Page 47 of Fox
FOX
Ihear my mother through the open master bedroom window as I walk in naked from the bathroom, toweling my hair dry.
Her voice carries the way nails on a chalkboard do—further than you want it to.
For a moment, I simply stand there, dripping, processing—then grab a pair of jeans and pull them on. I find a T-shirt and drag it over my head as I run down, taking two steps at a time.
I step onto the porch and find my wife sitting in her chair, looking confused, still recovering from brain swelling and four fractured ribs.
“Mother, what in the hell are you doing here?”
“Language, Archibald,” Mother snaps.
“What in the hell are you doing here?” I repeat.
My mother is a smart woman. She reads the rage on my face and backtracks, abandons her attempt to derail me by ordering me to watch my language like I’m twelve.
“We came to check on Lucy?—“
“She said we’re getting divorced,” Lucy blurts out, and the smallness of her voice guts me.
I crouch in front of her and take her hands in mine. “Sweetheart, you remember how I told you about my mother?”
My mother and Reina both gasp.
Lucy nods solemnly. “She doesn’t like the peonies.”
I catch the amusement in her eyes.
Fucking hell. She knows exactly what she’s doing. She remembers everything I said about my mother—and about her deserving not to be liked.
“Or me,” Lucy adds and flutters her lashes.
I tilt my head toward my mother. “That’s Margaret.”
Lucy’s eyes flicker toward Reina.
“She’s a friend of the family. Her name is Reina.”
“Okay.”
I straighten, kiss her mouth softly, before I turn around to face our two intruders.
“Archibald, it’s important that?—“
“Mother, get out.”
“What?”
I swear to God, she looks like she’s about to have a coronary.
I have never been this rude to her.
She knows I’m capable of it, but I’ve always treated her with deference because that’s what you do. These days I’m not doing what I’m supposed to—I’m doing what I want to. And what I want is not to be deferential to a woman who walks into my wife’s home and harangues her about a divorce she doesn’t even remember we were having, while she’s still healing from an accident that almost killed her.
My mother is a fucking monster.
Reina steps in front of her. “Fox, you can’t talk to your mother like?—“
