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While Lyra poured themeach a tall glass of raspberry iced tea, Mom chatted with faux aimlessness, making seemingly random observations about the house that had once been her domain.
Laughlin wasn’t much of a town, official or otherwise; there wasn’t much distance between here and Mom’s home now, but still she managed to avoid being here more than a couple times a year. No one who lived here had made any huge changes to the place beyond those required when Mom had taken her share of the contents, but now she was noticing and remarking on every shift and revision as she wandered the kitchen and breakfast area.
Brutus stood at Lyra’s side and watched Mom intently, like he thought she was casing the joint. They’d never have adopted Brutus if Mom had stayed; she was a cat person and wary of dogs bigger than about twenty pounds.
“When did you get a bread box?” Mom asked. She pushed back the lid of the 50s-vintage bread box Lyra had scored at Gringo Gomez.
“I don’t know. Last year, I guess?” Lyra pulled down a box of sugar wafer cookies to go with their tea.
“Your dad’s okay with you keeping bread on the counter?”
“Sure.” They’d always kept the bread in the fridge, until a year or so ago, when Lyra had seen an article online about how being in the fridge dried bread out. She’d started keeping it on the counter, and Pop had asked why she wasn’t putting it away. She’d explained, and that was the end of it—which was exactly as she’d expected. If he’d had strong feelings about where bread belonged, he’d never shared them with her.
If Mom knew of strong feelings he’d had, she wasn’t sharing them now. She simply sucked her teeth and turned to study the bulletin board on the wall.
“Do you want to sit outside?” Lyra asked as she set the glasses and a plate of the cookies on the plastic tray they used for the patio.
Southern Nevada didn’t get what one might call an ‘autumn,’ but the sun calmed down and didn’t try to roast the world every day, so it was nice to be outside.
“Sure.”
Mom and Brutus followed Lyra out the door. Brutus trotted to his cushy dog area, snatching up a Bully chew on the way. Mom sat at the head of the table, the seat that was normally Pop’s.
“You haven’t been too interested in talking to me lately,” Lyra said as she handed her mother a glass and sat down herself. “What happened to change that?”
Mom took a long sip of tea before she answered, and when she did speak, it wasn’t an answer at all. “You’ve added a lot more pots and plants since I was last here.”
“Yep. You haven’t been here in like a year. Why are you here now, Mom?”
She took another drink of tea. “Wade and I broke up.”
Lyra took a sip from her own glass and tried to figure out how to respond. Weeks—months, actually—had passed since she’d told Mom about Wade hitting on her, or assaulting her, or whatever that had been. It was highly unlikely it had taken this long for Mom to dump him over it, which meant that something else had happened since. Lyra tried to guess what that something else could be, and tried to figure out how pissed off she’d be that what Wade had done toherwasn’t enough—or that Mom hadn’t believed her in the first place until after something else had happened.
She loved her mom. Moreover, shelikedher mom. They’d been close when Lyra was a kid, and until recently, she’d still have described their relationship as good overall. They’d never had a big clash, never been competitive with each other in the way she’d seen some girls be with their mothers. They’d crossed some rocky terrain during the divorce, but all the terrain had been rocky back then.
They’d had the kind of relationship where they bought each other dumb gifts, coffee mugs and plaques, greeting cards and charms with sentiments likeNot just my mother (ordaughter), also my friend.
Until Lyra had told her that her new love had rather aggressively hit on her.
When Lyra’s quiet lasted a while, Mom carried on without her. “Della saw him at the Cove with some big-hair, big-rack blonde.”
So her best friend, she believed. Her daughter, not so much.
But Mom wasn’t done. “When I called him on it, he said he was bored, and maybe we were better off going our own ways. He said he realized he wasn’t ready to settle down. He’s forty-five years old! When’s he going to settle down? When he’s sixty?” She ripped her Jackie O’s off and tossed them to the glass-top table.
Mom hadn’t believed—or maybe hadn’tcared—about what he’d done to Lyra. She apparently hadn’t cared that much when her best friend had offered corroborating evidence that the guy was, at minimum, a hound.
No,Wadehad done the breaking up.
It was impressive, really, how her mother had managed to make the betrayal worse by informing Lyra that she was no longer dating the asshole and his roaming hands.
“I don’t know what you want me to say or do right now, Mom.”
Mom’s expression took on a shadow of disbelief. “I want you to stop being so judgey with me. You wanted me to break up with him. I broke up with him. Can we please go back to how we were?”
