He heard her horrified gasp.“How could you say such a thing about your own mother?”
“I don’t know, Aunt Elaine,” he retorted with deep sarcasm.“You think maybe her deathbed confession had something to do with it?”
Or the thirty years of bullshit and drama she put him and his father through before that happened.
“That makes her no less your mother,” she snapped.
“At least that’s true,” he muttered.
“She would be heavily disappointed in you, Ranger.Broken.Destroyed.This isn’t the son she raised.”
“She didn’t raise me,” he bit.“I was a toy.Sometimes her favorite.Sometimes she forgot I fuckin’ existed.”
“Don’t use that language with me, Ranger Hutchison.”
He’d had enough.“Good Christ, woman, you know the results of what she did.You know what I lost.WhatDadlost.How you have the absolute fuckin’gallto get up in my shit about her, I honest to Christ will never understand.”
“Well, at leastInow understand why you refuse to come home to be with your family to remember whatwelost,” she returned.
“Yeah,” he agreed.“At least you understand.”
“I’ll lay a rose on her grave for you,” she sniffed.
“Do whatever you want, but that rose is not from me.I know you won’t understand this, but I have enough feeling for the woman to say I’m glad you loved her so much.She didn’t deserve you either.But that’s all I got for my mother.”
“Lisa would be broken.Destroyed,” she repeated in a whisper.
Good, Hutch thought.
“Until we do this shit next year, have a great Thanksgiving, Christmas and a Happy New Year,” he said.
Then he hung up.
With a day to get on with, Hutch put that out of his mind, Blitz back in his pen and pulled out Major to work with.
He was heading inside to shower so he could pick up Mabel to take her to the sanctuary when his next call came.
Lug.
Probably to settle the day next week when he’d come out and put on the padded suit to be Hutch’s dogs’ prey when they went through attack drills with his clients.
“Yo, Lug,” he answered.
“Hutch, my man, something bizarre happened last night at The Link.”
Hutch stopped in his kitchen to listen to the answer after he asked, “What happened?”
“One of those guys, you know, the pseudo-Amish folk down the road?”
Hutch’s skin got tight.“Yeah, I know those guys.”
“Well, he strolls in last night, and everyone in the joint, all five of them, freaked.I did too.Not expecting that guy to walk into a drinking establishment.”
“No.Agreed.That’s unexpected.”
“So, see, this guy walks in, looks at the stage and then comes to me.”
“Yeah,” Hutch prompted, a creeping sensation slithering up his spine.
