My phone trilled through my truck’s speakers, and my brother’s name lit up the digital screen on the dashboard. Without a second thought, I sent it straight to voicemail. I avoided Colton as best I could these days. When he’d chosen to sleep with Margaux, he’d made it clear how little he respected me or our relationship. I felt zero guilt for giving him the brush off.
Unfortunately, my phone rang again almost immediately. “Fucking Christ,” I muttered before seeing my youngest sister Briana’s name flash on the screen. I pressed the call accept button and waited for the call to connect through my Bluetooth system.
“Hey. What’s up?” Briana calling so soon after Colton had me on high alert. “Is everything okay?”
When she laughed, the ball of lead that had formed in the pit of my stomach disappeared. “You sound out of breath, brother o’mine. Maybe I should be asking you if everything is fine.”
“Shit, Bri. I thought there was an emergency,” I told her, flipping on my blinker.
“According to Mom, the emergency is you aren’t coming home for the holidays. I’ve been instructed to change your mind.”
“Ugh, not you too,” I said.
“Let me guess—Mackenna?”
“Yeah, she called on Saturday. Colton called, too, a minute or so ago.”
“You talked with Colton?” she asked, her voice laced with skepticism.
I snorted. “Of course not. I sent him straight to voicemail.” I would have blocked his number a long time ago, but what was the point when he so rarely made an attempt to speak to me? It wasn’t like he was blowing up my phone these days.
Given the things he’d said when his affair with Margaux had come out, you wouldn’t know that my older brother and I had once been thick as thieves. He’d changed, though, and now I hardly recognized the uptight, self-absorbed man he’d become. Honestly, it shouldn’t have surprised me when he and Margaux hooked up, as they were actually perfect for one another. Hindsight was a real bitch sometimes.
“That makes sense,” Briana mused. “I was shocked when Colton told Mom he’d call you. I suspect he was hoping you wouldn’t pick up.”
“Yeah, well …” I said, trailing off. What more was there to say? My relationship with my brother was beyond redemption at this point.
“So, what do you want me to tell her?”
“Tell who?” I asked, my thoughts still stuck on my former fiancée.
“Mom,” Briana huffed out with exasperation.
“I don’t know. Make something up.”
“Would it be so bad to come back just for the weekend?” she asked, her voice sad. “I’ll be there.”
Guilt twisted at my insides, but what was I supposed to do? Pretend like my brother’s betrayal had never happened? If our mom had her way, that was precisely what I’d do. After all, that was how she’d coped with my dad’s infidelities for years, all so she’d have the type of picture-perfect family one could brag to their friends about.
I blew out a breath. “I don’t know, Briana.”
Spending the holidays with my family was the last thing I wanted to do, but if she really needed me to be there, I might have to reconsider. Our mother had very particular ideas about what constituted a proper young woman, and my sister’s pink hair, nose ring, and arm full of tattoos were as far as you could get from it. The first time Briana cut off all her hair and refused to wear a dress for our annual family holiday portrait, we’d all thought our mom was going to have a heart attack. Two years later, when Briana announced she was gay as we’d filed back inside the house after midnight mass, Mom had literally fainted. Until I’d moved to Vermont, Briana had been the black sheep of the Kelly family, and while she liked to act as if it didn’t bother her, I knew how hard she took their censure.
“It’s okay, Preston. I get it,” she said, her voice lacking its customary warmth. “On the bright side, I won’t have to share the pumpkin pie if you’re not there. You know how I feel about pie.”
I recognized the joke for what it was: a way of masking her own feelings about spending time with our family during the holidays.
“No. If you need me there, I’ll come,” I said, regretting the words the second I spoke them.
I might loathe the idea of spending the holidays with my family, but I hated the idea of our parents’ shitty comments toward Briana even more. Last Fourth of July, our dad had straight up asked her when she thought she might grow out of ‘this phase.’
“I don’t want you to have to deal with their homophobia alone,” I told her.
“Ah, you haven’t heard, then. Turns out, I’m no longer persona non grata.”
“What?” I asked, my fog lights illuminating the road and tree line ahead.
“Drake came out to his parents a couple of weeks ago.”
“Drake Barlowe?” I couldn’t have masked my surprise even if I’d tried. If you looked him up in the dictionary, his picture would be found next to the word bro. He was the bro-iest bro that ever did bro. Finding out that the guy who’d bragged incessantly about how much pussy he got was gay was like finding out … well, I didn’t know what it was like, but it was certainly shocking.
“Yup,” my sister chuckled. “And unlike Mom and Dad, his parents are taking the news quite well. Mr. Barlowe even put up a big old rainbow flag beneath their American one.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said, maybe even more shocked by this than I’d been over Drake coming out. The Barlowes were very Republican.
“Nope,” she said, her lips popping on the p. “Of course, this means Mom’s now intent on trotting out her lesbian daughter every chance she gets. I haven’t gotten this much attention since … well … since ever, actually.”
“Ugh, I’m sorry, Bri. That sucks.” All my youngest sister had ever wanted was for our parents to accept her for who she was. That it took the unspoken, years-long competition with Mrs. Barlowe for our mother to even pretend to accept Briana’s sexuality was heartbreaking.
“It is what it is,” she said resignedly. “I may as well ride the high while it lasts.”
Not for the first time, I wished that our mom was the type of parent who would support you through life’s trials and tribulations instead of adding to them.
“Anyhow,” Bri said with false brightness. “Think about it, okay? At the very least, you’ll get to see the LGBTQ-inspired rainbow tree Mom is planning for the foyer.”
“You’re kidding!” I laughed as the truck bounced over the deep rut in the drive I kept meaning to fill with gravel. That tree alone would almost be worth the trip down to Boston.
“Alas, I am not,” she said in a tone of voice that conveyed just how little she enjoyed our mother’s new-found gay pride. “Honestly, it would be funny if it weren’t so fucking tragic.”
“Story of our lives, sis.”
She sighed. “Yeah. And don’t worry about the holidays. I understand why you don’t want to come.”
“Thanks, Bri,” I said as my headlights panned across the yard, illuminating a woman sitting alone on the farmhouse’s front steps, her head tilted back as she glugged deeply from what appeared to be a bottle of wine. “Talk soon?”
“Sure thing,” she answered as I ended the call and hopped out of my truck, padding quietly toward Rosalie so as not to startle her.
When I was still about twenty feet away, she tipped her head back for another long swallow from the bottle. Damn. She looked how I felt.
I wished I could say it was only the stuff with my family that made me want to reach for a bottle of my own, but this renovation was turning out to be more of a shitshow than I’d expected. Sure, every job had its ups and downs, but this one would go down in history as the most difficult one I’d taken on yet—and it had absolutely nothing to do with the property itself. The early eighteen hundreds antique farmhouse was a dream. The owners? Not so much. They’d blown up my phone all day wanting to switch out the slate flooring we’d installed the week before and replace it with something graphic and modern they’d seen on Pinterest yesterday.
At the beginning of this project, I’d been excited to work with the type of clients where money was no object, but this also meant they didn’t think twice about tossing out materials they’d already paid for. Costs aside, it was also a colossal waste of our time. Thankfully, I’d managed to convince them to keep the slate we’d laid in the mudroom and laundry room, but I hadn’t been able to get them to commit to keeping the master bathroom the way the original design had called for. These changes would put us at least a week behind schedule in that part of the house.
But that was a problem for tomorrow, I decided, as I felt my lips twitch to the side in a small smile as Rosalie muttered under her breath about someone needing to get bent. Not wanting to startle her, I cleared my throat to alert her to my presence.
She swiveled to face me, lowering the wine from her lips and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “You look how I feel,” she said matter-of-factly, her voice coming out surprisingly clear for someone who’d taken to drinking straight from the bottle.“Care to join me?”
I glanced back over my shoulder toward the direction of my house. The only thing waiting for me inside was a leftover bowl of mac and cheese that sounded like a terrible idea. Still, I wasn’t sure that joining Rosalie’s little wine party for one was a good idea either. Even as I weighed my options, I found myself moving closer.
“By the way, I think my mom’s in love with you,” she said, jiggling the outstretched bottle.
I stepped forward and accepted her offering, studying the label in the dim glow of the porch light. I was more of a beer guy, but I knew enough about red wine to know which ones to steer clear of to avoid a hangover. Thankfully, this was a fairly well-known brand from Napa Valley that you could get in just about any grocery or liquor store. I’d had it at least a few times before.
Without waiting for me to acknowledge her preposterous statement, Rosalie barreled onward. “I mean, I get it. You’re very attractive. And you’re very nice to her, helping out around the house and all. But you should probably know you’re way too young for her. How old are you anyway?”
When I opened my mouth to assure her nothing was going on between her mom and me, I noticed the twinkling gleam in her eye. Oh. She was kidding. “Haha,” I deadpanned. “Very funny.”
Rosalie snickered. “I thought so.” She patted the ground next to her. “Sit and stay awhile?”
What the hell, I thought with a shrug as I settled my large frame down next to her, only wincing slightly at the cold from the wooden porch leeching through my denim to freeze my ass cheeks. I took a swig from the bottle, hoping the wine would warm me up, before passing it back to her. “I’m thirty-four, by the way.”
She nodded thoughtfully, then asked, “Can I tell you a secret?”