Read Online A Camden's Baby Secret by Victoria Pade - Free Book Online Page A

IQ and I guess that was to my advantage in more than my schoolwork. And this is the country—kids aren’t pampered out here. They have to pitch in at an early age. For me, by the time I was in fifth grade, it wasn’t feeding chickens or slopping hogs before school, it was fixing breakfast and getting my parents to eat, or dragging clothes to the Laundromat while they were buying liquor and cigarettes and groceries—”
    â€œSo they did buy groceries.”
    â€œYeah, they did. I’d make a list for them—canned soup and beans, frozen dinners, bread, peanut butter. Stuff for meals I could manage myself, plus things like toilet paper and soap.”
    â€œWould they have only bought the liquor if you hadn’t made them a list for the other stuff?”
    â€œMore than likely. They didn’t really care about food. If I didn’t make dinner, they didn’t eat, just drank. I did the dishes—when there weren’t any more clean ones. Brought cash to town to pay to keep our utilities on. Wrote my own notes for school and forged their signatures. I just kept things going—not great, but the best I could as a kid.”
    He didn’t say that with any self-pity, his tone matter-of-fact.
    â€œNo one called Social Services?” Livi asked.
    â€œIt wasn’t as if my parents ever physically hurt me, so there wasn’t that to trigger anything. They loved me in their way. Booze was just their priority and I had to adapt.”
    Their priority over him.
    That was so sad.
    â€œEvery year my father would sell off another acre or two of land and we’d live off that money. We had enough to get by, and I kept my mouth shut about what my home life was like.”
    â€œSo no intervention?”
    â€œNo intervention. I guess I did just enough to dodge that bullet. But I wasn’t the most popular person around,” he said. “I was still the poor kid who lived out in a run-down trailer and wore secondhand clothes. That didn’t put me on the guest list to many birthday parties. Most parents didn’t want their kids around that kind of trash.”
    Was that something he’d heard said about himself? The thought made Livi feel even worse for him, for the little boy he’d been.
    â€œBut that didn’t faze Mandy and J.J.,” Callan concluded in a happier tone. “Don’t ask me why, because I couldn’t tell you, but Mandy and J.J. were friends to me in spite of what other kids and the rest of the town thought. From kindergarten on, we were stuck together like glue. The three of us.”
    Livi was leaning back against the car, listening raptly, and Callan moved forward to cross his arms over the top of the open door between them as he went on reminiscing. His striking face was relaxed now, his small smile at the memory of his friends not at all tight or forced.
    â€œThe three of us were together through elementary school, middle school, high school, even college—the University of Colorado. I finished my bachelor’s degree in three years, then got my master’s and graduated a little ahead of them. But the three of us shared a crummy apartment in Boulder—even after they discovered they liked each other as more than friends. I was best man at their wedding.”
    â€œYou stayed living with newlyweds?” Livi asked.
    â€œSharing the space made the rent low enough that I could concentrate on developing software without worrying about anything else. So I could put every ounce of time and energy and everything I had into that, and then into the company I founded—CT Software. They just shuffled around me while I monopolized the computer we shared. Sometimes they had more faith in me than I had in myself.”
    That made Livi think of Patrick, who had seen more in her than she’d known she was capable of.
    â€œOnce things started to go my way and I launched the company,” Callan went on, “there was