Read Heaven Should Fall for Free Online Page B

rainbows and snuggle sex for the two of you. I’ve been on the campaign trail with him, and I know a little different. Let me tell you, Jill. You don’t know a guy until you’ve seen him under pressure. Cade’s like everybody else. He only cares about one thing.” He held up a single finger.
    “That’s the stupidest cliché ever.”
    “Not sex,” said Drew. “Recognition.”
    I hurried back to Cade’s room, dressed quickly and headed back across campus to my own dorm. The sidewalks were deserted. I thought of Cade sitting around his living room with his parents, his brother and sister, and seethed at both him and Drew. Here I was alone on Christmas Eve, hurrying away from the leering creep to whom I had afforded benefit of the doubt, all because Cade wanted to avoid the embarrassment of me meeting his brother-in-law. My messenger bag beat against the side of my coat, and I breathed into my hands to warm them. I knew what would sneak in just behind this anger: self-pity. That was how I would spend Christmas, and the next year I would dread the holidays all the more, remembering how miserable this one had been.
    It doesn’t have to be that way, I thought. I jogged up the steps to my building, tossed a few things into my overnight bag, tugged on the hoodie Dave had just mailed back to me and headed out to my car. I thought about calling him, but it was late already and I didn’t want him to feel he needed to wait up for me. I had a full tank of gas and a key to my old cabin, and I would find him in the morning. He wouldn’t mind. Dave never did.
    * * *
    In the few photos I have of my mother and me together, it’s easy to see we don’t resemble each other at all. She was fairly tall, with honey-blond hair that kinked into unmanageable curls when the weather grew the least bit humid. Despite her coloring, she had an Italian face—a regal nose and long eyes, a smile that appeared to store a secret. Sometimes I wondered if she had hoped for a miniature version of herself, rather than the baby daughter she received—one destined to be fine haired and button nosed, with eyes so round as to seem perpetually surprised. Even as a teenager she had looked like a woman, while long into college I still had to pull out my driver’s license to be allowed into R-rated movies.
    She never voiced the truth we both knew: that I looked like my father. It had to be true, because I resembled her family not at all, and yet she would never tell me who he was. Around the age of eight I entered a stage of nagging her with questions: what was his name, his job, where did he live, did he know about me. She brushed them off or changed the subject, until finally, when I was twelve and began asking again, she gave me her first sort-of answer.
    “If you want to know the truth, Jill,” she said, using that wry monotone that never meant anything good, “I wasn’t in a very good place when I found out I was going to have you. And once I knew you’d be joining me, I wasn’t about to go back to that place to see if anybody wanted to tag along.”
    I understood her meaning—that she had abandoned him, not the other way around. I stopped asking her after that; I knew enough about addicts by then to grasp that whoever he was, wherever he was, he was sure to disappoint me. And it had to be bad for him, because my mother was not one to assume someone was beyond hope. Padding around in her panty hose, her curly hair up in a messy bun from a long day at the office, she would pull the extra-long phone cord into the one bedroom and shut the door when one of the women she sponsored in AA called. If the call went on for a long time I would turn out the lights, make up the futon and try to sleep. Always I would overhear her calming and definite voice, and even though I knew she was handling a crisis—someone’s sobriety on the brink of failure—the sound of it would lull me easily to sleep. She was a sure guide, knowing the route through every