“Oh yeah you did,” she retorted angrily. “All the stuff you did to Martine?”
My body started burning and I instantly leaned back, asking sarcastically, “So, she stole your homework out of your locker and passed it off as hers?”
“Mom—” Auden began.
“No,” Pippa snapped.
I kept with the sarcasm. “Oh, so she stole your boyfriend. Is that it?”
She leaned angrily around her brother toward me. “Don’t pretend you don’t understand what I’m saying.”
“So sweet, pretty, quiet Ash destroyed your world? Knowingly and willfully participated in behavior that meant you lost everything. The man you’d loved for two decades. The home you’d made together for your children. The future you were looking forward to. Is that what happened?” I asked,
“Please, Mom—” Auden tried again.
“You know it isn’t,” Pippa spat.
“Your father and stepmother did that to me,” I retorted. “If your father found someone else he loved, after committing his love to me, that was not okay. But there was a way to go about handling that. How he did it was not that way. I reacted and they had consequences, frankly, that they deserved. I shouldn’t have allowed you children to see that but that’s the only thing I did wrong. The rest, they bought that. They bought it. You betray someone, you have no choice but to live with the beast your betrayal created. What you’re doing to Ash, she didn’t buy that.”
“Uncle Lawrie,” Auden beseeched.
“Your sister did this, pal, it is not good. So she also answers for it,” Lawrie said firmly and calmly, but there was disappointment in his voice.
Auden’s face set.
“This is not my girl,” I stated, my eyes never leaving my daughter.
“I had to move from my school. I had to find friends. Polly’s popular and she’s nice to me,” she returned, strangely not blaming me for them having to move but I didn’t have a mind to that.
“Polly is totally a bitch.” I whirled at Aisling entering the conversation. Surprisingly, she wasn’t done speaking. “Everyone knows it. And to be a friend, you have to be a bitch too. And she’s not popular. She’s feared.”
I whirled back to my daughter, raising my brows. “Is that what you want? Do you want to be feared?”
“Mom, come on. Lay off,” Auden ground out.
“Polly’s history,” I declared.
“Mom!” Pippa shouted.
“My girl does not hang with mean girls,” I informed her.
“Mom, goddammit, lay off,” Auden clipped.
My gaze shot to him. “Language,” I snapped.
“You’re losing it,” he returned.
“Of course I am,” I replied. “I’m dealing with my daughter who I cannot wrap my head around the fact she’s been a bully at all, much less to a girl I care about deeply,” I retorted.
“You need to calm the fuck down,” he shot back.
“Language!” I bit out.
“Fuck you! Fuck that! Fuck this!” he suddenly shouted and my back shot straight.
“Auden,” Lawrie growled, coming close to me.
“Do not speak to your mother that way,” Mickey waded in, coming to my other side.
“Fuck you too!” Auden ignored Lawr and said to Mickey. “You can’t tell me shit.”
“Enough!” I screeched and the room stilled. I turned eyes to my son. “Give your Uncle Lawrie your car keys.”
“What?” he asked sharply. “Why?”
“Do it…now,” I whispered, my voice trembling.
“I’m not—” he began.
“Keys, pal, you’re not going to make your mother ask again,” Lawrie stated, moving to my son with his palm up.
I turned and caught sight of Aisling and Cillian, anger and horror and sadness searing through me that all this time my daughter was a part of Aisling fading.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
Tears formed in her eyes.
Cillian shuffled protectively closer to his sister.
Seeing that, I stomped to my phone on the kitchen counter. I snatched it up, slid my finger on the screen and put it to my ear.
It rang once.
“Are the kid’s all right?” Conrad asked in greeting.
He sounded very concerned.
That did not dawn on me.
“Auden’s grounded,” I announced. “He cursed in my home even after I told him not to and then he did it directly to both me and Mickey.”
“Shit,” Conrad muttered, a surprising response but one that was lost on me.
“And our daughter is a bully. She’s hanging with bullies and she defends her position that she doesn’t say cruel things, but she doesn’t deny she participates by not only egging it on by laughing but also not doing what she can to stop it or remove herself from it,” I shared.
“Jesus Christ.” Conrad was still muttering but now doing it sounding angry.
“She further defends herself by saying I taught her that garbage with what happened between you and me and Martine.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he bit out and that got to me, making my body jerk.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s ridiculous. What happened with you and Martine is not that. There’s no excuse for bullying.”