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I lose the honesty through a cry. “His family! They don’t know about me and him. It’s new. I told Xander I would stay with him, promised him, like he knew something was wrong, but they don’t know me, so I can’t just demand to be close to him, so even if he’s dying right now, my promise in his mind, that I’ll be the one who stays and listens to him, my hand isn’t in his where I said it would be, where I swore it would be!”
“Right.” Mum straightens, wiping at her eyes that seem to leak like mine. She clears her throat, rising calmly, chin level with the floor and proud. “Up you get. We’re going to the hospital, but you can’t wear that.”
I crawl to a sitting position. “What?”
“You’re meeting the family,” she says simply; the way her mind works is a damn conundrum. “You need a nice jacket or a cardigan.”
I almost laugh against a mouthful of tears. “What? I can’t go to the—"
“Kaya Alana Lovit.” She grips her hips. “You have spent the last nineteen years of your life putting your foot down and rooting it to your exact demands. You have never letanyonetell you what to do or where you should be. I don’t want you to start now. That boy needs you.”
He does.I jump to my feet and grab my bag, following her graceful strides towards the door. “Okay.”
“Sweetie…” She stops and turns towards me, her eyes pleading. “A cardigan or a jacket. Please?”
“Okay, Mum.” I can do that for her. I rush to the wardrobe and stare at the contents, at the different outfits I would usually spend half a day matching and preparing, but my brain stalls. “Which one?”
“Ooh.” Mum steps forward, the question like catnip to a feline. “I like the champagne denim with your—”
My half-hearted glare cuts her off.
“Okay, okay.” She nods her misplaced enthusiasm away, holding the door open for me to exit. “The denim is fine. And let’s go. I’ll call aunty Jul—"
“Oh no.” I wander through the gap, hearing her locking the door behind me as I head down the veranda. “We are calling Mac.”
I feel a sense of dread creeping up my spine, but I have to do this for Xander. I have to put my nose into the Butcher family dynamic because I think he might want me to. I don’t understand it. I don’t need to. I made him a promise.
Retrieving my phone, I request Mac for an immediate pick-up and cross my fingers that my beach-bum is available to take his convict to the hospital.
I can hear Mrs Proper floating through my mum’s tone as she says, “Who? I can’t ride with a strange man. Kaya. I’m not a teenager anymore.”
I slump down on the brick wall by the motel driveway. “He’s not strange—” I halt on that lie because heiskind of odd with his far-out stare, his chapped lips, and sand carpeted car. “Well, he is no stranger than most people.”
We wait. Across the dimpled road, narrow houses are stacked together like dominos—sagging dominos. The overgrown vegetation reaches through the cracks in porches and driveways like hundreds of needles rising from the dirt.
Mum is standing, fidgeting with her chain, looking at her bare wrist, at a phantom timepiece, swiping away rogue hairs that don’t exist. She’s nervous.
For a man who cruises through life, with energy like a turtle on sand, he sure doesn’t mess around with Cabi timeframes. He’s here within ten minutes.
I hear her inhale when the old Mazda pulls up. If I could feel anything other than fear for Xander, I may revel in this moment more. This is good for her.
We’re adapting, Xander.
That is what we are doing.
Swallowing hard, I head to the passenger door to allow Mum a spot up front with Mac, but we collide at the same door. Shoulder to shoulder. I nod to the front seat. Her eyes widen, and her lips curve into a smile she clearly doesn’t feel.
We slide into the car.
Mac stares ahead, while beside him, my mum folds her hands in her lap like the Queen of England.
On Mac’s dashboard, the navigation shows his car as a green arrow and the destination—The District City Hospital—as a pin that is twenty minutes away.
“What have you done now?” he says after a few minutes of silence on the road. From the corner of my eye, I can see him glancing at me through the mirror.
I mostly gaze out the window, wanting to engage in our usual banter but not having the attention for it today. “I’m visiting a friend. That’s all.”
“Did you put him in there?”
