Page 5 of Saints & Sailors

“Saylor… W-We made a bargain. It was a last-ditch effort,” my mother went on. “We’re sending you away.”

My face crumbled. The record skipped. Even my pain froze. “What?”

“Saylor,” my mother sighed. “You’ve gotta go, honey.”

Disbelief briefly went through me as anger was quick to take over. “Really? You’re going to kick out your only fucking kid?”

Richard stepped over to me. “I don’t think you know what strings I just had to pull, young lady.”

I deadpanned. “As cocky as you are, now you’re acting like your job is strenuous?”

“Saylor Leigh!” my mother scolded me.

“What? He got me off, didn’t he?” She should’ve been consoling me and attending to my aches, but no, she was taking Richard’s side and trying to throw me out.

Richard faced my mother. “Tell her, so I can see her bubble burst. I am through with saving her ungrateful little ass. I’m sick of her shit. She could’ve killed someone tonight!”

And the award for Outstanding Dramatics in a not-so-serious situation goes to…

I massaged my temples. “Can we please just talk about this tomorrow?”

My mother folded her hands. “That’s just it. After you’re discharged, we’re going home to pack you up.”

Mild panic set in at yet another person giving me the boot. Worst of all, my own mother.

This wasn’t real. She couldn’t just “send me away.” We had no family in LA. It had always been us two. We were estranged from my grandparents since I was five. My mother was an only child, and I didn’t even know Richard’s family that well to just move in with them.

I threw my hands up in mock surrender. “Oh, sure, just where am I going to go?”

My mother hung her head, her shoulders drooping in defeat. “We think it’s time that we…send you to live with your father.”

“You seem…troubled.”

That’s what the shrink told me before my own mother shipped me clear across the country.

We sat in his office on the fifth floor of some immaculate skyrise that late Thursday afternoon—a huge favor on his end, and he analyzed me. After ten minutes of a loud and awkward silence, he spoke up with his diagnosis: I seemed troubled.

Give me a break.

Troubled? No. Betrayed? Yes!

At the news of my going to live with my father, I couldn’t believe it.

I didn’t know my father. According to the story my mother told me, the guy sounded like a chump.

They were together for a short period, long enough for me to be conceived, and then poof! It was just my mother and me. She never spoke of him. He never called, wrote, or e-mailed.

And I never asked about him.

It wasn’t like I had daddy issues or whatever, I just didn’t know the guy. How could my mother send me to live with a complete stranger? Because that’s exactly what Scott Stanley was to me, a stranger. All I had of him was his last name. Or maybe more, who knew? I carried my mother’s heart-shaped face, her long blonde hair, and my brown eyes were all my own. Sometimes, if I squinted, I looked a little like her.

Now I didn’t care. She was throwing me to the wolves as far as I was concerned. One little mishap and she was sending me south.

Apparently, Scott lived in the state of Georgia, in a small town, barely on the map, called Meadow Grove.

“You’d be ‘troubled’ too if your mother abandoned you,” I replied to Dr. I-Have-the-Answers.

His bushy eyebrows peaked at my response. “Do you feel abandoned, Saylor?”