Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 77120 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77120 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Her name is Francine Stokes, and I assume she’s still alive. She wasn’t a stripper, but she was a topless showgirl.
For some reason, I open my mouth. “My birth mother was a Vegas showgirl.”
Jason stops walking. Literally stops in the middle of the sidewalk, right in front of Rita’s coffee shop.
“What?”
“Didn’t Angie tell you? I’m only her half brother.”
He widens his eyes. “No, I don’t think she did.”
“Yeah. I mean, Marjorie adopted me and all, and she’s my mom. I don’t even remember my birth mom. When I was older, my dad told me about her.”
He scratches the side of his head. “A Las Vegas showgirl. Really?”
“Yeah. Not that I’m comparing Las Vegas showgirls to strippers or anything. I mean, noble professions, both. The ladies make good money.”
He looks down. “You don’t have to justify what you said. I get it.”
I nod. “She did perform topless, though, apparently. So there’s a little crossover. But yeah, my dad had a fling with her, and she got pregnant with me. So they got married, but then…”
“Yeah?”
I can’t help myself. I chuckle. “My dad caught her fooling around with the pizza delivery guy.”
He widens his eyes. “No shit?”
Not exactly the reaction I was expecting. “Shit,” I reply.
“That’s crazy.” He strokes his chin. “I guess I didn’t think anything of it. I mean, you look a lot like her dad, but that didn’t mean Marjorie couldn’t be your biological mother.”
“I can’t believe Angie didn’t tell you.”
“She probably doesn’t even think about the fact that you’re a half brother. She considers you her full brother.”
“Yeah, that’s how I consider her too. Same with Sage and David. But for some reason, when we were talking about strippers, I thought of my birth mother.”
“Yeah, but as you said, Vegas showgirls—”
“Apparently sleep with pizza delivery guys,” I finish for him.
He laughs at that. “At least you have a sense of humor about it.”
“It’s kind of weird,” I say. “My mom—Marjorie Simpson, that is—is my mom. I love her as much as I love my dad. But ever since…”
“Ever since what?”
“Ever since… You know…”
“Ralph?”
“Yeah.” I sigh. “Ever since Ralph, my birth mother has been on my mind.”
“Is she still alive?”
“To be honest, I have no idea. I’ve never once had the desire to look for her, and my dad and I don’t talk about her.” I sigh. “All I know is that she exists. Or existed, if she’s dead. I’ve never felt like I needed her in my life. I have a mother and a father who are awesome, who’ve given me everything.”
“What you’re feeling is normal, I think. I’m no psychiatrist…” He laughs. “In fact, a year ago, I barely acknowledged psychiatry as a legitimate medical profession. But anyway, I think sometimes when something happens in your life—something traumatic—you tend to see things in a different way.”
I look into his eyes. Jason’s eyes are a very vibrant green. Not unlike my cousin Dale’s. “I shouldn’t bother you with this. You’ve been through something much more traumatic than I ever have.”
“I won’t disagree with you there,” he says, “but I’m okay talking about it. For those three years after Julia and Lindsay died, I wasn’t really living. I was just…existing. I thought about a lot of things I hadn’t thought about in a long time.” He gazes absently down the street. “About why I became a doctor in the first place. Why I became a surgeon. I thought about the people who had died on my table. Things that I had compartmentalized before then. You kind of have to if you’re going to keep doing a job as a surgeon. But when I couldn’t cut anymore, things came back to the surface. I kept thinking about how I had deprived someone of a child, a wife, a husband. It almost felt like losing Julia and Lindsay was this karmic retribution.” His lip trembles slightly, but he steadies it. “It was… It was a hard three years. It’s still hard. But meeting your sister has changed me.”
“Yeah. She told me you didn’t think much of her chosen field.”
He sighs. “For a long time, I didn’t. I didn’t feel that psychiatry ever helped me, and I sure as hell didn’t see how it helped Lindsay, because as far as I knew, she ended up taking her own life.”
“Yeah.”
“Turns out—though, I guess we’ll never know for sure—that she probably didn’t take her own life. In fact, she never seemed suicidal to me. She was devastated, of course. Didn’t talk a whole lot. But she got up every morning, did her chores. She hadn’t gone back to work yet.”
“Right. It’s not as if she’d return to normal immediately. Those things take time.”
“Yeah. Losing our little girl killed her. Killed me too. But we were both trying. And things seemed to be getting slightly better. Which made her suicide all the more odd. So when I finally found out the truth about Ralph, it made me wonder. Maybe we just didn’t give psychiatry enough time. Maybe it could have helped her.”