Worth Fighting For. Molly O'Keefe

how he always saw her. Strong and stalwart. Unflinching but also, most of the time, unsmiling.

      Life had been hard on Mom.

      “I am very happy right now,” she said and Jonah forced himself to smile so she would leave him for a few minutes. Just a few was all he needed. Or he’d pass out on the gravel.

      His body awash in cold sweat, he waited until she worked her way down the path to the lodge before he opened his passenger car door and slumped into the seat. Gasping, he pawed open the glove compartment and grabbed his emergency inhaler.

      It had been weeks since he’d needed this. Weeks since the asthma had fought past his carefully acquired relaxation tools.

      He took a deep puff from the inhaler. Another. Waited, inhaler poised, until finally, he felt the steroids at work, opening his lungs. His throat.

      Air, like cold, clean water, filled his body, and his head stopped spinning.

      He stared at the brilliant blue sky, the muscular shoulders of the Catskill Mountains and waited for his body, his constant betrayer, to fall into line.

      “See you later, Tim!” The tall blonde, Daphne, shut the kitchen door behind her and stepped onto the gravel heading toward her white pickup truck with the Athens Organics logo in green on the side.

      But she stopped, like a deer sensing danger and glanced over at the Jeep, the open door and him slouching in his passenger seat.

      God, she was pretty.

      Her hair, so gold it seemed white, was lit like a halo around her head, as if further proof of the differences between them. He could practically feel the devil’s horns pushing out from his skull. Her green eyes raked him. Her lush mouth opened slightly in surprise and, he was sure, a mild disgust.

      Not wanting her to see him like this, he tossed the inhaler back in the glove box and sat up. Met her gaze as if he had nothing to hide.

      She lifted a hand—a farewell or a greeting he didn’t know—then walked to her truck, got in and drove away, right past him, without another glance.

       CHAPTER THREE

      JONAH HAD SAT THROUGH more than his share of tough negotiations. He could sit unfazed through the heaviest, stoniest of silences, smiling slightly until the opposition cracked.

      It was a skill he’d picked up from the many hours Aunt Sheila spent with him playing Stare Down during that chicken pox incident.

      But even he had to admit that lunch was rough. Rough in the way the Nuremberg Trial was rough. Rough like the South surrendering to the North. Civilized on the surface but only one wrong word away from an all-out brawl.

      “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Mom asked, resting her head against his shoulder, while linking her arm through his. He was walking her from the lodge to her cottage across the clearing that was filled with the electric-green of a new spring. He slid on his sunglasses against the blaze of the sun.

      He had to admit, much like the meal he hadn’t eaten and the room he didn’t eat it in, the place was nice.

      That was all he was going to admit.

      “It was pretty bad.” He laughed, putting his hand over hers and holding it tightly.

      “Well, you didn’t help,” she chastised him. “Sitting there like some kind of—”

       “What?”

      “I don’t know. Tough guy.”

      “I am a tough guy,” he protested.

      “Please,” she said. “You barely said two words.”

      “They talked plenty,” he reminded her. Had they ever. Alice and Delia, the redheaded Texan, could talk paint off a wall. They were like two birds—bright and pretty but chattering constantly. He’d tuned them out until one of them mentioned Daphne, then like some kind of radar, he tuned right in.

      Idiot, he thought.

      “Max and Gabe barely said two words,” she said, seeming preoccupied.

      “Gabe said enough,” he assured her. Gabe, when everyone was occupied with passing dishes and spooning out salad and cooing at the black-haired, squashed-face baby, had turned to him, eyebrow arched in a way Jonah completely understood and said, “Dirty Developer?”

      He’d pushed away from the table for one wild moment, ready to put his fist in Gabe’s smug face but Max put a hand between them and said, “It would break Iris’s and Dad’s hearts if you fought.”

      It had been the appropriate bucket of cold water. But still, Jonah felt that anger in his stomach. The anger remarkably similar to the one that had fueled him for years on the playground when kids called him shrimp or tiny tunes or baby.

      But he did hope that before he left he might get a chance to have a quick conversation with Gabe Mitchell. The kind of conversation that might end in a bloody nose.

      “So, are you satisfied?” he asked, glancing down at her. “Family reunited so we can all get on with our lives.”

      She stopped and stared at him, her dark eyes like spotlights on his grimy little soul. “I know this is hard for you, Jonah—”

      He laughed and tugged her into motion. “No, it’s not hard at all,” he clarified. “It’s not hard because I have no expectations, Mom.” He knew this was going to hurt, but she’d clearly gone slightly delusional since coming here over the winter. Maybe it was grief and stress over Aunt Sheila’s battles, but his mom wasn’t thinking clearly. “I have no attachment to these men.” When he saw her shaking her head, he spun her to face him. He took off his glasses so she could see how serious he was. “These men don’t mean anything to me. And they are never going to. I don’t want anything from them, or need anything from them.”

      She searched his eyes and he let her. This was his truth. “You are what matters to me,” he told her and she smiled. But it was one of her sad smiles.

      “Oh, honey.” She sighed, cupping his cheek. “You’re what matters to me, too. That’s why I want you here. Why I want you to stay.”

      “Mom—”

      “Look,” she interrupted. “Everyone in there was having a real hard time not asking you about that article in the Times last week.”

      “You saw it?”

      “Of course I did. It was the New York Times. Everyone saw it.”

      Of course. Everyone. Even out here. The lovely Daphne had already proven that. Thinking of her watching him through the windshield of his Jeep, her eyes so damning, made his skin tight.

      He bristled in reaction to the unbidden thought of her. It had been a long time since his thoughts had been so caught up in a woman. Especially to one who so clearly hated him and who he was never going to see again.

      “Why don’t you just tell them,” Mom suggested. “Explain—”

      “There’s nothing to explain,” he said, walking again, trying to shake the remembered sensation of Daphne’s eyes judging him.

      “Jonah—”

      “There is nothing to explain,” he repeated, enunciating clearly so she’d get the idea that the conversation was over.

      “Well, if you won’t stay for me,” she said, “if you won’t stay in order to get to know your own father—”

      He rolled his eyes at her and she smacked his arm. “I am your mother, Jonah. You will not roll your eyes at me.”

      “Sorry, Mom,” he said, truly abashed.

      “Like I was saying, if you won’t stay for me, or to get to know these truly wonderful men—these kind and generous and