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It’s two days after my failed attempt at serving Riggins with divorce papers, and I’m learning his definition ofspaceis a bit different from mine. He is still coming in at noon every day I’m at the diner, sitting in his booth and watching me until I’m done for the day. Then he follows me home and presses a kiss to my lips before he leaves and goes on with his day, doing I don’t know what.
It’s… easy.
It’s everything we used to be.
But it’s unnerving. I’ve come to learn that good things, sweet things, don’t last for me.
And it seems like today is the day the other shoe is going to drop.
“No.” I hear the words ring out in the diner, my mother’s firm, angry voice entering my psyche.
My head swivels in the direction of the door to see my mother standing at Amelia’s station, her jaw tight, her eyes filled with venom.
And the venom is directed right at Riggins.
Without my permission, my body moves toward the front of the entrance, ready to diffuse this situation.
“You are not welcome here,” she says, not paying me any mind.
“Mother,” I say, my voice low and trying to avoid a bigger drama than I already see rolling out. We have a handful of customers scattered at tables throughout the diner, but in a small town like this, juicy drama travels fast.
Her head turns to me quickly, and I don’t see the mother I know, the one who is cordial, if a bit cold. Instead, it is ice and brutal anger. A glance of someone who doesn’t like you in the least and barely tolerates your presence. “I’ll get to you next,” she says, stunning me.
“I told you I didn’t want him to be here. Riggins Greene, leave, or I’m calling the cops. I have the right to refuse service.” Her lips tip up in an ugly smile I’ve never seen before. “You were pretty well acquainted with the back of a cop car last time you were in town, weren’t you? And if I recall, Stella wasn’t too impressed by that either.” My brows furrow in confusion with her words and the way a hint of pain scrapes along Riggs’ face with the words, but Reed steps in before I can let it register.
“Hey, Mrs. Hart, maybe—” Reed tries to say.
“I don’t want to hear from you, Reed. You’re no better than that one. You leave my establishment before I call the authorities.”
It’s getting too out of hand, her words getting angry for no reason, and I wonder if she’s fully sober, remembering the days when she would come home from luncheons with her friends just a bit too tipsy—that’s always when she would be her most cruel. And with all the eyes in the diner on us now, I need to shut it down before it gets much, much worse.
“Mom, come on, let’s—” I don’t know what I’m going to say. Maybelet’s talk about this out of the eager eyes of the entire townorlet’s not do this here, but I don’t get the chance to determine which version I’m going to argue because she looks at me, and snaps.
“I told you to get that divorce, or I was done with you, Stella. Did you? He’s bad news, just like that father of his. Even Jeanette enabled their shitty behavior.”
Now, I can put up with a lot of shit. I can put up with my mom talking shit to me, with my never being enough for her. I can even put up with her talking shit about Riggins because, at some point, I reinforced those thoughts she had about him. I cried in her house when he broke me, and she listened.
But Jeanette?
Absolutely not.
Jeanette Greene was the woman who took me in for six hours when I tried to run away from home after failing another one of my mother’s invisible, unwinnable tests when I was ten. The one who dried my tears and told me my mom was just confused. That I was beautiful and smart andenough, and when I was 12, and she died, a part of me died with her.
She was a good person, unlike the woman who actually raised me.
“Absolutely not,” I say, speaking the words out loud, my back straightening, my jaw tightening. The armor I’ve built around me to be her perfect child despite everything shatters, and I revert back to a version of me I hid long, long ago.
“Excuse me?” My mother says, seething.
“I said, absolutely not. You do not talk about Jeanette like that. One, she isn’t here to defend herself. You yourself taught me not to talk ill of the dead, but your obsession with talking shit about Mr. And Mrs. Greene is absolutely criminal. And two, that woman was more of a mother to me than you ever were. She was kind and comforting and never?—”
I don’t get to finish my sentence because searing pain strikes my cheek, my face turning as my mother slaps me across my face.
“How fucking dare you,” my mother says with pure fucking venom, with a voice I’ve never heard before. “How dare you? I am your mother. I raised you.”
“I…” I start stuttering. My cheek is throbbing, and I think, at this point, I’m in pure shock, unsure of what to do.
I’m twenty-seven, and my mother just slapped me in the entryway of my workplace.
