Split Black /#Wattys 2021

Chapter Thirty-five

He stared at her face, imagining himself trudging up the stairs to the lieutenant's office again. Sitting in that little chair while Davenport perched on the edge of his desk, staring down at him like he was the bad kid in school.

He didn't want to do it.

Was he going to let her make him do it again, or not?

He found the words.

"I'm sorry, Ma. I'm not here to bail you out. I'm not going to take up for you again."

Her face froze for a split second. Fear and surprise lifted her brows high up over her eyes, making her mouth into a little round o.

Finally she said, "What?" and then the anger hit, drawing her brows down at a sharp angle. Red poured into her cheeks. Her eyes slit hatefully and glittered like ice.

She leaned forward and hissed through the bars. "After all I've done for you?"

And then the words poured over him like stinging rain, like hail.

"After all the things I bought you over the years? You were always piled up with gifts for Christmas, and you never thanked me for anything! And all those trips for special basketball camps in the summer, and oh, my God, your shoes? Do you have any idea how much athletic wear costs? And you were always growing out of them before you ever wore them out." She leaned closer, spitting venom. "Do you know how many times I ate peanuts for dinner? But you had your basketball shoes! And your car was newer than mine, and then you went and wrecked it!"

John sat there as he always had, pelted with the words, wondering if he deserved them.

"I always made sure you had everything you needed!" Actually, that was his father's alimony and child support, but John kept his mouth shut. "I stayed home and cooked and cleaned and had your friends over and cleaned up after them, even though Matt wet the bed every damned time he stayed over. I always tried to show you boys a good time. I cooked spaghetti dinners and we played games and had ghost stories in the back yard, and I taught you how to read before you were even in kindergarten. And you were lazy, you wouldn't even walk 'til you were fourteen months old!"

The spittle flew as she hissed at him under her breath. John wiped his face. His heart lurched and jerked in his chest. His stomach hurt.

His mother went on, bedraggled blond curls shaking on either side of her face. Her hands white-knuckled the countertop. "You think I had any of that when I was a kid? No! I got slapped around all the time and told to shut up and that I was fat and ugly and stupid. My own father told me I'd never amount to anything in the daytime, and then he'd sneak into my room at night. I cried and cried for weeks after you were born, thinking I didn't deserve such a beautiful little baby boy and I wasn't going to be good enough to raise you."

Tears flooded Ma's eyes and her voice rose from a whisper into a wobbly whimper. "And I was always asking myself what I wished my parents would have done for me, and I did those things for you. Remember all those times we went to Bluebird Gap Farm? And I took you out at night to catch lightning bugs and see things like the Big Dipper and the moon, so you wouldn't be afraid of the dark—not slapped upside the head for crying like I was. And this is the thanks I get!"

John began to feel horribly guilty. He remembered the years when his mother was his best friend, and compared to what she had grown up with, she had done an incredible job raising him. She really had. He thought of the enormous strength it took to do all that, and then his own eyes started flooding up.