All the mock-delight seeps from her voice, leaving only scorn. “It’s rude to stare.” She puts a hand back to support her spine, curved by the weight she appears to be carrying. “Scrape your jaw off the floor and come help me with a vase.”
This, grasshoppers, is what I get for not coming to see my mother for months. She’s punished me plenty of interesting ways before, but this here’s a whole new ball game. When I do come, of course, I always bring lilies. Funeral flowers. It’s like our sordid little private joke.
The new joke is not funny.
“Don’t you dare ask me how this happened,” she goes on, waddling back out of the kitchen with a green vase to match the table. “We both know you’re up on your birds and bees bullshit.”
“You’re forty three, Mom.” I sound ridiculous.
This whole thing is ridiculous.
“Who knew the eggs were still fresh, huh?” She rubs her belly, deliberately tugging the tunic up so I get a good look at the stretched flesh beneath. “Still. This will be good for you. It’s exactly what you need.”
What I need is a good night’s sleep, a bottle of vodka, and the kind of fuck you can only pay for in Thailand. I’m all out of fucks for anything else and I still can’t bring myself to put the lilies down.
“Think about the PR opportunities. He’ll be your little shadow. Your mini-me.” She sighs in perverse, feigned glee. “We’ll be a nice little family for the cameras.”
Right. Because we’ve always been such a happy family; because the family she has now just isn’t enough.
“So who is he?” I manage. “The father. Shouldn’t I be taking you all out to dinner?” Or putting his cock through a meat grinder. That kind of thing.
“Who knows,” she says cheerfully, snatching the lilies from my hand in a swish of crepe paper and a burst of heady scent. “So how’s your channel going? It’s a channel, right?”
It’s a news network.
She doesn’t know?
“Does he know about this?” I ask.
“Of course he fucking knows, Aeron.”
“But you don’t know who he is,” I say flatly.
“Know is a very subjective term.” She places the lilies carefully on the table, and pauses to yank the tie apart. “I mean, he knew. But it doesn’t matter now, does it? You’ll have a little brother to entertain in a month or so, and I’ll finally be a mother.” She clears her throat. Sighs. “Again.” She talks as if she’s full of excitement, yet every word is weighed down with dread.
Time to put on my nice boy voice. It hardly ever works on her but she seems extra psychotic today, and what do I have left to lose?
“Maybe I should check him out. Make sure everything’s…safe.”
“Do I get a side of skinny fries with your bullshit chivalry these days?”
“No. But I know a great surgeon and I’ve got a whole closet full of coat hangers, so…”
She snorts. “Mind all the skeletons when you’re rooting one out.”
This witch can’t take care of a baby; she barely took care of me. I line up options and shoot them like bottles—can’t exactly get rid of the baby now. Can’t get it adopted; what if someone found out? I’m just starting to make a name for myself, for fuck’s sake, and middle America is so far up its own ass, it’s yogic.
“You could say congratulations,” Mom calls, still concentrating on the flowers.
“Congratulations.” You spiteful narcissist.
Spiteful, murderous narcissist bitch.
“What do I tell people?” I ask. “About the baby.”
“Well. Maybe don’t say you’re looking forward to being a father.”
“You’re fucking sick, you know that?”
“That’d be a headline for you though, huh?” She chuckles to herself. “Isn’t that what you were all about in college, making your own news?”
I ought to cull her completely. I fantasize about it. I’ll never have to stand in the shadow of her forked-tongue misery again, or waste another afternoon trudging across the city to pick up another bunch of fucking lilies. Enough of that already.