My grin got less shaky and my nod was far more definite.
“You’re on TV duty, I’ll get the ice cream,” she decreed.
She then came in, brushing her cheek against mine before shelet me go and moved toward the kitchen.
“Mom?”I called.
She turned to me.
“I’m sorry you have to go through this with me,” I said.
“Something else you’ll learn, I pray, my beauty, is thegood, the bad, the ugly, a mother is never sorry.Their baby needs them,there’s no other place they would be.”
Yes, oh yes.
I’d never manage without her.
“I love you,” I told her.
“And there it is,” she replied simply.
Then she went to get the ice cream.
I watched her go, knowing she was right.
There it was.
That was us.Our family.Our life.
We’d never had a mortgage (Mom still rented).We’d never hadroots.
But we’d had each other.
And love.
And that was all that was needed.
So life sucked right then, it was uncertain and scary, bothof those things in the extreme.
But I had my mom.
And that was all that was needed.
On that thought, I moved to the TV.
Chapter Two
Path
Rosalie
A plethora of guns lay in display cabinetsbefore me, lined up on their sides, white tags attached to them.
A little old man with not a lot of hair (in fact, there wereabout three strands wafting over his shiny dome) was on the opposite side ofthe case, just down, eyeing me as I assessed my options.
I could imagine what I looked like.What with it being justa couple days after Tack, Hop, Tyra, and Lanie came to call, I was stillbruised and stitched up with a taped nose, angry welts across my neck, andmoving gingerly.
He probably thought I was a woman with revenge on my mind.
