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“She what?” I screeched.
There was no way we were keeping it secret that we were in here together.
He winced at the pitch my voice had reached, then nodded his head and handed me his phone.
I reluctantly took it, then stared at the contents of the screen.
I read the dossier that he had pulled up, ending with the last little bit about the last time my mother had contacted me.
“I haven’t talked to her in years,” I said quietly. “The last time she did,” I wiggled his phone at him. “She’s not a good person.”
“Tell me her story,” he suggested.
Or ordered.
I was choosing to think it was a suggestion, though.
That way I didn’t get all bent out of shape when I needed to be focusing on the problem at hand.
“Nothing much to tell, I guess. All of us have pretty dead-beat moms. All of us except for Simi. She was the only one who refused to let her daughter go to Dad when he told them he was keeping us. From the moment I can remember, I’ve been with my dad. We’d go on supervised visits with our moms sometimes, but ultimately, all of us were here. My mom actually came and visited the circus a lot. At the time, I was fairly convinced it was because my mom and my dad still had a thing for each other. They’d always disappear together for a couple of hours, and then they’d come back all smiling and happy.” I shrugged.
“How long was she here?” he asked. “When she’d show.”
I shrugged. “A week was the longest. But during that week, I never, ever saw her. Maybe at dinner at the food trailer. Sometimes I’d see her coming out of Dad’s trailer. But she never showed up here and hung out with me. It was always as if she was here doing a job. Val used to tell me that they’d be up together all night long. Val’s a night owl, FYI. She’s up when everyone else is sleeping. It drives us insane.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Do you think if you called your mother right now, she’d come here?”
I snorted. “My mother does what she wants, when she wants, and hasn’t ever done anything else. I could try, but to be completely honest, it would be pretty suspicious if I called her, because I never have before.”
He sighed. “I was hoping to make this easy.”
“Easy and my mother have never been two words put together before,” I admitted. “You’ll find she’s a terrible person, and that there’s a reason I turned out to be so good.”
“And why is that?” he asked me, looking suspicious.
“That, being my parents had nothing to do with raising me. Hell, we all raised ourselves,” I admitted. “We turned out pretty good, considering.”
He pulled out his phone and made a call.
I chose to head to the sink to wash my face.
To be honest, my parents weren’t angels. I’d never thought they were, either.
But to have this thrown in my face was like swallowing battery acid.
It was eating me up inside.
The cold water I splashed on my face felt heavenly.
The roiling in my stomach seemed to subside somewhat, and when I was drying my face, that’s when Winston started speaking.
“Find her and bring her to me,” he said into the quiet of the bathroom. “Don’t bother getting her anything. She may not be living long enough to need any toiletries.”
Again, that should really piss me off.
I mean, he was talking about murdering my mother, for Christ’s sake. But my mother had never been a mother to me. At this point, she was just another person in my life who had turned out to be nothing more than a person I knew.
The fact that I shared blood with two sickos did concern me, however.
My decision to never have children was sounding more preferrable by the second.
When I was eighteen, I’d gotten on the birth control implant when my doctor had refused to give me a hysterectomy.
I loved kids and all—I mean I loved my sister’s kids which included a brand-new niece and nephew who were the apple of my world—but the thought of having my own sent terror straight through my veins.
“Thanks, LaDerrick,” Winston said.
I threw my wet paper towel overly hard at the trashcan and missed.
I bent down to pick it up, and when I stood, it was to find a hard body at my back.
“You’re standing awfully close,” I said quietly.
“You’re taking this rather well,” he accused.
I turned around so that I was face to chest with him. Damn, but he was big.
“My mother ceased being my mother when she got me a jar of jelly for my birthday that I ate, and then promptly was sent to the emergency room.” I sat down on the toilet seat and absently reached for a piece of tissue paper on the back of the toilet which I then started shredding into my lap. “I was nine, and she knew that I was deathly allergic to nuts. The jalapeño jam had nuts in it. Who puts nuts in jalapeño jam? My mother. She thought it would be funny. She said she bought it, but turns out that she made it. And she didn’t even can it right. I’m lucky that I didn’t die from salmonella poisoning on top of nut poisoning.”
