“Why don’t you go and run a bath, Mom?” I suggest. “I’ll come up when I’m done with Dad and see to your nose.”
“Sit the fuck down, Diana.” Dad stalks toward us, nostrils flaring and eyes as black as the night sky. He slams an unopened bottle of vodka down on his desk, snarling at Mom. “That should keep you happy while I talk toour son.”
Mom slides out from behind me before I can stop her. Dad swings around and throws a punch. His fist lands on the side of her jaw, and she collapses like a sack of potatoes.
I go for him again, and he pulls a gun on me, pressing the muzzle into my stomach. “Enough!” he grits out. “You seem to have forgotten who calls the shots around here. Sit your ass down and shut up until I ask you to speak. If you want to protect your mother, you know what to do.”
I grind my teeth to the molars, and a muscle ticks in my jaw as we face off. Mom is crying as she climbs to her feet, swiping the bottle of vodka and unscrewing the cap. Disgust is etched upon dad’s face as she drinks straight from the bottle.
He created the monster, but now he can barely tolerate looking at her.
“Sit.” Moving the gun to my side, he pushes me toward one of the chairs in front of his desk. Accepting defeat, I sit down without uttering another word. I often wonder why I bother fighting Mom’s battles when she makes zero effort to defend herself. She’s a slave to booze, and it’s like nothing else matters but getting that next fix. Not her husband’s swinging fists. Not her son’s sanity or safety.
Mom yelps as Dad grabs her by the hair, throwing her into the chair beside me. She doesn’t drop the vodka though, clutching it protectively to her chest, like it’s a baby. Frustration washes over me. I feel a whole host of emotions whenever I contemplate the life my mom leads. Anger is a recurring sentiment, along with exasperation and a sense of helplessness, but overwhelming sadness is the most regular feeling. She’s a shell of a person, existing from one bottle to the next. I don’t know that she has many moments of lucidity. Most all she has known these past twenty years is pain and self-loathing.
Sometimes, I wonder if she would be better off dead. Occasionally, I think she’d be doing me a big favor popping too many pills and washing it down with Mr. Grey Goose. This noose around both our necks would die with her body, and maybe that would be for the best because this is no way to live.
And the truth is, it already feels like I’ve lost my mom. I lost her a long, long time ago.
Remorse courses through me as those thoughts land in my head, like always. I’m a shitty son for wishing her dead, but sometimes it’s hard to be understanding and show compassion. I know she’s a victim. I know Dad has preyed on her weaknesses, like he’s done with mine, but I never remember her fighting back. Not even when he struck me for the first time. I was six, and I cried my eyes out, calling for my mommy, begging her to make it stop, but she just stared at me with this blank look on her face, like she did every time after that until I got old enough to understand she was incapable of coming to my rescue.
You saved yourself.
Jimmy’s words resurrect in my mind, and I feel the truth of them deep in my bones. I have had some help, but he’s correct. I am the only person who can save me, and I’m not out of the woods yet. It’s a work in progress, and I won’t be able to say I’m safe and free until I’m out from under my father’s clutches. But I’m in the home stretch, and I just need to hang in there a little longer.
“You’re taking Gayle Turner on a date tomorrow night,” Dad says, yanking me from my head.
“What?” I splutter because that is literally the last thing I was expecting to come out of his mouth.
“You heard me. It’s all arranged. You’ll pick her up at eight, and I had my secretary make a reservation for you at Chelle’s Steakhouse.”
“Why the fuck did you do that?”
He clenches his hand around his tumbler. “Your language is appalling. You can’t show up at Yale speaking like that.” He waves a hand in my direction, and his lips pull into a grimace as he scrutinizes the additional ink on my arms and my neck. “It’s bad enough you look like that. Lawyers don’t look like thugs.”
“Taken a look in the mirror lately, Pops?” I snap, cutting across him. “You might not have my ink or use my appalling language, but you’re a thug all the same.” Dad has climbed his way to the top using any and all means necessary. Rumors are rife within legal circles about his association with shady characters and criminal enterprises, so he’s far from a saint.
My tats and piercings might make me look like a thug, to some people, but there’s only one gangster in this family, and it ain’t me.
True to form, he ignores me as if I haven’t spoken. “I have told you, time and time again, to stop with the ink. Don’t make me take it out on your mother. This is your last warning. Clean up your act, Vander, or I will make you.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
He throws his glass over my head with a loud bellow, and I duck down in time to avoid it. It slams into the wall, shattering upon impact.
“That was my daddy’s,” Mom says, in a dazed voice, staring straight ahead. It’s a miracle she even noticed. She’s kicked off her shoes, and her knees are tucked into her chest as she swigs from the vodka bottle.
“Do I look like I give a fuck about your daddy’s precious Waterford Crystal?”
“You gave a fuck when you married Mom for her father’s connections,” I spit out.
Dad only married Mom because her father was a judge and he used his influence to land Dad a prestigious job with a top law firm the second he graduated from Yale Law. My grandparents are both dead now and not here to see the way things have turned out for Mom and me. I doubt they would’ve been so supportive of the marriage if they knew how he has cheated, lied, bribed, and stolen to get to where he is. He’s even swindled Mom out of her inheritance, ensuring she has no independent wealth to fall back on so she’s eternally tied to him.
I bet it kills him he couldn’t stop me from claiming the inheritance they left for me. I got the cash the day I turned eighteen, and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. That money is all I have to use as leverage when I try to convince Mom to leave him. There is just enough to set her up in an apartment, free of his clutches, and pay for my first couple of years at Yale.
He points his gun at my head. “Don’t fucking tempt me.”
I bark out a laugh. “We both know you won’t shoot me. You’re arrogant enough to want your legacy to continue, and I’m your only option.”
