Chapter Text
Simply put, Cynthia Blofis was losing her goddamn mind.
She stood shellshocked in her kitchen, shaking fingers still resting on the old phone’s handset from when she had put it down some 15 minutes ago. She was frozen in place. She was furious. She was excited. She was curious. Even more than that, she was just plain hurt.
Her son. Her own little baby boy. Married with kids and he didn’t even tell her.
“Give me one good reason why you can’t come home, no shoddy excuses.” She said with finality.
On the other line, Paul let out a shaky sigh, then went quiet for a minute.
“Well?”
“Mom, uh… You might want to sit down. I have some… news.”
How could this have happened? Had they really grown so distant from each other that he wouldn’t trust her with this kind of information? Paul’s siblings had been ecstatic to announce weddings, pregnancies– actually, there had been a few times where she had been told before any official announcement was ever made. She'd always thought her and Paul had that same kind of relationship too, that when he finally met someone he really liked, she'd be the first to hear. Or, like, at least in the top 5.
Now she wasn’t so sure. Actually, now she was sure of quite the opposite. Of course she noticed that they hadn’t been as close since he’d moved out of the state, but he was a grown man who needed to find his own way in life, and she recognized that nobody could do that with their mother hovering over their shoulder every minute of every day, so she let it go. As for the missed family holidays, well– she was definitely not happy about it, but she trusted her son. The first year, when he told her that his fancy new private school teaching job just demanded too much work for him to make the trip all the way to Maine, she trusted him. The second year, when he said his car was in just too rough of shape to try and brave the roads with all the terrible weather they had been having, she trusted him. But this year… she didn’t even know what to think.
“Her name is Sally Jackson, she’s 39, and she’s the most incredible woman in the whole world. We met at a writing seminar 4 years ago and I’ve never loved someone more.” He said, his voice trembling, but never unsure.
She didn’t even know a single thing about this woman, her new daughter-in-law. Well, she knew some basic stuff– name, age, the like. But that was just meaningless information that only mattered on IDs. She needed to know about her. What she was like. Paul evidently thought the world of her, but Paul saw the best in everyone, sometimes when it wasn’t even there. So, him loving her didn’t really tell Cynthia much about this Sally lady.
She had always had faith that all of her children would pick good people to spend their lives with. But she had also always had faith that she would be informed when these people were picked, so that belief might be worthless now. Maybe Paul really had somehow found the greatest woman to ever walk the earth. Maybe she was kind, and smart, and beautiful, just like he had told her. Or maybe it was just a farce. Maybe she was fake, and cruel, and stuck up. Lord knows her kids had all brought home a couple people like that when they were younger, before they had found their current partners. Maybe she was like that, maybe she had somehow conned a sweet guy like Paul into marrying her with some kind of sob story or something.
Or maybe that was just her own anxieties rearing their ugly heads.
Maybe she was everything she'd been chalked up to be. Maybe her son really had met a truly good woman, fell in love with her, and married her. And maybe he really was afraid that his family wouldn't accept his new one. So afraid that he didn't think they could be trusted with even knowing about them.
Which brought her to another issue entirely…
…Paul's stepson.
Paul sighed deeply. The two of them seemed to have been doing that a lot over the course of the conversation. “Sally had him with, uh… a man she was with when she was in her early twenties. Percy is 17 now, and Sally and his biological father have been apart for his entire life. He’s such a good kid, and I’d honestly look into legally adopting him if I didn’t think his father would incinerate me on the spot for it.”
Now that one really stung. Anybody would be scared to introduce their sweetheart to their parents, she got that. And unhappy as she was about being kept in the dark about her son’s marriage, well… It's not like the Blofis family was a particularly calm one. Paul was probably the most timid of them all, and even he could be quite spirited at times. But hiding a grandchild was a whole new matter.
Let it never be said that Cynthia Blofis was a bad grandmother. She loved her grandbabies with a ferocity that would rival that of a mother bear’s. She didn’t get to see them as much as she would like to, given that the family had scattered all over the East Coast over time, but she still loved them all the same. The knowledge that she had another grandchild that she had never met, never even known about, made her heart ache.
But then again, just as was the case with his mother, she didn’t know anything about this kid. Every horrible maybe and what-if started circulating through her brain again. Paul said he was just as great as his mother, but what if that just wasn’t the case? Maybe he was just smart enough to put up a front when Paul was watching, and as soon as the adults turned their backs, he became a bully, a brat, a juvenile delinquent.
Cynthia took a deep breath. She couldn’t judge people she didn’t know anything about. Spiralling wouldn’t do her or anyone else any good. She let her fingers slip from the handset, turning towards the stairs and slowly heading down to the living room.
“Is this why you’ve been avoiding coming home?” She whispered.
Paul was quiet. “I’m so sorry, mom.”
Her husband sat on the couch, quietly watching some football game, blissfully unaware of the family situation that had just rocked Cynthia’s entire world.
“Hey, hon? I just got off the phone with Paul.” She said, keeping her tone purposefully collected.
Her husband turned his attention from the TV, looking at her with one bushy eyebrow raised. She recognized that look. Most would say it was judgmental, but Cynthia knew it meant he was expecting the worst, but still couldn’t keep himself from hoping for the best.
“He said he’d be able to make it to Christmas this year, for the full week.”
Her husband’s face brightened instantly. “Oh. That’s good. Haven’t seen my boy in forever.”
Cynthia smiled in response. “There is just one thing, though.”
“What?”
“Paul Blofis, my son,” She said sternly, “There is only one way in the world you could possibly make this up to me, and to the rest of the family.”
“I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you. Whatever it is, mom, I’ll do it, I swear.”
Perfect. Now he was bound by honor. There was no way of escape. “Bring Sally and Percy with you to Christmas this year. No other way, honey.”