THE BONDSMAN IS LATE. IT’S NEARLY ELEVEN BY THE TIME HE shows.
Gavin is pacing all over hell and back and it’s as if he’s holding a piece of twine rapped around my insides while he walks.
“Fuck. We’re never going to make it back in time.” He’s been cussing at his phone for the past half hour.
I’ve texted Dallas a few times and he seems to buy my dying-from-bad-seafood story.
“We don’t have to stop and see Papa, Gav. I’ll live. We’ll get your mom home and we’ll hit the interstate. I’ll drive ten over the limit all the way to Austin. We’ll be fine.”
Before he can say anything, the bondsman, a short, stocky black-haired man with a military-style buzz cut and slight paunch over his belt, named Arnie, strides purposefully out of the metal doors and tells us everything is handled and that Gavin’s mom will be out in about fifteen minutes after she signs some paperwork for her belongings.
He and Gavin shake hands and he leaves us to wait some more.
“Do I even want to know how you came up with seven hundred dollars on such short notice?”
Gavin closes his eyes and shakes his head. “No, babe. You don’t.”
I do, actually, but now is not the time. I use the ladies’ room one more time, eat the granola bar in my purse after offering to split it with Gavin, who shakes his head, and follow him out to the car, where we enjoy our last few minutes of freedom from the inside of the Camaro.
If I thought I looked rough, Katrina Garrison gives the word a whole new meaning. Her hair is greasy, black roots showing several inches above the bleach-blond dried-out strands. and the bags under her eyes are deeper and darker than I remembered. I’m not sure how I expected her to greet her son but I know a slap to the face wasn’t what I’d pictured.
He doesn’t even flinch. He was expecting it, even if I wasn’t.
“Two fucking days, you ungrateful little bastard. You left me in that godforsaken place for two whole fucking days. Do you know what it was like in there? No, of course you don’t. You have no idea of the disgusting conditions I just suffered through.”
Her yellowing teeth show as she sneers at him, and I see how thin her lips have become. “Meth mouth,” my friend Cassidy and I used to call it when we’d see crackheads hanging out around Jaggerd’s dad’s garage.
I’m still reeling from the sting of the slap that might as well have landed on my own face, when he opens the back door and tells her to get in the damn car.
Katrina is shaking and so am I, though hers is likely from amphetamine withdrawal and my rattled nerves are from caging the urge to throttle the living life out of her.
“Breathe, Dixie Leigh,” Gavin whispers as he opens my door next. “I’m okay.”
“I’m not,” I choke out. “Gavin, why did she do that? You have got to stop letting her do this to you. I mean it.”
“I’m sorry you had to see that. Get in the car please. We need to get on the road.”
I do as he says, because he sounds so desperate and because I know Dallas will be flipping out if we’re late.
The second Gavin is inside, Katrina starts in on him but her tone has changed completely—from enraged to whiny. “I need twenty bucks, baby. I owe someone ten and I have no food in the house.”
“I just gave everything I had and then some to a bondsman to get you out of there, Mom. I don’t have twenty bucks. I’ll barely even have enough gas in this car to get it back to its owner.” He snorts out a harsh sound. “And I grew up in that house, remember? I know good and well you don’t give two shits about keeping food in it.”
My soul splits open at the reminder of how neglected he was. How Nana made him stay for dinner and a bath every night because she knew he wouldn’t get either at home. I can hardly breathe for the fist barreling through my chest.