Page 12 of With Spite

I gestured toward the door. “Will you lock that?”

He did, coming back to lean against the table again.

“What is it?” I asked, seeing that he had no plans on leaving any time soon.

“Wanted to let you know that Romina is pregnant.”

I flashed him a grin. “Out of wedlock, you dirty dog?”

Harvey flipped me off. “Fuck all the way off. Mom’s going to lose her shit.”

Mom had lost her shit when Candice, Hampton’s wife, had come up pregnant a couple of weeks after the wedding. Then, eight months to the day of their wedding, their little girl had been born into the world.

Mom was all about appearances, and she hated more than anything “bastards.”

They weren’t a good look on her family name.

“What are you going to do?” I wondered.

“Have the baby.” Harvey rolled his eyes. “Romina and I were thinking about a quick wedding at the courthouse.”

“You’re really going to piss her off if you do that and don’t say your vows in her church,” I pointed out.

“I know,” he sighed. “And it’ll make Mom hate Romina. But I don’t really care. We’ve been tossing around the wedding idea for a while, and neither one of us really want a big one. She wants her sister there. I want you there. Hell, we aren’t even thinking of inviting our parents.”

“She’ll seriously castrate you if you leave her out of that, too.”

“I know, but Romina can’t stand Mom.”

“Don’t blame her.”

“And Romina’s pregnant, and emotional, and can’t stand when Mom gives her shit.” Harvey sighed.

I settled a look on my brother. “One day, you’re going to have to stop caring what your mother thinks, and start thinking about the rest of your life.”

“Is that what you did?” he asked.

I rolled my eyes at him as I sawed one of the front shoulders off and got to work cutting the meat from the bones. “You mean, when I started to get tattoos every time she pissed me off?”

Harvey laughed. “I swear to God, the first couple of times it happened, I thought I was going to pee myself from laughing so hard. The goat was epic.”

My mom had inserted herself into every facet of our lives.

When I’d asked for space and time to do my own thing, she’d inserted herself harder.

That’d been the first tattoo I got.

A goat.

Stubborn as a damn goat, my mother.

And I’d told her that the goat was her.

She had not been happy.

“Now they’re just for me,” I said. “What’s your plan on telling the parentals? I think you should just tell Dad at work.”

Dad worked at Hooten’s Steel Mill along with Harvey.