Dammit. She was going to kick her sister’s ass.
Fuming, Eva strode through the gate and up the steps, throwing open the front door hard enough to rattle the windows—if they weren’t already vibrating from the music. A skinny guy with a shock of greasy dreadlocks lay passed out on her couch, an open beer resting on his concave stomach and a joint burning down in his limp hand. The scent of pot filled the air in a cloyingly sweet cloud, and she started throwing open windows, heating bill be damned.
Pausing at the foot of the couch, she didn’t dare touch the guy to wake him. He looked—and smelled—as if he hadn’t bathed in months. But she did take the beer before it spilled and picked the joint out of his fingers because he was seconds from dropping it.
What the hell? This guy was not Shelby’s usual type. Yes, she vacillated wildly when it came to the men she’d dated, but they always fell somewhere on the scale between uber-geek hipster and punk rocker. Never drugged-out hippy. That was more like—
Oh, God.
Horror skittered across her skin as a slim figure appeared under the archway that separated kitchen from living room, and her worst fears came crashing into her home in the form of a woman-child who never understood the meaning of motherhood.
“Mom?”
“Honey!” Katrina breezed through the living room and pecked an air kiss on each of Eva’s cheeks. “So glad you’re home. I see you’ve already started without me.” She winked and hip-checked Eva hard enough to spill the beer she hadn’t set down yet. “At least one of my girls knows how to have a good time. Shel-Bear is being a party pooper.”
Eva looked toward the kitchen. Shelby hung back and lifted her shoulders in a helpless shrug when Eva met her gaze with a question in her own. Yeah, thanks, Shelby. A lot of help she was.
Eva set down the beer and dropped the joint into the can. “Mom, who is that guy?”
“That’s Doug. We’ve been living together in Baltimore.” She lowered her voice and leaned in as if to divulge a state secret. “He’s perfectly wonderful.”
“Yeah. Looks like Prince Charming.”
“Eee-va,” Katrina drew her name out on a whine. “Don’t be bitchy. You should be happy for your mama. I think I’ve finally found The One.”
“You said the same thing about my father. And Shel’s. And about Tony, the loan shark. Shane, the car thief. Jamal, the drug dealer. Oh, and who could forget Evander, the stripper? Or Aaron, doing time for double homicide?”
“Aaron was innocent.”
“Mom, he was caught with blood literally on his hands!”
“Well, this time it’s different. Doug and I are in love.”
Yeah, like Eva hadn’t heard that before. A headache began pounding in beat with the music, and she found the source—an actual boombox, straight out of the nineties, tape deck and everything. She yanked the cord out of the wall and Doug the One woke with a sputtered, “Hey!” Then after glancing around with droopy eyes, he added, “Where the fuck’s my joint?”
Uh-huh. Definitely another winner.
She faced her mother again. “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you still in Baltimore?”
Katrina instantly bristled. “What, I can’t come visit my girls?”
“Mom.”
“Oh, all right.” She flapped her skinny arms and sighed like answering the question was somehow a huge favor. “We got evicted. But it wasn’t our fault! The fucking landlord…”
Something else Eva had heard before. Nothing was ever Katrina’s fault, and the world was out to get her, and blah, blah, blah.
Christ almighty, Eva was sick of it. Closing her eyes, she pinched the bridge of her nose and focused on breathing until Katrina wound down the rant. Except, she was just getting started, and after about five minutes of increasingly frenetic and paranoid claims, Eva couldn’t take it anymore.
“Mom. Mom. Mom!”
Panting, wild eyed, Katrina spun on her. “What?”
“You can’t stay here.”
“Why not? Don’t you love me anymore?” Like that, her fanatical expression crumpled into a pout, and Eva caved. This was her mother, after all.
“All right, you can stay, but not that guy. I’m not supporting one of your deadbeat boyfriends.”
Katrina’s gaze cut to her one true love and tears welled in her blue eyes. “Eva, honey, you can’t possibly expect me to choose between my daughters and the man I love.”
Yes, she absolutely could. On this point, the pout wasn’t going to sway her. She stood her ground as tears trickled prettily down her mother’s cheeks.
“I can’t leave him.”
Eva nodded and only felt the tiniest pinch of regret. She’d been down this road one too many times to feel more than that. “Then you need to find someplace else to go.”