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RHETT
Waiting to kill Jimbois making me nuts. The cold weather doesn’t help. I can’t even start plotting with Hobo until the snow stops. Finally, after hours of restlessness at the Pigsty, I text Irina to ask if she wants to go out to dinner.
After a few minutes, she replies with, “How long would I be gone?”
Whenever Irina asks these questions, I assume she doesn’t want to spend time with me. Only after a second to actually use my fucking brain, do I remember Fiona needs care.
“Can you stay overnight?”
Irina doesn’t respond right away. I tap my foot with such intensity that Goose and Tomcat stop playing video games and frown at me.
“Yes,” Irina finally replies.
Smiling at her response, I want to leave now. Instead, I’m stuck waiting for two hours.
The snow is still coming down when I pull up to the front guard building. Irina appears under a hooded jacket. In her hand is a small overnight bag. I hurry her inside the SUV, where I kiss her until she laughs at my neediness.
“I missed you, too,” Irina says, grinning at me while wiping off the wet snow. “Where are we going?”
“I’m not sure.”
Irina studies me as we sit at a light despite the lack of traffic. Nothing about her gaze feels judgmental, yet I can’t settle myself.
“I need to show you something,” I say and make a U-turn, so I’m headed toward my old house.
The remodeled ranch with a double-pitch roof and gray wood siding felt like a huge step up when my mom first brought me to visit. I felt important to get to live in the house.
The stained wood floors and big stone fireplace felt fancy like Walla Walla’s house that I visited for his sixth birthday party. When we moved in, my mom showed me all the spare bedrooms and asked me to pick which one I liked most. I chose the one closest to hers. All my life, we’d slept together. I was afraid to be away from her, even if I’d get a cool new room.
My mind fills with memories as I park in the driveway, next to the asshole’s sedan. I think about how I cried every night for weeks after my new dad moved me into the basement. Maybe I was a dumb kid because it took me a really long fucking time to figure out how I wasn’t wanted by him. I’d go up to the door, find it locked, and be so shocked.Where was my mommy?
Irina doesn’t speak when we sit in the idling SUV. She probably thinks I’m crazy. Or weak for still harboring grudges from so long ago.
“I grew up here,” I say when I find my voice. “For the first seven years of my life, my mom and I lived in a shack behind my grandparents’ house. We had nothing. Then, this guy who worked in an office and drove a relatively new car started sniffing around her. Jillian was so beautiful, but men didn’t want her. They figured she must be cheap for getting knocked up when she was a teenager.”
“People judge others to distract from their own failings.”
I give her a small smile. Irina’s got a way of pushing away her pain. Hiding from it, I guess. Not me.I wallow in that shit.That’s why I can’t settle down. I’m still the kid missing my mom, both when she was upstairs and after she died. I’ve never been able to get over what I lost.
“Lloyd had a wife before, but she left him for someone else. I heard about that when I was older. It made sense. My mom was beautiful, but she was also poor and stuck with a kid. He’d get the hot wife without worrying about her running off. I was the baggage keeping her trapped here.”
“She didn’t think of you that way.”
“You don’t know.”
“Do you think she did?”
“No,” I mutter. “But others did. I was a mistake she made when she was too young to know better. I changed her whole life. I know she loved me, but I also know she would have been better off without me.”
“Eagle,” Irina says in a voice laced with pain.
I open my door and come around to help her out. Irina seems nervous about the wet, icy ground. When I consider her falling, I nearly pick her up like I did Fiona at Thanksgiving.
