I almost groaned. The party. Ugh. “Almost,” I answered vaguely.
“That sounds convincing. Fine, I won’t ask. How’s it going with his baseball team?”
Spotting my house coming up, I turned the wheel to pull into the driveway. “He really likes it so far.” It was me who had been having issues with it. “I already got suspended from practice for getting into an argument with a mom on the team.”
“Diana! What did she do? Say something about Josh?”
In normal circumstances, she knew me too well. “She called me Teen Mom.”
There was a pause. Vanessa was a product of a parent who had become one as a teenager. “What a bitch.”
“Uh-huh. It’s fine. He likes it, I’m not worried about it, and the coaches are…” I let out a low whistle. “Not my type, but they’re nice to look at.”
She laughed. “Have your parents brought up him doing soccer again?”
I almost grumbled. That was a sore spot in my family. No matter how many times I explained to my parents that, just because I had two cousins who played professionally, didn’t mean every person with the last name Casillas was going to be good at it. “Nope.”
“And Louie?”
“Still no. He mentioned wanting to try karate, but he’s happy skateboarding for now.”
“I’m sure it’ll—shit. I need to go pee, but I need both hands to get off the couch—”
I just about shouted out a laugh, imagining her trying to get off the couch and failing.
“Shut up. I’ll call you later, okay?”
“Okay.” I snickered again. “Love you.”
“Love you too,” she replied.
“Bye,” we both said at the same time.
Tossing the phone into my open purse, I was cracking up all alone. Imagining Vanessa trying to hoist herself off the sofa again only made me laugh harder, easing my memories of the day further and further away. Out of the car, I opened the rear passenger door and reached in, slipping my hands through several grocery bags. My mom had sent me a text before I had gotten off, saying she would bring Louie home later, and with the Larsens taking Josh to batting practice and keeping him overnight, I had decided to hit the store on my way home. I’d stocked up on sick-kid necessities.
“Diana?”
I froze. Each wrist had four plastic grocery bags hanging off it. My cell phone was in my purse.
My heart started beating so fast there was no way I would want to know what my blood pressure could possibly be in that moment. I’d heard that voice before. It only took a second “Diana” for the tone to register with the part of my brain that didn’t want to recognize it.
It was Anita.
She had found my house.
She was here.
I wasn’t above admitting there wasn’t a reason for me to lose it, but I was going to do it anyway. I was more freaked out than angry, and that pissed me off. A knot filled the very center of my chest and my throat closed up. That part of me that didn’t want to deal with this—that never wanted to deal with this—said I should just get in the car, close the door, and get the hell out of there as fast as possible.
But I thought of Josh, and I knew I couldn’t do that.
Anita knew where we lived. She knew where we fucking lived. Arguably the biggest mistake of my brother’s life had somehow found our address.
My hands went numb right before they started trembling. I squeezed them into fists. I closed my eyes too, hoping this was a bad dream but knowing it wasn’t.
Slowly, I let out a long breath and ducked out of the car too hesitant when that was the last reaction I would want to have if I ever looked back on this moment. Like a bad dream, she was there.
Josh’s mom.
Josh’s birth mom.
I hadn’t seen her since Rodrigo’s funeral, where she’d pitched a fucking fit in the parking lot when she saw Mandy, my brother’s wife—Louie’s mom and Josh’s stepmom, who had always been more than that, until she wasn’t.
“Hi,” she said in a calm tone like the last time I’d seen her, she hadn’t called me a stupid bitch while she’d been drunk as a skunk. I could forgive her for that. We had all been in a bad place at that point. What I couldn’t forgive her for was trying to fight Mandy while she’d been grieving, and yanking on Josh’s arm when he hadn’t wanted to go with her. Why would he? Before the funeral, which I had no idea how she’d even heard about, she hadn’t seen him in three years. I could count on one hand how many times she had been with the boy she’d given birth to and given up parental rights to at nineteen.
I had nothing to be freaked out about. Absolutely nothing. But that was a lot easier said than done.
“How have you been?” she asked almost casually.
“Fine and I hope you have too, but you need to go,” I managed to tell her calmly, carefully, despite the fact that my hands and forearms had started tingling with discomfort and I was feeling about eighty other different emotions I wasn’t ready to classify.
“I just want to talk,” Anita tried to explain, one of her hands going to cup the elbow of the opposite arm. She looked thinner than the last time I’d seen her. The whites in her eyes were more yellow, and I couldn’t help but wonder what was wrong with her.
I’d told her very plainly when I’d shoved her toward her car after pulling her away from Mandy and Josh, “If you ever want to see Josh again, you need to clean your life up.” And from the yellow that was supposed to be white and the flat color of her hair, she hadn’t done that.
I knew Anita. At least I knew the person she used to be. She’d been this teenager who had fallen in love with my brother after meeting him at a club back in Fort Worth. She had been nice enough, partied a lot, laughed really loudly. I guess you could say we were a lot alike. Anita had only been seeing my brother for about two months when she told him she was pregnant with his kid. She was only a year older than me, but as I took her in, I saw this person who seemed to have aged physically faster than I had. What had started off with her “not being ready to raise a baby” had turned into this person in front of me who got mixed in with one bad decision after another.
She was Josh’s biological mom, but in all the ways that mattered, he was mine, and I would only share what he was willing to give. He had been mine before Mandy, and he was still mine even after Mandy. I was the one who helped bottle feed him after he’d been released from the hospital. I’d been the one who took turns with my brother waking up in the middle of the night when he cried. I had cleaned his dirty baby butt, bought him clothes, blended his food when he’d gotten off formula. I was the one who cried when my brother met Mandy and announced to my best friend and me that he was moving out and getting a place with her. I was the person who had missed the shit out of Josh when I didn’t live with him for those years their family had been together.
Not Anita.