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"Dump that piece of trash, for starters. Leave her and marry Tiffany."
I wanted to kill her. I looked at my mother and pictured wrapping my hands around her neck and choking the life out of her.
She smiled like she was reading my mind. "I'm not the only one that knows. You think I don't have a backup plan? I have several."
"I could just say no. I'll turn myself in. I'll take the punishment. I'll do the time."
"I know everything. You weren't even there when the shots were fired. She killed him. She killed a cop, and she'd never let you take the fall for her. That girl is a fool. She'd go down with you." She smiled when she caught my unguarded reaction to that. "You know it as well as I do. If you go down, you'll go down together. Pick your poison, son. My way, or yours."
"I won't marry Tiffany. Not fucking happening. Dream on."
She shrugged as though she'd been expecting that. She probably had. "An engagement then. One year. Give it a chance. You might find it's to your liking to be with a girl of your own class. And if it's not, feel free to break it off. Whatever. So long as you don't taint the family tree with that Theroux girl, I'll let you do what you like."
"A year? No fucking way."
"Six months then."
"And that's it? You just expect me to stay away from Scarlett indefinitely? No. I'll take my chances the other way."
"Five years. Stay away from her for five years, and I'll leave you alone. That'll be long enough, I think, for you to realize what a silly idea she was. Time enough for you to grow up and grow out of her."
"And in five years, if I go back to her, you'll just let me?"
She shrugged. "You won't. You'll have forgotten her name by then, but if by some miracle you haven't, fine, you can go play with the trash to your heart's content."
It was a frightfully quick interaction. My entire life changed in a few short sentences, a handful of minutes.
My mother insisted on being present when I called Scarlett. She didn't trust me to go through with any of it on my own.
I had no opportunities to warn Scarlett, to try to make it better, to do anything but what I was instructed to, which was brutal and swift.
I went a little numb as I made the call.
I knew just what to say. That part was simple.
It was too easy to convince her. She was always waiting to be abandoned, to be thrown away. I knew that.
"This doesn't work anymore. We don't work," I heard myself saying at one point. Nonsense like that rolled out of my mouth, my eyes on my mother all the while.
Her freedom or her love. Those were my choices.
It was no choice at all, but it broke us all the same.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR
"A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her."
~Oscar Wilde
PRESENT
DANTE
We'd lapsed into some semblance of normal faster than I could have hoped for.
We had our issues. Of course we did. Our history was long and destructive. I knew we'd be working through some of it for years. I'd never been naive enough to imagine otherwise. Not for one second had I ever been that delusional.
