Jonny's Redemption (Gemini Group Book 7) by Riley Edwards (audio ebook reader TXT) 📕

so good days, she started as soon as she rolled out of bed.

It was a not so good day.

“Will you be home for your dad’s birthday?”

“Ma,” he snarled.

“I just thought you’d want to go to the cemetery with me this year. You haven’t been. I thought…maybe Caleb and Rory would like to go.”

Involuntary rage took over.

“Don’t you dare call Macy and ask her that shit.”

Jonny heard his mother’s swift inhale but he felt Bobby's presence. Just her nearness felt like a physical touch. She was getting up out of the chair, ready to come to him, comfort him. Any other time he’d welcome it, but not when he was speaking to his drunkard of a mother about his lying, cheating father. Not when the burn of their betrayal was slicing through him. He shook his head and Bobby’s step faltered but she didn’t stop her approach.

Jonny needed to get his mother off the phone with her promise that she wouldn’t reach out to his sister-in-law Macy.

“Why in the world not?”

Clueless.

“To start with, you’re halfway to sloshed. Macy doesn’t need to hear it.”

“Jona—”

“But more importantly, don’t you think Caleb and Rory have had enough hurt?”

“I’m their grandmother,” she weakly protested, not addressing her drunken state. “And Calvin was their grandfather.”

“Was he?” he snarled, losing patience.

Jonny felt Bobby’s hand on his forearm. He looked down and watched as she slowly trailed her fingertips down his arm until their palms were together and she curled her fingers around his.

“Breathe,” Bobby whispered.

Jonny did not breathe in fear he’d exhale fire.

“That’s a horrible thing to say. I don’t know what’s gotten into you.”

Of course she wouldn’t know. She was too goddamn busy drowning her sorrows, same as she’d been since Jonny was ten. Same day, over and over. Same lie. Same bullshit.

Nothing ever changed.

No, that wasn’t true; it got worse.

Apparently, the silence had stretched on too long without Jonny doing what he always did after he lost his cool with his mother, which was to apologize. And Anita, unable to endure her son’s disapproval, broke that silence. When she did, Jonny lost the loose hold he had with his mother.

“You can’t imagine how hard this has been on me.”

“I can’t, Ma? Really?”

“Jona—”

“Oh, no. You’re right. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have my husband cheat on me. But you know what I don’t need to imagine? What it feels like to know the dad I loved, the man I looked up to, the man I thought was a good, decent man—wasn’t. I also don’t need to imagine what it’s like to not only find that out, but then watch my mother who is a good, decent woman turn into an alcoholic.”

“I’m not an alcoholic,” she denied.

“It’s not even eleven in the morning,” Jonny reminded her.

Bobby squeezed his hand and anger surged.

Anger at his father, his mother, his brother, the universe.

Secrets and lies.

Neither were of Jonny’s making yet he’d been forced to play along. His father’s indiscretions had been a black stain on the family. His “adopted” brother the breathing, walking proof Calvin Spencer was a dickhead. A child the community had praised the Spencers for fostering then adopting. A child who then grew into a teenager with anger issues. A child who grew into a man who was a shit husband, shit father, and in the end a man who snapped and killed his father.

And through all of that, Anita had sunk further and further into her misery. A woman who at one time was a good mother, turned sour.

Raising your husband’s love child would do that.

Lying to your friends, your relatives, your other child would do that.

“It’s a hard week for me, Jonathan. Your father’s birthday is—”

“Just stop,” Jonny interrupted her. “The drinking didn’t start after he died. It’s just gotten worse because he’s not around to cover for you. This isn’t the first conversation we’ve had about this. It isn’t even the tenth. I’ve begged you to get help. I’ve offered to pay for it. I’ve offered to take you to New York so you could be close to your brothers and no one in Cliff City would find out. Begged, Ma. Your son has fucking begged you to get help and still you deny you have a drinking problem.”

“You shouldn’t say the f-word to your mother, Jonathan, it’s disrespectful.”

Jonny’s chin dipped and his head lulled forward.

All the anger slid clean away and in its wake leaving nothing.

No pain. No remorse. No love.

Just nothing.

How could a son feel nothing for the woman who raised him?

“Don’t call Macy,” he told her in an effort to wrap up the call. “The kids are not going to the cemetery, neither am I. You wanna go to keep up appearances you do that. You wanna go stare at the headstone of the man that betrayed you, destroyed our family, lied, and cheated you do that alone. You wake up and want help, call me. Until that happens, Ma, I’m sorry to say I’m done with this. I didn’t make this mess, but you and Dad sure did make me live it and I’m done with that, too.”

Suddenly and surprisingly, Anita no longer sounded intoxicated when she spat, “You wouldn’t dare.”

Jonny’s hand flexed in Bobby’s and tightened until he heard her whimper in pain. Christ. He tried to disengage their hands but Bobby held fast and refused to let go. The conversation needed to end. This wasn’t the way he’d wanted to ease his woman into the topic of his fucked-up family. He’d wanted time with her with no outside distractions, and that had included the past. He’d wanted a week of mellow, then on the last day before they left to go home, he would’ve told her everything. She deserved to know. But he just wanted a few days of peace, with his Bobby. Then his mother had called and blown his plans to hell.

Typical. So goddamn typical, nothing in Jonny’s life was his own. It was a series of days, months, years where he was