Read Underestimated Too for Free Online Page B

He never
turned around to look at either of us. It was almost as if he wasn’t talking to
us at all. “My mom used to tell me this story. Who does that? Why would you
ever tell your child things like that? I will never put anything like that on
Nicholas’s shoulders—ever. She told me how when my grandmother would have a
spell and have to go to the hospital her stepdad would tell her that it was her
job to take care of him while she was gone.
    My mother had to sleep in the same bed with him,
cook for him, pack his bucket, he even made her bathe him. My mother wasn’t
your average looking girl. My mother was gorgeous, mind you. She’d always been
a beautiful woman, right up to the day she died. Can you imagine telling your son
these things? She never did tell me that Carson Boyce was my father, not in so
many words, anyway. It wasn’t that hard to figure out. I mean, come on, she
told me about sleeping with the bastard. I knew why we left, I wasn’t born
yesterday. I always felt dirty, like there was something wrong with me because
of who my father was.”
     “He wasn’t blood,” I pointed out, trying to make it
better for him. He acted as though he didn’t hear me, and continued. Deidra
placed her finger over her lips, telling me not to talk.
    “I remember being on that bus for what seemed like
days. I don’t know what she was thinking. We had a paper sack with clothes and
no money. I vaguely remember sleeping in a shelter and then in the apartment
above the drugstore.”
    Drew turned and looked right at me. “I don’t know
what it’s like to eat popcorn for supper. I never had that luxury. I ate
spaghetti from a can, day after day after day. That’s what my mother made for
me: spaghetti from a can.”
    Drew hated spaghetti. That explained it.
     “My mom never worked a normal job. Her job was done
at home. She explained to me that she entertained men to pay the bills. I was
too young to know what that meant until I was around ten.”
    “What happened when you were ten, Drew?” Deidra
asked.
    Drew got quiet and stared out the window with a
lovely view of an alley full of dumpsters. “She started entertaining Michael.
Michael got her a job at the jewelry store down town, moved us to an upscale
apartment, and demanded that he was the only man she’d be entertaining from now
on.”
    “That’s when I started taking care of myself. She would
go to his house in the weekends, and I wouldn’t see her until he dropped her
back off at our door.”
    “Who stayed with you?”
    “No one. Michael insisted that I be a man and take
care of myself. This was our life until we moved in with him a short time
later, very short, like three months. Michael had taken us to a summer fest for
wedding planners. That’s when I met Randal Callaway. Randal loved my mother
from that first day. I think he really just wanted Michael to settle down and
give him a grandchild. At least with my mom, he’d sort of have a grandson,
although he never treated me that way.”
    “Is that when you moved in with him?”
    “Yes, he’d always tell my mother that he was going
to marry her, but even at ten, I knew he wasn’t going to do that. She wasn’t
the only one that entertained Michael Callaway. She was just the one that was
kept in his house.”
    “A kept woman?”
    “Yes, Michael lavished her in expensive luxuries,
and she did everything he told her to do.”
    I wanted him to stop. Drew was talking about my
father, Michael Callaway. I didn’t want to think of him this way. He was
ruining the image of the good-looking man that swept my mother off her feet. He
was supposed to be my knight in shining armor.
    “You said you started taking care of your mother
around the age of ten. What did you mean by that?” Deidra asked.
    “My mother was sick, she needed her medication. When
she didn’t have it, things happened to her, she saw things. Before we moved to
the estate, I made sure she took it religiously. Michael didn’t. He used