Read Second Chance With the Rebel: Her Royal Wedding Wish for Free Online Page B

wouldn’t be that easy.
    “I look well. You look terrible.” She gave his freezing, naked
torso a hard pinch. “No meat on your bones. Eating in restaurants. I can tell by
your coloring.”
    He thought his coloring might be off because he had just had a
pretty good dunking in some freezing water, but he knew from long experience
that there was no telling Mama.
    They approached the back of her house. The porch door was
choked with overgrown lilacs, drooping with heavy buds. Mac pushed aside some
branches and opened the screen door. It squeaked outrageously. He could see the
floorboards of her screened porch were as rotten as her dock.
    He frowned at the attempt at a repair. Had she hired some
haphazard handyman?
    “Who did this?” he said, toeing the new board.
    “Lucy,” she said, eyeing the disastrous repair with pride.
“Lucy helps me with lots of things around here.”
    His frown deepened. Somehow that was a Lucy he could never have
imagined, nails between teeth, pounding in boards.
    Though Mama had said nothing, he had suspected for some time
the house was becoming too much for her, and this confirmed it.
    “You should come to Toronto with me,” he said. It was his
opening move. In his bag he had brochures of Toronto’s most upscale retirement
home.
    “Toronto, schmonto. No, you should move back here. That big
city is no place for a boy like you.”
    “I’m not a boy anymore, Mama.”
    “You will always be my boy.”
    He regarded her warmly, searching her face for any sign of
illness. She was unchanging. She had seemed old when he had first met her, and
she really had never seemed to get any older. There was a sameness about her in
a changing world that had been a touchstone.
    Why hadn’t she told him she had lost her license?
    She was going to be eighty years old three days before Mother’s
Day. He held open the inside door for her, and they stepped through into her
kitchen.
    It, too, was showing signs of benign neglect: paint chipping
from the cabinets, a door not closing properly, the old linoleum tiles beginning
to curl. There was a towel tied tightly around a faucet, and he went and
looked.
    An attempted repair of a leak.
    “Lucy’s work?” he guessed.
    “Yes.”
    Again, the Lucy he didn’t know. “You just have to tell me these
things,” he said. “I would have paid for the plumber.”
    “You pay for enough already.”
    He turned to look at Mama, and without warning he was fourteen
years old again, standing in this kitchen for the first time.
    Harriet Freda’s had been his fifth foster home in as many
months, and despite the fact this one had a prime lakeshore location, from the
outside the house seemed even smaller and dumpier and darker than all the other
foster homes had been.
    Maybe, he had thought, already cynical, they just sent you to
worse and worse places.
    The house would have seemed beyond humble in any setting, but
surrounded by the magnificent lake houses, it was painfully shacklike and out of
place on the shores of Sunshine Lake.
    That morning, standing in a kitchen that cheerfully belied the
outside of the house, Mac had been fourteen and terrified. That had been his
first lesson since the death of his father: never let the terror show.
    She had been introduced to him as Mama Freda, and she looked
stocky and ancient. Her hair was a bluish-white color and frizzy with a bad
perm. She had more wrinkles than a Shar-Pei. Mac thought she was way too old to
be looking after other people’s kids.
    Still, she looked harmless enough, standing at her kitchen
table in a frumpy dress that showed off her chunky build, thick arms and legs,
ankles swollen above sensible shoes. She had been wearing a much-bleached apron,
once white, aged to tea-dipped, and covered with faded blotches of berry and
chocolate.
    The niceties were over, the social worker was gone and he was
standing there with a paper bag containing two T-shirts, one pair of jeans and a
change of underwear. Mrs. Freda cast him a