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“I wouldn’t?” I narrow my eyes at her, daring her to challenge me, even though I am lying through my teeth.
Before she can talk, my phone rings again. I silence her with a slash of my hand through the air. “I’m going to get that. Your ass better be out here when I get back.” I open the door with a tight smile looking at Ryan and Axel. I pull my phone out of my bag. I answer and it’s Rachel. Somehow they got locked out of the employee room with everyone else’s keys locked in there and their belongings in the lockers. They need my key. It’s one of those expensive locks she doesn’t want to break and replace. I don’t want to leave with Vanessa here but I have to.
“Ryan, come here.” I sling my bag across my shoulder. “I have to leave, but Vanessa is staying and she is going to pretend to be a halfway decent mother to Axel.”
“Why?”
“Because he needs that right now. If we kick her out it’ll make us the bad guys and her look like a sacrificial lamb. She’s going to take him to McDonald's. You’re going to go with them. Listen to everything she tells him. You are not to take your eyes off of them for one second.”
“I got it.” He nods.
“Axel,” I call over to him across the room. “I’m going to the store. I’ll be back.”
“Is Mom still here?”
“Yep, and looks like she’s going to take you guys out to eat dinner at McDonald's.”
“Yeah!”
I smile and go over to him and kiss him on the cheek. “See you later.” I walk outside to Vanessa and take twenty dollars out of my pants and shove it into her chest. “You’re going to take him to McDonald's, buy him what he wants, come back here, hang out with him, and give him the best fucking afternoon you can before you leave. He better have a smile on his face when I get home.” I leave her standing at the door with the twenty crushed to her chest in her fist and drive to the store.
* * *
“Thanks for comingdown to open the door. I’m sorry you had to come back down here. I don’t know how they locked their keys inside.” Rachel shakes her head.
“Don’t worry about it.” I pick up two locks and ask, “Which one of these do you think I should get? I’m looking for something strong.”
“I know you were probably annoyed coming down here but that’s no reason to try and lock us in. I think a lesson was learned. I promise to keep the spare in my office.”
“No.” I laugh. “It’s for my house. An unwelcome guest with a key was at my house when I got home.”
“How unwelcome?” Brows furrowed, she takes one of the locks from my hand and looks at it. “Do you think you need to file a report with the precinct?”
“Nothing that serious. Just my mother being her usual self.”
“Oh. Well, I’d go with this one. Can’t go wrong with a bulldog deadbolt.”
“I guess not.” I take the lock and put the other one back with a sigh.
“Are you okay?”
And there’s that sympathetic bordering on pitiful tone from people who have had the misfortune of dealing with Vanessa. “I’m fine, Rachel.” I lie because I hate feeling like that kid again, the one who was ashamed of her mother and the life she was living and trying very unsuccessfully to hide her from her friends. “I just didn’t need to come home to her after visiting my grandfather.”
“He’s not doing any better?”
“No. But you know how that is…anyway.” I shrug. I don’t want to talk about Grandpa’s deteriorating health. “I’m going to go ring this up and figure out a way to get a stack of long wood into the back of my car.”
“Wood?”
“I’m going to replace a few broken planks on my porch before someone falls through it and breaks something.”
“And you know how to do this?” she asks with a touch of skepticism. “Sounds like something you should call a professional to do.”
“Anything with the word professional attached to it is too expensive for me.”
“If you don’t know what you’re doing in the long run it will cost you, even more, to properly fix on top of any mistakes you make.”
“Well, that’s a chance I’ll have to take. Besides, you can learn almost anything with a good YouTube video. I watched one and it didn’t seem too hard to try with the boys.”
