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“Thank you,” she said instead, and made an effort to sound as if she’d never visited Mississippi, much less grown up there. “I appreciate you calling with your good wishes.”
Wanda Mae snorted. “I couldn’t walk three feet today without someone else throwing your latest exploits in my face. Do you know what they’re saying about you? Do you care?”
“I’ll assume they’re not praising me and calling me the next Kate Middleton,” Brittany said, and was proud of the fact she sounded amused. Or close enough to amused, anyway, that the mother who barely knew her wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. “But that’s just a guess.”
“Trust you to marry a king and screw that up, too,” Wanda Mae snapped.
Brittany sighed. “I did it to hurt you, of course. You’ve discovered the truth.”
“You think you’re so smart, don’t you?”
Her mother didn’t wait for an answer. She kept right on talking, the way she always did.
The sick part, Brittany understood then as she listened to the usual litany of complaints and accusations that followed after that rhetorical question, was that she found this comforting on some level. She clenched her free hand into a fist and felt her rings dig into her flesh, but still, this was some kind of cold, bracing comfort. It reminded Brittany who she was and, worse, who she might have become.
Nothing had ever made Wanda Mae treat her eldest child as anything but an embarrassing burden, no matter how much money Brittany had sent home over the years, which was never, ever enough. Nothing had ever made Wanda Mae act as if she loved Brittany at all, for that matter. Not Grandmama. Not her other kids, most of whom Brittany had basically raised herself while Wanda Mae was out cavorting in bars. Not the fact Brittany was the only one who hadn’t gotten in any trouble. She hadn’t gotten pregnant and she hadn’t gone to jail. She’d just left.
And still, somehow, Brittany found her mother’s predictable fury soothing. She knew what to expect, and no matter that it was the same endless font of vitriol every time. It was her mama. It was the way things had always been.You probably need to take a look at that,she told herself, not for the first time.
After all, she’d lost her virginity at last. She’d never thought that would happen. Didn’t that suggest anything could?
But not today. Not when she felt so...ripped up inside. It was as if those stolen, heated moments in the castle had done a whole lot more than throw her over a cliff she hadn’t known existed. They had crumbled her foundations into dust.
Cairo had.
She didn’t know what to do about it. She didn’t know if anything could be done about it, come to that. And her mother was still shooting off her mouth, the way she liked to do when she got going.
No wonder she’d answered this call. Somewhere deep inside, Brittany had obviously wanted to know that something, somewhere, would remain the same no matter how much she might have changed. No matter how much Cairo had already changed her, from the inside out, leaving her flailing about without a mask when she needed one the most.
“Only you could manage to marry the one person on earth more sinful and shameful than you are,” Wanda Mae was saying as if personally affronted by this. “How am I supposed to hold my head up in town, Brittany?”
“I’ve never known how to answer that question, Mama,” she replied, unable to keep the weariness from her voice. “But I’d imagine you should use your neck, like anyone else.”
“I’m glad you can still make smart remarks. I’m glad you think this is one more big joke, like everything else in your life. Everyone knows exactly what kind of sick pervert that man is. Everyone knows what he’s like. It’s probably why you chose him. Youlikedegenerate, disgusting—”
Brittany didn’t know she meant to move and she had no memory of doing it, but then she was standing there by the side of the bed as if she’djumpedup. Her heart pounded at her, suggesting she had.
“Careful, Mama,” she said, and her voice was cold. A kind of blade, slicing through her mother’s stream of words and shocking them both, if her mother’s gasp was any indication. “Be very careful. Keep running your mouth about him and you might find the bank dries right up. Then how will you keep yourself in cigarettes and beer?”
“You would threaten your own mother?”
“I don’t want to hear your thoughts on this marriage.”
Wanda Mae sniffed. “This is the influence that man has on you. This is the kind of ungrateful, selfish creature you’ve turned into, in such company. Flaunting yourself all over the world and then taking it out on your poor—”
“This is your last warning,” Brittany said, even colder. “I’m not playing with you, Mama. He is off-limits to you.”
Her mother fell quiet, and Brittany couldn’t seem to feel that shocking little victory the way she should. She felt too unsteady. Her stomach was twisted into a knot and her heart was pounding at her. And she couldn’t remember the last time she’d defended her choices to her mother. Had she ever?
But she refused to listen to her mother vent her spleen on Cairo.
She refused.
She didn’t really want to ask herself why.
“You listen to me, Brittany,” her mother said after a long pause, and her voice had gone quiet. Brittany closed her eyes and braced herself. “You think I don’t know anything. You lit out of Gulfport and never looked back and believe you me, your opinion of the folks you left behind couldn’t be more clear. You think we’re all dumb country trash.”
“I think nothing of the kind,” Brittany gritted out, and what she hated herself for the most was how guilty she felt when her mother said these things. As if Brittany’s snobbery had been the problem instead of Wanda Mae’s patented blend of neglect and malice. “I think you’d find just as much about me to criticize if I lived next door.”
