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“Hey, Mom,” I answered the phone.
“Hey, Scoots, you just getting off?” my mother asked as if she didn’t know my schedule by heart when we all knew she did.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said back because even though I was an asshole most of the time, I was still a good ole Southern boy and this was my momma.
“Well, good. Why don’t you stop by here on the way home for some of your momma’s bacon and pancakes?”
She stated it like a question, but I knew better. When my mother asked her only child to come over for breakfast, that meant get your ass over here or I’ll bring it over to your house and make you feel guilty as hell.
She only lived a few blocks from me. It was one of the reasons I’d moved back home to Columbia. She and my father had raised me here in the same small house they still lived in. When I retired from the marines, it was a no-brainer that I’d move back home to be close to them. They were getting older and I wanted to be around them, to help them out when they needed it.
“I’ll be there in a minute, Mom,” I said, hanging up the phone and cranking up my bike. It took me the twelve minutes to get to their home from the station that it always did.
I pulled up to see my seventy-year-old dad on his lawn mower in the backyard. His favorite place to be. I didn’t like him out there in this heat and I’d told him so more than once. But no one could stop my dad from doing whatever the hell he wanted to, so I’d long since given up trying to boss him around.
I tried to give him a wave, but I was positive he hadn’t heard me pull up over the mower, so he just kept on trucking and so did I to the front door of the house.
I walked up the front walk, admiring the new fall flowers he’d planted out front. When I neared the front door, I leaned over to touch one of the orange flowers, only to feel a rough fabric instead of an actual live petal.
I rolled my eyes at my crazy-ass parents planting fake plants, just like I ignored the many stone fountains that were strewn about their yard, and opened the front door.
“Anyone home?” I yelled even though I knew they were. It was tradition, after all.
I made my way toward the smell of bacon cooking in the kitchen. My mom was standing at the stove in an old housecoat that zipped up in the front and covered her from head to toe. Her gray hair was cut short and perfectly styled with tons of hair spray even though she was still in her pajamas.
“Morning, Momma,” I said, saddling up next to her and pressing a kiss to her wrinkled cheek. I snagged a piece of bacon from the plate next to the stove and leaned on the counter near her.
She turned her hazel eyes on me and gave me a once-over. “You look like shit, Scoots.”
I nodded because I felt like shit. “It was a rough shift.”
She pressed her lips together and her eyes got soft. “I’m sorry, baby.”
She plopped some pancakes and bacon on a plate for me but didn’t ask more. She’d learned the hard way not to ask about my hard shifts.
She buttered my pancakes and poured syrup over them before placing them on the table in my spot just as my dad opened the back door of the kitchen to join us.
“Hey, West. When’d you get here?” he asked, picking up the newspaper from the counter and coming to sit next to me at the small round table in my parents’ kitchen.
They had a big dining room with a large table, but we never, ever sat in there. We always ate in the kitchen close together so we could chat.
Sometimes I felt like this, these moments, my parents were the only thing that kept me sane and going anymore.
“Just five minutes ago.” I leaned over and hugged my dad and rubbed the top of his bald head while Mom placed his plate in front of him and sat down to join us.
“How was work?” Dad looked at me with raised eyebrows.
“Shit,” I answered, shoving some pancakes in my mouth and trying not to think about that sweet little boy crying underneath the car.
“Sorry, Son,” he said around a mouth full of bacon.
He didn’t ask any more about my work night either. But my mom jumped right in on a subject I’d been avoiding since the last time I’d been here.
“Well, I tell you what. Penny across the street, her daughter just moved home after a really bad divorce and you know what, Scoots?”
“What?” I answered, indulging her, but I already knew what because she’d told me this same bullshit three days ago when I’d come to have breakfast after my last shift at the firehouse.
I attempted to wolf down my breakfast as quickly as possible so I could get the hell out of here before she invited the woman over to meet me.
