blame you. I’d like to know what the deal is, too.”
“So why don’t you go find out what’s up?”
Brooke glanced over her shoulder, then back at the milling crowd, her cheeks getting all splotchy. “Because I’d have no idea what to say? You’re the one who can talk to like, anybody. Me...” She shrugged.
Which was probably why she’d made Wes talk to Mom. Not that he hadn’t been thinking, too, how crappy things had gotten, with the boyfriends always coming and going, the way Mom always seemed distracted. Like she had other things she’d rather be doing than hanging out with her kids. It’d been making Wes nuts for a long time. But he hadn’t said anything to his sister because she hadn’t, and he didn’t want to upset her.
Neither of them had really thought Mom would make the choice she did. But she had. Like, without even thinking about it for two seconds.
Wes glanced across the room at Dad, talking to some dude a little older than him, maybe, standing with a couple of boys about his and Brooke’s age. Sabrina’s oldest brother, Ethan, and two of his kids, Wes remembered. Dad looked over, giving him a You okay? look. Wes nodded. Sometimes it felt like Dad cared almost too much. But after Mom? He’d take it.
He smiled, thinking about that first night after they’d come to live with Dad for good, and he’d come right out and said they’d have to be patient with him, because there was a huge difference between being the weekend parent and being the only parent, and that he honestly had no idea what he was doing. Pretty much the same thing he’d said the other night, actually, after they got back from the Colonel’s. Although why Dad thought that, Wes had no idea. Since he obviously had it together a lot better than Mom did.
Then this Sabrina person appeared...
“He says they were friends,” he said, swallowing hard. “When they were in school. No big deal.”
Brooke didn’t look convinced. “I don’t know, the way he keeps looking at her...”
“And you’ve been reading too many of those sappy books.”
“Jane Eyre is not a ‘sappy’ book, moron. And it’s better than playing those stupid video games all the time—”
“Like the ones Dad designs, you mean?”
Brooke blew out a cherry-scented sigh. “It’s just, after Mom...”
“I know. But Dad already said—”
“Oh, and like grown-ups never say whatever they think you want to hear?”
“So why wouldn’t she do the same thing?” Wes said, nodding toward Sabrina.
His sister’s mouth got all squinchy, as if maybe he had a point. But then she looked back at him with those big eyes of hers and said, “Please?”
One thing about Brooke, she never whined. Well, hardly ever. And she wasn’t now. But he could see the worry on her face, that they’d barely solved one problem and here was another one, knocking on their door. Because they’d seen it over and over, not only with Mom, but with other kids they knew with single parents—the minute a new adult appeared on the scene, the kids got shoved to the back of the line. Okay, maybe that wasn’t totally fair; he could think of a couple of times where it worked out okay.
But only a couple.
Wes glanced outside again, thinking, wouldn’t it be nice, for once, to not have to worry about the grown-up stuff? To simply be a kid? Seriously, even if they didn’t know where they were going to live after the summer yet, or go to school, things at least felt more or less normal. Finally. Because Dad...he really was there for them. Also, he was cool with being the grown-up. No matter what he said. Meaning Wes could already tell getting to live with Dad full-time was the single most awesome thing that had ever happened to them.
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