Titans Read Online Free PDF Page A

been married twice, is divorced, and has one child, a retarded daughter named Rebecca, aged twelve. She lives with his mother—your grandmother. He’s forty-six.”
    “Do you believe he raped Mother?”
    Leon returned the card and leaned on a hip to push the handkerchief back into his pocket. “I believe your mother believes it. I’ve never known for sure. She was the belle of Gainesville as well as Denton in her youth. As the beautiful only child of well-to-do parents and the darlin’ of your mother’s childless, rich godmother, she was spoiled to the core and grew up thinkin’ the world was hers for the asking, like she’s gotten Lily to believin’. I fell in love with her in the fourth grade when she enrolled in school, the prettiest little thing you ever saw. I carried her books. Made sure no one bothered her. I was like her big brother. She could tell me anything and did. I went to work for her folks on this farm when I was eighteen. I watched as the boys made a beeline to her door durin’ her midschool years, and they followed her here after her time in finishin’ school, but she kept ’em all danglin’ until Trevor Waverling showed up in town. He must have been around twenty-five.”
    Nathan had never heard any of this story before. “What brought him to Gainesville?”
    “His aunt. She died and left him a saddle and tack shop she’d inherited from her husband. Trevor had no interest in runnin’ a business in a small town like Gainesville, so he hung around until he sold it.”
    “And that’s when he met Mother.”
    Leon got up and struck a match to the barn lantern. “Yep. I saw him only two, three times. He was a handsome devil. I heard the ladies were wild for him, but he had his sights set on your mother, at least accordin’ to the way she tells it. He squired her about until the shop was sold, then vamoosed, leavin’ her pregnant. Her daddy came to me. No decent man would have her, he said.” Leon’s attempt at a wry grin failed as he sat back down on the bucket. “That’s what the man actually said to me.”
    Nathan had not liked his mother’s father. Liam Barrows had no time for his first grandson and brushed him off like a pesky fly, but Nathan mainly disliked his grandfather because he treated his son-in-law like hired help. Today’s disclosures had revealed the cause of the man’s disaffection. He had died when Nathan was ten, succeeded by his grandmother who lived only a year afterward. The farm had then gone to his mother.
    “Do you know if he was telling the truth when he said he didn’t know that Mother was pregnant with me?” Nathan asked.
    Leon plucked a piece of straw from a bale of hay and stuck it in his mouth. “Yeah, that part I believe. I’m not sayin’ he’d have done anything about it, but I’m sure he didn’t know.”
    “How can you be so sure?”
    “Because your mother didn’t know, not until Trevor had been gone for two months.”
    “So the reason she hates him is because he didn’t marry her, baby or not?”
    “That’s the way I see it.”
    “Fancy a woman hating a man all these years when she has the best husband alive and three good kids.”
    “Trevor Waverling was the only man your mother couldn’t have. She’s never gotten over the insult. It’s my view he wouldn’t have had to rape her. Because of him, she was forced to marry a man beneath her and become a farmer’s wife, a far cry from the life she’d expected to have, and she’s never forgiven him for it.”
    And gave birth to a son she didn’t want, Nathan thought. So much was making sense now. It explained why his mother never looked directly at him but spoke to him from her profile. He gazed up at the open barn window where the first star of the evening had appeared. He could hardly stand the pain of admitting it, but he agreed with his father’s view. He was not the child of rape, but he might as well have been for all the chance he’d had of winning his mother’s love.