I considered her thoughtfully for a minute as her attention was stolen by the arrival of our food. She looked like a cheerleader. She looked like the kind of person that would never let you believe that you would fail. Everything about her inspired the belief that things would indeed work out the way they were supposed to. Just like the woman that had stepped up to take care of me, Jules, and my brother after we were forced to say good-bye to my mom. Caroline was never my stepmother. She was my second mother and her bright, positive personality was very similar to Dixie’s, which was crazy considering she had also been handed some really shitty circumstances she had to work her way through while maintaining that smile.

I smothered my burger in ketchup and smashed the top bun back down with my palm. Dixie did the same with hers and made a sound that I knew she would make if I ever got inside of her as she took her first bite. It made the fit of my jeans even more uncomfortable than it already was after watching her with that milkshake.

“My dad remarried when I was a teenager. The woman he married was a lot like you. She saw the best in everyone and in every situation. She was quick to smile and quick to forgive.” She was also the reason I knew that having something good and pure in my life wasn’t in the cards for me.

I leaned back in the vinyl seat knowing I’d opened the door to a line of questioning I couldn’t avoid forever. Talking about Caroline meant talking about my mom and how things had ended so tragically with both of them.

She arched her eyebrows a little bit and went back to her melting drink. “Who exactly are we going to see besides the woman that fell and hurt herself? You said you swore on your mother and now we have your second mother, so I assume we’ll be crossing paths with at least some of your parents at some point in the next week.” Anyone else might be a little intimidated by that but Dixie was likeable and she liked everyone, so I knew she would fit right in with the remaining members of my family. “What are they like?”

It was an easy question but one that I tended to dance my way around when it was asked. Typically, strangers asked it because they were wondering how I came by my unusual coloring and they wanted me to lay out my family tree and walk them through my genetic makeup. I knew Dixie could care less what color skin and eyes the people who had made me had, and since I knew that I had no problem trying to help her climb my complicated family tree.

“My mom was a beauty queen. A pretty blonde with blue eyes that wanted to be the next Miss America. She got knocked up with me her freshman year in college and was effectively disowned by her parents.” The corners of my lips turned down, and I couldn’t stop the flare of outrage I always felt on my mother’s behalf that my grandparents were so close-minded and cold. “She never told me if the reason they were so pissed was because she pretty much tanked her education and her pageant future by getting pregnant, or because she got knocked up by a guy who was biracial. It was like she was doubly defying their antiquated and racist views. He was African American but he also had a solid chunk of Middle Eastern in him, too. He played soccer at the same school but didn’t stick around long when Mom told him she was keeping me.” I’d never met the guy, but she often told me I looked a lot like him. “Things were pretty rough for her when I was young.”

Dixie sucked in an audible breath and I could see how deeply my words were affecting her. She was hurting for me and I hadn’t even gotten to the parts that actually wounded and left scars yet. My frown dug deeper into my face and my hands curled tightly around the mug in front of me. “My grandparents never bothered to contact either of us. Not once. Not even when she died when I was thirteen.”

I knew it was a bomb to drop and that I should have given her that information more tactfully but the words rushed out. I’d held them inside, never sharing them with anyone, so they took their chance to escape and fell heavily between us.

“Oh, Church.” She sounded like she wanted to cry for me.

I lifted a hand to hold off the rest of her sympathy. “When I was five my mom met a guy named Julian Churchill. He’s now the sheriff in Lowry, but back then he was a patrol cop and he pulled her over for speeding. He told her he would let her go if she agreed to a date.” It was totally unethical and completely illegal, but luckily my mom liked the look of Jules, remembered him from high school, and agreed to go. It was a story they always told with smiles and shared laughs. It made me want to grin but I knew how it all ended and that in turn made me want to break something. I also never talked about the fact that initially I hated Jules. I hated that I had to share my mom with him. Hated that he showed up and took care of her when that was my job. I also resented the fact she picked another man with dark skin to fall in love with. I wanted her life, and mine by association, to be easier and without judgment and speculation and to my immature and untried mind it seemed like she was going out of her way to keep it hard by falling in love with someone who didn’t look a whole lot like either one of us. I was too little to understand why all of that thinking was wrong and that who my mother loved was completely out of my control but there were a lot of years where I was nothing short of terrible to Jules. As an adult I would like to take those actions and a lot of those words I hurled at him back.

“Jules is a good guy. He took me as part of the package without blinking an eye. They got married a year later and he asked if it was cool if he could adopt me before the ink was dry on their marriage license.” I remember trying not to cry when he asked me if it was all right. My mom was good. My mom and Jules together was better. No one other than my mom had ever wanted me, in fact I spent most of my childhood feeling distinctly unwanted, but there was Jules, big, badass Jules, telling me he was choosing me to be his son despite the attitude and anger I so carelessly tossed his way. It would go down forever as one of the most significant moments of my life. “They had a perfect marriage and I thought we were a perfect family but Mom wanted more kids and struggled to get pregnant for a long time. Jules just wanted to make her happy, so he consoled her through several miscarriages and a round of failed in vitro treatments. Right about when she resigned herself to the fact that it wasn’t meant to be, she got pregnant. She called it a miracle.” Really it was a curse.