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  Like Father Like Son

  Copyright @2019 Leigh Lennon

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  This book is a work of fiction and is the product of the author’s imagination. Mentions of people living or deceased are for reference purposes only.

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  This book is a work of fiction and is the product of the author’s imagination.

  Editing by Ellie McLove

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  Cover design by Najla Qamber

  Photographer: Eric David Battershell

  Cover Model: Chris Spearman

  Alpha Reader: Emma Albright

  Beta Readers: Nancy George, Kymberly Dingman and Kelly Green

  Like Father Like Son

  I said good-bye to my son. But he had one final request—a letter I’ll never forget.

  Dear Dad,

  If you’re reading this, it means I’m gone. I had one dream, growing old with Holland. Death won’t stop me from providing for my wife. And because you’re the best man I know, what I’m about to ask—my last request—I know you’ll do. Please take care of Holland. Take her back to California with you. It’s a lot—I know. But, I’m placing my most precious possession in your hands.

  Love,

  Scott

  But the thoughts swirling through my mind are certainly not what my late son had in mind. How do I resist this woman in front of me?

  After all, you can’t choose love, it chooses you.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Playlist

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  A Note from the Author

  It Takes a Village

  About the Author

  Other Books by Leigh Lennon

  Please Stalk Leigh Lennon on Social Media

  Dedication

  To my many friends who listen to my book ideas over and over again and smile through it. Thanks for accepting me for who I am and all the craziness that surrounds me!

  To the one person who taught me if you were lucky to find love, accept it and live your life for you! I wish you had been able to read one of my books! I know you would have been my number one fan. I miss you every day Mom.

  I love you!

  Like Father Like Son Playlist

  Maguire’s Play List

  Bon Jovi, “Blaze of Glory”

  Bon Jovi, “Blood on Blood”

  Bon Jovi, “Livin’ on a Prayer”

  Bryan Adams, “Summer of ‘69”

  Guns N’ Roses, “Welcome to the Jungle”

  Metallica “Enter Sandman”

  Metallica “Nothing Else Matters”

  Mötley Crüe, “Home Sweet Home”

  Poison, “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”

  Queensrÿche, “Silent Lucidity”

  Holland’s Playlist

  Death Cab for Cutie, “I Will Follow You Into the Dark”

  Fall Out Boy, “Centuries”

  Fall Out Boy, “Uma Thurman”

  Panic! At the Disco, “Say Amen”

  Sunny Day Real Estate, “Pillars”

  Taking Back Sunday, “This Photograph is Proof”

  The Front Bottoms, “Flashlight”

  Weezer, “Buddy Holly”

  The Author’s Playlist

  Coldplay, “Yellow”

  Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Fortunate Son”

  Ed Sheeran, “Castle on the Hill”

  Green Day, “Wake Me Up When September Ends”

  House of Pain, “Jump Around”

  Kid Rock, “Warrior”

  Jo Dee Messina, “Heaven Was Needing a Hero”

  Lee Brice, “I Drive Your Truck”

  Little Big Town, “Boondocks”

  Luke Bryan, “Drink a Beer”

  Matchbox Twenty, “3AM”

  Rednex, “Cotton Eye Joe”

  Tim McGraw, “If You’re Reading This”

  Toby Keith, “American Soldier”

  Prologue

  Sixteen years earlier

  I kneel on the hot California cement when his large hazel green eyes fill with water. His flushed fat cheeks are only a couple of things on his small face that have my two hundred and ten-pound body wanting to smash something. He’s clinging onto the Curious George stuffed animal I bought him for his first birthday.

  I ignore the incessant tapping of the she-devil herself standing behind us. Not only is the tap-tap causing me to want to jab an ice pick through her Botox lips, but her annoying noises can’t be contained to just her fingers. Long moans even make my little guy a bit more uptight, clinging onto me like his life is about to be torn to pieces. And it is.

  “Listen, Sport.” My nickname for my son isn’t overly original, but the second he could walk, he had a soccer ball, basketball, or football in his hand. The kid, at only six, has natural skills that I want to continue to instill in him. But, that has all gone to shit.

  But now, my time will be condensed to two weeks at Christmas and a month or two during the summer. As much as I fought for custody of my son, and I fought like hell, Christine convinced the courts that after our divorce, she had been left destitute and without a way to support herself. She put on quite the performance with the judge insisting that being around her family would be the only way to get on her feet after such an awful separation. Her infidelity didn’t sway the judge and he claimed we had equal rights as parents. And though that’s what the law claims, my lawyer warned me that unless the mother has been negligent and we couldn’t prove the move would be unsafe for Scott, he would most likely side with the mother. And fuck, she should have been awarded an Oscar for her performance of a decade.

  “Daddy, I don’t want to move to Virginia.” The tears in his eyes flow down his face. My own face turns to the bitch I thought I once loved.

  My eyes plead with her. “Christine, pl
ease don’t do this,” I mouth where she can see me, but Scottie can’t.

  “Scott, honey, we have a long drive. Say goodbye to Daddy.” She slips into the seat of her beat down Jeep. The idea of my Scott driving cross-country in this vehicle has me more nervous than not seeing him as often as I had when Christine only lived five miles down the road.

  His long arms find passage around me, and he’s not letting go. Yeah, buddy, I don’t want you to leave me either is what I’m thinking.

  “Maguire, c’mon. We’ve gotta get going. Please, can we limit some of the dramatics? For fuck’s sake, y’all are men, not sissies.”

  Christine’s southern accent she’s tried for years to tamp down seems to seep from her lips when she’s on bitch mode. With her talking to both Scott and me in this way, bitch mode is in overdrive.

  “Alright, Sport, let’s get you in the car. You and Mommy are going on an adventure. Don’t forget, I’m flying out to see you for a week before school starts. You and me, we’ll go camping along with so much more.”

  I lift him up and buckle him in his booster seat, giving him one last kiss that will have to hold me for two months. We were used to going to the park after work each day to dribble the soccer ball or sometimes I’d put him on my shoulders while he dunked the basketball.

  It’s all up in smoke because Christine has decided after the divorce, Scott’s extended family should be more of an influence on him than his own father. In her manipulation, she’s taking away my right to mold him into a responsible young man. This has been my dream since his small little body had been placed in my arms.

  I shut the door, one last time taking in his sweet little face that imitates my own. The pain that’s coursing through my body is physical, and all I want to do is grab him—keeping him with me like he should be.

  I don’t want to talk to Christine, and when I turn my back, she calls out to me, “M, hold on a second.” Gritting my teeth, I twist my body toward her, holding my own tears until my son is gone. “I’ll have Scott call you each night when we are snug and safe at a hotel.” She adjusts her rearview mirror while biting her lip. This is never good; it has always been the one way I’d been able to tell when she’s lying. It’s how I found out about all her affairs, of course, that had been after I caught her in our bed with someone else.

  “What is it, Chris?” I probe.

  “Mama is planning on taking Scott to the beach the weekend you were fixin’ to come out. Can you come a different week?”

  I slam my hand on the open window door. “No!” Scott begins to cry louder, and I have to contain my temper unless I want his last memories of me to be his mom and me fighting.

  I lean in closer to Christine, where only she can hear me. “I’ve given up most of this summer with him so he could get settled. I have my tickets and it’s already approved with Ned. Don’t challenge me on this,” I threaten but with her lips pursed, as it is when she’s hell-bent on getting her way, I understand this subject will be revisited another day.

  I make my way around to where he’s buckled. Leaning in, I kiss him on the forehead one last time. “Okay, Sport, be good for your mommy. I’ll talk to you tonight.”

  Christine pulls out, and I watch the taillights of her beat up Jeep until it turns the corner four blocks down the road.

  Chapter 1

  Present

  The day I left that podunk town and became Mrs. Scott Jameson Parrish is the day I compare all days to. Sure, a woman’s wedding day is supposed to be all wonderful, and it was, even if we were only at the justice of the peace. But every day I can spend with Scott as my husband marvels the next.

  No one had prepared me to be a military wife—a young military wife at that. Scott was only nineteen when he married me on my eighteenth birthday. My daddy would never have agreed to me leaving the farm so young if I wasn’t legal. It had more to do with losing some of his valued labor than losing his daughter.

  Leaving Rustburg, Virginia for North Carolina was not only the best thing we could have done, but it was essential. Scott’s own mama is the bee’s knees at manipulation and tried like hell to break us up over the years we had dated. She always wanted him at her beck and call.

  With little but the clothes on our backs and our marriage certificate, Scott had joined the military and we were making it work—even if we were away from one another longer than together for the first three years. And he had been home on leave for two weeks—where we barely made it out of bed.

  The next three months would be lonely, but I’ve become fast friends with several other wives whose husbands are in Scott’s unit. Three days is all it has been since hearing from my man. I’m in my own little world, sewing curtains for Sarah. She’s my neighbor and best friend who has found out she’s expecting a little girl. I’ve picked out pink and purple unicorn fabric. Sitting at the sewing machine Scott bought for me, I’m about to start work on these darling curtains. Sarah had not been surprised at my choice since I’m always telling her unicorns are my spirit animal.

  A loud knock pulls me out of my world. Sarah frequently comes over this time of the morning with two cups of coffee in her hands. I keep telling her I hate it and she insists she’ll make me a coffee drinker eventually.

  Opening the door, still in my bathrobe, I have bright purple fabric colored unicorns I’m pinning when my eyes dart up because I don’t smell the java that usually permeates my nose. It takes a second for all the pieces of my perfectly planned life to come undone at the seams. My husband’s company commander stands in front of me, along with the chaplain. With them, is a man I’m too familiar with—any military wife’s nightmare—standing at the threshold of our government issued house. Captain Hillier, the casualty assistance officer, has made it his mission to know every spouse of his soldiers. The officers don’t have to say anything. If these three men show up at your home in their dress uniforms, no words ever need to be said. He catches me before I fall. I’m kicking, screaming, and yelling when all the other doors to our cul-de-sac open and I’m surrounded by wives who fear the same visit from day to day. But it’s not their husband who has been killed in action. It’s mine.

  It’s the third time I let her call go to voice mail. It’s funny, our kid is twenty-two, and I stopped shelling out any more money to the crazy bitch the day he graduated high school.

  My life as a dad had not been what I’d imagined it would be when I held him for the first time. We weren’t geographically close. Christine made sure of that. As Scott grew up, each year until he was thirteen, it was met with, “I want to go live with Dad.”

  I’m sure it hurt Christine to hear his words and I never pushed him. As a matter of fact, I’d tell him, Virginia is an excellent place to live, Son. You have so much family surrounding you. I tried to make things easier for Christine, never understanding why. Oh, yeah, I love my kid and part of being a parent is sacrificing.

  But each year, Christine would tell him, “If your dad really wanted to be a part of your life, he’d move to Virginia.” I never found this out until his words wounded me one night, one of the last times he visited me for summers when he was sixteen. By then, he had a serious girlfriend who he eventually married and summers at my house became a thing of the past.

  And the truth be told, I wanted to move to Virginia, solely to be there for Scott. I had busted my balls to make it happen. Christine strapping me with such high alimony and child support is one reason I couldn’t move. Plus, a year before I caught my cheating whore of a wife with another man in our bed, I’d bought into a partnership in a new business. Seventeen years later, we’re very successful, but it has taken time to build.

  As Scott had gotten older, Christine hemmed and hawed over holidays. I rented a cabin for a month in June and December to be closer to my boy. I would fly out a couple times a year for big games. And he’d come to visit me, too. We made it work, but the resentment lived deep in him thanks to the manipulative words of my ex.

  The
phone keeps buzzing when Irene, my assistant, pops her head in my office. “Maguire, sorry to bug you, especially for this. Christine is on the phone and claims it’s an emergency.”

  “Shit.” I’d hoped to have avoided her most recent rant. The funny thing about Christine, she had gotten married the day after alimony had stopped. She cheated on me, but I still got saddled with paying her twelve hundred dollars a month in alimony alone for eight years, not to mention the child support I paid until Scott graduated. She’s been through a couple husbands since then, and quite honestly, it’s too much to keep up with.

  I pull at my corded landline hard; I’m surprised I don’t yank it from the set itself. “Chris, what the hell is so important you’re blowing up my line like you blew up our marriage?”

  Yeah, I’m usually not a dick, but when it comes to her, I’m one to the tenth degree, if not more.

  “Maguire?” Her sobs fill the line. “Maguire…” I can barely understand her, but she’s called me enough over the years sobbing, asking for a second chance. I can decipher her need by the mere tone in which she uses my name. It’s soft but rushed. Slow but frenzied.

  “Chris, hell, I don’t have time for this.” I’m close to slamming the phone down, ending this call.

  “No, no, it’s not…fuck—Maguire!” she yells, and I take the set from my ear for a second when the crying intensifies. “He’s gone, M.” She hasn’t called me M in years. “He’s gone, gone, gone, gone.”

  My breathing grows heavier and my patience is gone if she thinks I care about her latest fling leaving her high and dry. “Who is it this time and how much money do you think you’re getting from me?”

  “M, listen to me.” She’s begging now, and for the first time, she has my attention.

  “Okay, I hear you, Chris, who is it?”

  “He’s gone, M. Our boy is gone. Scottie, he’s been killed in action.”