Kiss Mommy Goodbye by Joy Fielding Read Free Book Online Page A

to Donna for a glimmer of understanding. He saw only puzzlement, a slight furrowing of her eyebrows. “It was like—like she threw all her support behind the woman who’d made my life miserable for two years. Maybe I’m not explaining it right, I don’t know, but I felt, I really felt, betrayed. Yes, betrayed. That’s the word. I just couldn’t stand that the two of them should stay friends. It was over with Janine and me. I wanted her out of my life.” His voice grew more intense with each recollection. “Finally, I offered my mother the choice. Janine or me—her son.” He shook his head. “It may sound pettyor childish now, I don’t know. But it was something that was very important to me at the time, and that’s the main thing. Not how important or trivial it was to anyone else, but how much it meant to me.” He stopped again, finding it increasingly difficult to persist. “I—uh—I told my mother how I felt; I told her I thought her choice was clear, but—well, it wasn’t even that she chose wrongly, it was—” He stopped for a full second then continued. “She hesitated.” He stopped again, obviously still unable to grasp the psychology behind what had taken place. “I offered her a choice between her own son and someone who’d come into her life only two years before, and she hesitated. So I said that as far as I was concerned, she had obviously made her choice; there was nothing more for either of us to say, and that I would clear out of her life. And I did. I quit my job; I packed my bags and I moved to Florida.” He looked lovingly at Donna. “Close your mouth,” he said gently. “A bee will fly in.”
    She ignored his attempt at levity. “You just picked up and left everything,” she said amazed.
    “I left nothing,” he said. “Not everything. There was nothing there to leave.”
    “You haven’t seen your mother since?” He shook his head. “Does she know where you are?”
    “She knows.”
    “And?”
    “Nothing,” he said. “She’s phoned a few times, but I have nothing to say to her.”
    “After all this time?”
    “Some hurts don’t die.”
    “Mothers do,” Donna said flatly. “Is what she did really so unforgivable?”
    Victor shook his head in bewilderment. “I thought so,” he said. “Maybe I’m wrong. I just know I’m still not ready to see her again.” He sat down beside Donna. “I know that it was never my intention to lie to you. When I told you she was dead, I had no idea I’d be proposing two months later. By that time, especially after hearing so much about your own mother, how you felt about her, I didn’t know how to tell you the truth. I knew you’d never understand.” He shook his head again. “For a man who prides himself on his common sense, it was an uncommonly senseless way to handle things.”
    Donna nodded her head in silent agreement. “And your ex-wife?”
    “What about her?”
    Donna felt her anger returning. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d been married before?”
    “As far as I’m concerned, the present was all that was—is—important.”
    “Stop saying that,” Donna said, standing up.
    “Saying what?”
    “ ‘As far as I’m concerned,’” she repeated. “You keep saying that! Unfortunately, your ‘concerns’ aren’t the same as the facts. Don’t you think I had the right to know?”
    “No,” he said, rising and standing beside her. “No. I didn’t see how a previous marriage had anything to do with us. There were no children involved. I haven’t had any connection with Janine in years. I’m certainly not planning on seeing her again in the future.” He moved around. “I didn’t see—I don’t see,” he emphasized, “how a discussion of my previous mistakes could have any bearing on our lives together.” Donna groped for words to refutehim. “Have I ever asked you anything about your past? About old boyfriends?”
    “It’s not the same thing,” Donna protested. “I was never married