Page 29 of A Return For Ren

“How are things with Zara?” she asked.

He should have figured his mother would get right to the point. “Awkward.” He debated a few minutes and decided to let his mother know about dinner. “I asked her to come over Thursday night. I wanted to talk. I wanted to clear the air. She is watching my son and...”

“Don’t tell me you think she is taking any anger out on you on Max,” his mother scolded him. “Zara is a lovely woman and would never do that.”

“I don’t think it. I don’t know what I think anymore.”

“Why did you do what you did?” she asked. “I thought you two were so in love. Zara was such a sweet girl.”

“She was,” he said. “She still is. We wanted different things in our life. We are both where we thought we’d be.”

No reason to tell his mother about the final fight with his father. It was in the past and she didn’t need to know. It was more of the same but it just was the final straw for him. He didn’t want to relive it and be told he was too much of a hothead back then when it came to his father.

Things his mother witnessed. That she had to jump in and calm them both down. It drove him insane how his father always told him he was disrespectful when he dared to stand up for himself. As if being under eighteen meant he had no voice. That he just had to take the shit dealt to him and do what he was told.

Maybe if his father hadn’t been such an ass for so many years, he wouldn’t have detested being here.

“You figured you’d be raising a child on your own?” his mother asked. “One that you couldn’t even tell me about? That you couldn’t ask for help? That is where you saw yourself?”

He knew a burn when he heard it. “No. Where we live. She came back here and I couldn’t.”

He’d said it more than once that he couldn’t come back to this. That he’d hoped the distance in college that first year would have helped and it didn’t. The memories of his childhood living in Mystic just beat him down so much. He was out to prove he could be something anywhere other than here.

When he came back it was as if the fire in his father burned stronger with the insistence that he stay and help out. That his education was a waste and did he think it was right his mother was working so hard to pay for it.

He’d once told his mother to stop working that hard. He’d get a loan. He couldn’t take it anymore. He didn’t want that guilt on his shoulders.

She’d told him she wasn’t working more and that was just Ryan trying to make him feel guilty, not to worry. The problem was, he thought she was lying no matter how many times he asked her to tell him the truth. He wasn’t sure which one of his parents to believe, but since his father treated him like shit, he decided to go with his mother.

He’d like to believe he’d know if she was overdoing it and he’d never seen that. That maybe that conversation he’d overheard with his mother saying she’d work more to pay for it was her way of making his father feel like crap?

He could barely handle his own relationship with his father, the last thing he was going to do was try to figure out his parents’ marriage.

“I understand. I’m sorry for that. Your father wasn’t an easy man. I want to say he mellowed over the years, but it was more like the last few days before he died. After his stroke.”

Ren frowned. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing,” she said, putting Max on the floor in front of the toys that she’d bought.

“If it was nothing you wouldn’t have brought it up.”

“I think your father had regrets. Your name came up a few times. He asked how you were doing. If you were happy in life.”

Ren snorted. He was almost wishing he hadn’t been told this. “It took nearly dying for him to ask you about me? If he wanted to know he could have called me or reached out.”

“Would you have taken his call, Ren?” she asked softly. He didn’t answer her. “That is what I thought. You’re both too stubborn for your own good. Your father was wrong. There is no doubt there. I’m not making excuses for him. I’m saying that I believe he had regrets.”

“Which means nothing now,” he said firmly.

He walked over and saw a toy in the corner. One of his. An old wooden boat his father had given him. He remembered it now. All the toys that came from his father were boat or water related.

As a kid he thought it was great. When he got older, he wondered if it was priming him to take over. Maybe subliminal messages? Or was it merely what his father liked? Who knew?

What he’d wanted was the man that sat with him by the water as a kid and taught him how to fish and swim.

Not the one that yelled at him for falling in and making him cry. But the one that spent weeks standing in the water out by the docks at his house holding him up to make sure he wouldn’t drown if he fell in again.

That was the man he wanted and the one he never saw much of.