I chuckled. He knew me well. “You could say that.”
He sighed, looking down for a moment as if he were trying to string words together. “Are we really going through with this?”
I opened my mouth to respond, not sure what I was even going to say, but the front door opened and my mom peeked her head out. Her eyes flickered over me, then to Hunter, and back again.
“There you are. Come back inside, we’ll be serving dinner soon.”
If she’d caught me out here alone, she would have been angry at me for leaving the party, I was sure of that. But I was with Hunter, and she approved of that. For some reason, that thought made me feel incredibly tired.
We returned to the party, and my smile slipped back into place. It was time to put on a show.
My mother had placecards at each seat, and I was next to Hunter. My parents sat on my other side, while Hunter’s parents were beside him. This was what Thanksgiving dinners would be like from now on, I thought.
The food was exquisite, it always was. My mom had a knack for finding people that were amazingly talented in their field and utilizing them. In this case, it was the chef that she’d found over twenty years ago when she and my father got married.
By the time the dinner was done, I was ready to be back in my jeans. The dress was beautiful, but a little tight around my chest, and my shoes pinched my toes.
But I had to stick around for a while as the men went into my father’s study to talk business and smoke cigars while the women gathered in the sitting room to have coffee and gossip. It was all so archaic, and I spent most of the time lingering by the window, thinking about anything that wasn’t pointless gossip about people I didn’t even know.
I watched my mother. She really did love this. It was what she lived for. Would I feel that way someday? My future was predetermined, but still such a mystery to me. I didn’t know how being married to Hunter would change me. I didn’t know who I was.
Butch
I frowned as I pulled into the parking lot of my mom’s apartment building. The place was a shit hole. I wasn’t exactly surprised; her last place was so bad that it was eventually condemned by the city.
There were men outside of the building with shifty eyes and aggressive body language, but I wasn’t worried about them. They were a bunch of punks that wouldn’t dare to mess with me or my bike once they caught sight of the Outlaw Souls logo on the back of my jacket. Even a bunch of tweakers like this would know better than to mess with the motorcycle club.
Stalking past them, I walked into the building and up the stairs to the third floor. The carpet in the hall was threadbare and the walls were covered in peeling wallpaper, but it was the dim lighting that made the place really depressing.
What the hell was I even doing here?
Right.It was her birthday.
Stopping at the door with my mom’s number on it, I held her gift in one hand and knocked with the other. Immediately, I heard shuffling around on the inside of the apartment, but it was a couple of minutes before the door was pulled open.
My mother was standing in the doorway, looking twenty years older than she actually was. The life she lived was aging her quickly, and I fucking hated to see it. But I’d learned a long time ago that I couldn’t change her. It was the reason we barely had a relationship.
“Hi, Mom,” I said, stepping into the apartment.
“Brian, my baby boy,” she said, smiling as she shut the door and pulled her robe tighter around her thin body. It was mid-afternoon, but she was wearing a nightgown. “Come, take a seat.”
The place was a mess, with empty take-out containers of food scattered around the living room and stacks of fashion magazines on the end tables. There was a laundry basket next to the couch overflowing with dirty clothes, and the ashtray on the coffee table was full of cigarette butts. As she walked past me, taking a seat on the couch, she picked up a pack of menthols and pulled one out. By the time I’d sat on the chair, she’d lit up, blowing out a cloud of smoke into the air. I hated that minty smell. It reminded me of everything I didn’t like about my childhood.
“How have you been, Mom?” I scanned the area, looking for prescription bottles or powdery substances, but I didn’t find any. I wasn’t stupid enough to think that this meant she was clean. It was more likely that she’d taken so long to get to the door because she was hiding that shit.
“Really great, really great,” she said, and I could see the glassy quality of her eyes. She was high right now.
A bitter disappointment took ahold of me, which was just stupid. I knew the deal. She had been an opioid addict for years and at this point, I believed that she couldn’t go back to the person she used to be. It was the entire reason our relationship was so strained.
I knew that addiction was a disease, I’d done plenty of reading about it, but I just couldn’t get past the fact that I’d always come second to her drugs. I was her son, for fuck’s sake. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t forgive her for it. She might be a victim to her own affliction, but so was I. My brother too. Unfortunately, he followed in her footsteps, and now he was in prison, serving a five-year stint.
“Here, I brought you a gift,” I said, holding the wrapped package out to her.
“You always were such a sweetheart.”
I watched as she opened the gift, a ceramic bear with a party hat. She had always collected them, and I hoped she still did. There was light in her eyes as she examined the figure, and her smile was genuine.
“I love it,” she said, placing it carefully on the table beside her. “It’s perfect, just like you.”
