“You can just fuck off now, Clara Belle Abbott, and fuck off tomorrow, and fuck yourself off into eternity. That’s how it’s going.”
“Ma, enough,” Boone said, checking to make sure I was in the bed before clamping his hands on Dolly’s shoulders and guiding her toward the cab. Apparently he was of a like mind when it came to keeping us as far apart as possible.
“Don’t expect me to pretend to be civil, Boone. Don’t ask me to play nice with the girl who took a sledgehammer to your heart.” Dolly stumbled forward, guided by Boone’s steady grip. “You’re a good boy, the best kind out there, and you didn’t deserve to be treated like trash. Not with everything you did for her.”
I should have bit my tongue. I should have tried to bite it harder. “And treating him like trash doesn’t include having him haul your ass out of the same dive bar every week while the crowd jeers at you both like you’re a couple of clowns?”
Boone’s face pulled into a wince, but he was anticipating Dolly hurling herself my direction. His hold tightened on her shoulders right as she threw herself toward the bed, looking ready to leap inside headfirst if that was the fastest way to get to me.
“Goddammit, enough!” Boone shouted, pulling her back and twisting her body around until she was facing the cab again. “Get in now, or I’m leaving and the cops can deal with you.”
Dolly looked at her son, her eyes unable to focus on him thanks to the alcohol, and she patted his cheek gently. Almost affectionately, though Dolly was about as affectionate as a rabid wolverine. Over her shoulder, she said to me, “You better not compare what you did to my son to what I’ve done to him. We all have our faults, but at the end of the day, I love my son.”
My fingers curled into my palms. Dolly Cavanaugh had always had a way of getting under my skin. Not just because she was the mother of my once-upon-a-time boyfriend, but because she used love as an excuse for everything she did.
“I loved him too!” I shouted as Boone lifted her into the cab. “But at least I didn’t keep making the same mistake over and over, excusing it with love. The same mistake every other happy hour.”
From the looks of it, Dolly put up a bit of a fight to get out of the truck to come at me, but her strength was waning. She’d likely gotten a punch of adrenaline after seeing me, and now that that had tapered off, she was probably only a few seconds away from passing out into a whiskey coma.
Boone shot me a look as he held his mom, keeping her where she was. His look was more pleading than stern, one that said he already had to deal with one person he could barely handle and he really didn’t need another one. I sealed my lips for him, then I turned around and threw my back against the back window of the truck. It was a little easier to ignore Dolly when I wasn’t looking at her and she was more snoring than spewing.
Dolly Cavanaugh had been a five-foot-two tornado with fiery red hair for most of her life. From the sounds of it, she’d come into life making a ruckus, and I knew from experience she was likely to leave the world the same way. A person couldn’t miss her walking around town. She might have been petite, but she had a way of holding herself that made her seem half a foot taller. Plus she was top heavy and all legs, and she knew how to dress to further showcase her genetic advantages. She’d never been shy with her affections for men, just as they’d never been shy in return.
That was probably why there’d been a long-standing rumor circling the community that Boone and Wren came from different dads. To look at them, a person could easily be convinced, but the rumors had never gotten to Boone. Wren was his sister, and no one could try to tell him otherwise.
When Boone came around to the driver’s side after buckling his mom in and getting her door shut behind her, he paused. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay.” I nestled a bit lower into the bed to get comfortable. The drive from here to Dolly’s place wasn’t far, but riding in the back of an old truck while bouncing down washboard roads that hadn’t been repaved in over a decade wasn’t the definition of comfortable.
“You don’t look okay.”