Younger brother? My father has a brother? I have an uncle? How the hell did I not know this? My mind spun, and I blinked several times.
“You see, we came from a shitty neighborhood. From the slums. You could easily describe it as a slum part of New York City. We barely even had electricity or warm water, because we couldn’t pay for it. We’d eat canned food that we could get from the community church or the food banks. That night, my family barely even had food to feed ourselves. My mother turned Brad away. After my parents went to sleep, I sneaked out of my room and went over to his house. I brought him two slices of bread. He broke down and cried. He was fourteen, I was eleven. He quickly fed his brother and only took two bites himself. I learned that they hadn’t had any food for two whole days.”
My mother paused, as I sunk to the floor, my legs suddenly feeling weak. I wanted to call her a liar, but I could hear the truth in her words, the rawness in her voice. This was real. My parents were poor… and I never knew. They never told me anything about their pasts or their childhoods. We never… talked.
I sat on my ass and stared at my parents, finally realizing that they were truly strangers to me.
My mother made a choking sound. “For four years, I’d sneak food to him. We were both poor, but I had parents who were still trying to get food on our table. Brad didn’t. His mother was a drug addict and alcoholic. The little money Brad saved up from working part-time at the church, his mother would steal for drugs. When he was eighteen, he left home with his little brother.”
“We were homeless,” my father broke in, with a whisper, his voice cracking. “For months, we lived on the streets, under a bridge with other homeless people. We were…starving. I was …desperate. I stole a man’s wallet… and I was…caught. Was thrown in jail for a night. It rained that night. My brother…was… alone under the bridge. He walked in the rain for hours, looking for me.”
He took a deep breath and paused with a cough. I was glad I was sitting down when my mother continued. “Your father’s brother… your uncle… he caught pneumonia.”
“He didn’t… make it,” I whispered, already knowing where this was going. If I had an uncle and my father never spoke of him, then it only meant one thing.
She nodded. “I used to sneak away from home to go meet your father. You see, we had a dream. We wanted a future together. We worked the cheapest job we could get. I waitressed. Brad worked at a mechanic shop. At twenty, he finally finished his high school diploma. Then came university. We could barely afford it.” My mother paused, sniffling. “Those days were the hardest, but it paid off.”
Her head fell into her hands, and she cried. “Savannah…” I heard him whisper.
My father picked up, in his weak voice. “We were finally able to buy an apartment, the cheapest one we could… afford, but it was ours. Life… got… better. We were no longer homeless or starving. I got a job, one that paid the rent and put enough food on the table. We lived paycheck to paycheck, but everything was…okay. Life… was good. When your mother found out she was pregnant with you…”
“That was the happiest day of our lives, Maddox,” my mother whimpered. “The happiest. Truly, the happiest. The best day.”
I wanted to call her a liar. All my life, they made me feel unwanted. I had been a mistake… yet, here they were, telling me that I was loved, before I was even born.
Bullshit.
But I stayed silent and listened. Because it was all I could do. I was stuck in this moment, their voices echoing in my ears, their past flashing in front of my eyes. I was… numb and then I was… feeling too much.
“For six years, we had everything we wanted. Sure, we weren’t rich. We still struggled. But whatever we had, it was enough. Then, life… it… knocked us down... again.”
“What?” My voice deepened, a ball of emotions settling itself at the base of my throat. “What happened?”
“You were five when I was diagnosed with colon cancer,” my father said.
I covered my mouth, then rubbed a palm over my face. Fuck. No. This isn’t… this couldn’t be real.
“I’m out of here,” I growled, pushing to my feet.
“Please,” she whispered, so brokenly, I… just… couldn’t. Walk. Away.
“Colon cancer is one of the easiest diseases to detect, and since we discovered it, at the earliest stage, it was curable,” my father offered. “But that was a reality check for us, son.”
He coughed in his fist once and then rubbed his chest, as if it pained him. The expression of his face was one of sorrow. And shame. “It was then I realized that if something were to ever happen to me… I would leave a wife and son, without any savings. A mortgage, student loans and nothing else. Your mother, she never finished high school. She worked to put me in university. She worked, so I could have a degree, and if I had died… your mother and you would have been left with nothing.”
“When we left the slums behind… we promised to never go back to it,” my mother cut in. “Never go back to being that poor.”
Brad Coulter closed his eyes with a heavy sigh. “I became obsessed, Maddox. So… fucking… obsessed.”
“Brad kept saying he wanted what was best for us. And so, he worked. He never stopped working. Never stopped to even take a deep breath. And he climbed up the ladder,” she took a shuddering breath, “he went from an office clerk, to a lawyer, to a senior associate, to a business partner, then a law partner, a business owner… he kept climbing that ladder, like an obsessed man.”
I shivered, feeling too hot and then too cold. My skin burned, my head ached, my chest… goddamn it, it was being carved open. That shit didn’t just hurt. It fucking killed me.
My father… he opened his eyes, and there were tears in them. Real fucking tears. Tears I never saw before. “Years passed, I didn’t notice. Years passed, I went from a man who lived from paycheck to paycheck, to a man who could have anything he wanted with a snap of his fingers. I had everything, but it was too late when I realized that, in chasing financial security, in becoming obsessed with being wealthy, I forgot… about you. Even though, you were the reason I had done everything I did.”
“Am I supposed to pity you?” I finally growled, cutting into their little story. “Am I supposed to feel bad?”
They both flinched at my cruel words. Yeah, good. Fuck this. Fuck them.
“While Father Dearest was chasing after wealth, what were you were doing, Mom?” I spat out, turning toward Savannah Coulter. “Chasing after your husband?”
She had the audacity to look ashamed. “I feared losing him. After his experience with cancer… it was the one thing that haunted me. I couldn’t… I didn’t know how to cope.”
“Does that excuse make you sleep better at night?”
“No.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t.”
“Do you regret it?” I hissed, anger churning in the pit of my stomach. “If you could go back and change things, would you do it?”
My mother’s tears-strained cheeks flushed even more, and she looked away, but not before I caught the flash of pain and guilt on her face. “If I could… I would have changed how things were. I was a good wife, but I couldn’t be a good mother.”