago. I filed for divorce.”

  He could see that she was starting to get the gist of his ex-wife.

  She wet her lips. “So Michelle just disappeared? She gave you custody? No visitation?”

  “Oh, no. Things are never that simple with my wife. Michelle came back from her trip bearing gifts for Jenna—mad, I might add, when she found out that I’d filed and she no longer had a place to live—and promptly turned back into the doting mother.”

  “So Jenna did go to see her?”

  “Until late February. That’s when I found out that one of the teens in the apartment building where Michelle had rented was doing most of the visiting with my daughter. Typically, Michelle stayed gone until late in the night, leaving Jenna in the care of a fourteen-year-old. Only, this time, Michelle didn’t return, and the teen went home.”

  “What?”

  He nodded. “Midnight came, and it was time for her to be home. Jenna was in bed, so she didn’t see the harm.”

  “Your daughter was left in the apartment all alone?”

  “At six years old, yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “She woke up sometime during the night, and when she couldn’t find anyone else there she called me.”

  “But she was okay?”

  “Scared, but yes. She was fine. She’s been able to fend for herself for a long time.”

  He saw the additional questions at the statement, but he didn’t go into the fact that he’d once been a bad parent, too. Not bad in the way that Michelle was, but bad in that he’d sat back and let his sister see to his kid more than he had. Dani had lived at the farm with them before he and Michelle had moved away. She’d come home from college years earlier when their mother had died, and had stuck around to finish raising their brothers. So when Jenna had come along, it had been easier to let Dani do her thing than to be in the house and around Michelle every day. He’d spent his days on the farm or out running errands. Exactly as his dad had once done.

  “Why hadn’t Michelle come back that night?”

  He could see Erica’s chest rising and falling with her breaths. “That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Or more like, the million-dollar ring.”

  Confusion darted through her eyes before she got it. “The boyfriend?”

  “Right in one. They’d gotten engaged that evening, and she simply couldn’t run home and leave him after that.”

  “I didn’t realize she’d cheated on you, too.” Her words came out strangely calm.

  “Neither did I until I got home from Christmas, but that was the least of my concerns, wouldn’t you say? In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he wasn’t her first.” The sad thing was, discovering his wife had cheated had barely fazed him at that point. They’d not only had a bad marriage for years, but since the day he’d announced he was returning to school, she’d made fun of him for his new career choice. It wasn’t high-class enough for her. “I stayed until she returned the next morning, and then we had a real argument.”

  “Did it scare Jenna?”

  “It scared everyone. Someone across the hall ended up calling the police, and the minute they knocked on the door, Michelle tried out a new routine. That of scared ex-wife.”

  Horror crossed her face. “She said you’d hit her?”

  “She claimed utter terror that I would—since she could produce no physical proof that I had.”

  “But you told them what you were arguing about? That she’d left Jenna there alone?”

  Humiliation burned through him as he shook his head. “No.” He tried not to picture that day in his head, but the images wouldn’t go away. “They had cuffs slapped on me before I could begin to tell my side of the story. Jenna was curled up in the corner, crying her eyes out at that point, and Michelle went over and huddled on the floor with her. I looked guilty as sin.”

  “So they took you to jail?”

  He leaned back against the pillar of her porch, ready to get the story over with. “They took me to the police car outside, but before they could pull away, Michelle came out. I have no idea what she said to them, but knowing
her and how she hates to cause a public scene, she didn’t want it getting out that I’d been hauled to the police station. The next thing I know, I’m uncuffed and out of the car. Michelle is smiling as if she’s Mother Teresa and just done the world a favor, and once again, my daughter is upstairs, left alone in the apartment.

  “I got Jenna,” he continued. “And I swore to Michelle that if she ever so much as tried to see our daughter again, I’d go to the judge and claim abandonment. And as I said, she doesn’t like public scenes.”

  “So she just disappeared?”

  “She just disappeared.” He watched Jenna through the window. She’d quit sliding, and had sat on the couch. She picked up a magazine lying open on one of the cushions, but didn’t look at it. She just sat there. “After I calmed down, I had my lawyer let Michelle know that I’d be open to her talking to Jenna on the phone. I even offered supervised visitation.” He looked back at Erica. “I’m not evil. It would have been better to wean Jenna off her mother more slowly before we moved away. But at the same time, I’m not sorry for the way it happened. Michelle plays mental games, and Jenna doesn’t need that in her life.”

  “Gabe.” The word was little more than a whisper, and he could tell she wanted to reach out to him. But he stood his ground.

  “Don’t feel sorry for me, Erica. I chose her, remember? I dumped you for her.”

  “You were a stupid kid.”

  He chuckled dryly. “I was a stupid adult.”

  “Maybe so, but I’m still sorry.”

  They both looked at Jenna again. “Have you talked to her about it?” she asked. “About her mom at all?”

  Gabe shook his head. She’d lived it. He saw no need to keep rehashing it.

  “What about . . .” Erica paused, and from the look in her eyes, he could already guess that he wouldn’t like how her question would end. “Have you ever considered letting Jenna make the decision to see her mother or not? I mean, if Michelle is calling again.”

  Anger swelled once again. “Did you not hear what I just told you? Michelle can’t be trusted to care for our daughter. So no, I have not considered giving Jenna any say in the matter. I handled it. I’m still handling it. And I wouldn’t change anything about how it happened.”