“No, ma’am,” I said quietly. “I didn’t.”
“She didn’t,” Josh said. “It was my decision too. And I’m the one telling you.”
“I’ve told everybody about that cruise! The whole beauty shop! Darlene! Carol! The ladies from church! What am I supposed to tell them now?”
“Tell them the truth,” Josh said. “Tell them you pushed a sixty-eight-year-old man into a pond, his hearing aids cost forty-one hundred dollars, and your son paid to replace them.”
Cindy stared at him.
“I bought clothes,” she said, and her voice cracked. “I bought three sundresses and a cover-up and a hat. On my Dillard’s card. Six hundred dollars.”
“Then you can return them,” Josh said. “Or you can keep them and pay for them yourself, Mom. Like the rest of us do.”
For a long moment, nobody said anything. The wind chimes on the porch tinkled in the breeze. One of the ceramic geese had fallen over in the flower bed.
Then Cindy did what she always does when she’s losing. She cried.
It wasn’t quiet crying. It was big, loud, heaving sobs, standing in her gravel driveway in a turquoise sundress.
“I can’t believe this,” she wailed. “My own son. On my sixtieth birthday. Choosing her family over his own mother. After everything I’ve done for you, Josh. After I raised you all by myself after your daddy left!”
I felt Josh’s hand twitch. I reached over and squeezed it.
He didn’t back down.
“Mom. I love you,” he said. “But you need to hear this. Two years ago, I co-signed your car loan. You missed three payments, and I paid them. Fourteen hundred and sixty-seven dollars. I never said a word about it. At my wedding, you gave an eleven-minute toast about yourself. At Thanksgiving, you made fun of Leon for not hearing you. And last Saturday, you pushed him into a pond and laughed while he stood there in the water, scared to death, patting his ears.”
Cindy stopped crying. She stared at him with her mouth open.
