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“Aoife!”
“Don’t even look at her,” Joey snarled, rising to his feet to block me from his father’s view when he opened his mouth to respond.
“Joey,” his mother sobbed. “Please…”
“I’m done talking to you,” Joey told her in a shaky tone. “I’m done with you.” He turned back to my father and said, “This isn’t me walking away from my responsibilities. This is me walking away from a murder charge.” Blowing out a frustrated breath, he tenderly tipped my chin up with his knuckles and said, “Are you with me?”
Out of my chair and up on my feet in seconds, I was moving for the door with my hand firmly entwined with his. “Oh, I am so with you.”
“Wait right there,” Mam called after us. “Don’t even think about wandering around town in the dark of night in your condition. Take Joey up to your room while we finish up here.”
“Upstairs?” Dad muttered. “Really, Trish?”
“What are they going to do, Tony?” Mam sighed. “Get pregnant again? They have to get this one out to put another one in.”
“Jesus, don’t give them any notions.”
______________________
“He has some goddamn nerve coming here,” Joey bit out, as he paced my bedroom floor. “Sanctimonious bastard thinking he has any right to lecture me on parenthood. Fucker never changed a nappy in his life, and he sure as hell never paid for one, either!”
Over an hour had passed since we came up to my room, leaving our parents downstairs to hash it out, and Joey was still pacing around like a madman.
“His entire side of the family is the same,” he continued to rant, as his hair stood up in forty different directions from the sheer act of him pulling on it in frustration. “Assholes, the lot of them.”
Clad in his school uniform and looking entirely too comfortable in my sleeping quarters, Joey stomped around my room like a powerhouse, stopping every few minutes to realign a crooked poster on my wall or to fold one of the many items of clothing I had strewn on the floor.
“If you ever met his asshole father and scumbag brothers, you’d know what I’m talking about,” he grumbled, folding another pair of my discarded jeans. “And his mother?” He shook his head and shuddered. “Don’t even get me started on that fucking demon of a woman.”
“Your nanny?” I asked from my perch on my bed, as I gave my toes a dodgy French pedicure. “I thought she was nice.”
“No, no, that’s Nanny Murphy,” he corrected, bundling a stack of neatly folded clothes into my wardrobe. “She’s from my mother’s side. Nanny is nice. You’ve met Nanny.”
“With the cute perm?”
“Yeah, she’s the one who gave me that miraculous medal from Knock to give you for your eighteenth.”
“Oh yeah, I love Nanny.”
“Yeah, we should go see her,” he muttered, rubbing his jaw. “Tell her the news ourselves.”
“About the baby?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Nanny’s a saint. The witch is my father’s mother.” He fell back into explaining. “She’s a tyrant, Aoife. You’ve never met anyone as cold as— Hold up. Should you even be using that stuff?” He stopped his rant-induced pacing to swipe up my bottle of nail polish and eye it warily. “Doesn’t this shit have chemicals that might be bad for my baby?”
“It will be bad for you if you don’t back up from my top coat,” I grumbled, reaching up to swipe the bottle back. “Don’t get all anal on me, Joe.”
“Hey.” He held up his hands. “I’m only asking out of concern for the kid.”
“Such a law-abider.”
He rolled his eyes. “Back to the witch.”
“The witch,” I mimicked with a snort. “That’s a conversation I look forward to listening to you have with our child.” Cackling to myself, I feigned his deep voice and said, “Hey, kid, so this is your great-grandmother, the witch, and these are your great-uncles, the scumbags.”
“And this is your grandfather, the rapist, alcoholic bastard himself.” Groaning, Joey stopped pacing to bang his forehead against the wardrobe door. “Poor kid is fucked and she isn’t even here yet.”
“It might be a boy.”
