Page 48 of Mason

Mason

“Mason, can you grease this pan?” Mom asks, her hands busy kneading pie dough.

She’s buzzed around the kitchen since I got here at seven, a little too wired in this morning for my liking. But it’s better than watching her wallow in tears with family movies, so I’ll take this new side of her. Especially if it comes with sweets.

She looks good today, almost back to her usual self, with glowing pink cheeks and her hair fastened in its usual updo. She’s wearing an emerald blouse with a high-waisted skirt and heels, slipping right back into her routine of being Dad’s put-together plus one. A week out from Spencer’s murder, and she’s the parent on the mend. Meanwhile, Dad barely got out the door for his weekly rounds of meetings this morning, taking Grady with him for the first time.

I grab a can of Coke from the fridge she keeps by the backdoor and take a drink, moving to stand against the wall, watching her work the dough into a ball. “Thought you were going to switch Dad to diet, Mom.”

“It’s baby steps,” she grumbles, rolling the dough extra hard. “He’ll start next week, maybe.”

I smirk. “Mom, he’s too set in his ways. He likes the regular Cokes. But with his health, maybe we all need to be more careful about what we give him.”

She frowns, grabbing the rolling pin and a pinch of flour that she dusts over her work station. “Leave him alone. It makes him happy. He likes sugar and sweets, I like baking, you like… I don’t know what you like anymore.”

“I don’t know either,” I admit. Other than poking at a certain Giambelli, I draw a blank. Everything I thought I liked about life doesn’t do it for me anymore. I’m dreading the docks rather than looking forward to them. Hating the thought of running jobs. I feel like a puzzle piece that soaked up a little too much bullshit and refuses to fit in the same hole again.

Mom rolls out the dough into a thin sheet, working methodically. Her fingers press the dough in place, pinching the corners with precision. Everything Mom does is done with love. Care. Expertise. She’s the only Carlyle wired that way. She doesn’t have the same dysfunction running through her veins.

I watch her work, chewing a pecan I swipe from the counter. “How did you meet Dad?”

She’s shared a lot of stories about growing up in Biloxi with its crazy collection of characters, but she’s never mentioned a peep about her and Dad’s fucked-up love affair. About how her father didn’t believe a woman could run the empire so he married her to a man from a Chicago faction he thought worthy to rule the empire and her. About how someone kind-hearted ended up with a bastard so bitter to the world. A choir girl with a killer.

“It was a different time back then,” she says, reaching for the bowl of pecan mixture. “Our parents thought we’d hit it off and set up a date.”

That makes about as much sense as Anthony hooking me up with Emily. Mom’s father was a police captain and her mother a Sunday school teacher. Prather Harris ran the Southern Mafia crime family and his wife, Faye, marinated in mint juleps and daytime soaps. They didn’t exactly run in the same circles.

“A blind date?” I quirk a brow.

“A wedding,” she corrects, spooning the first scoop of pecan sweetness into the pie shell. “I met your father on our wedding day at St. Michael’s.”

“You didn’t want to marry him?” I feel the heat hit my face before the knot in my stomach registers. An arranged marriage. She isn’t with Dad because she loves him. She’s with him because it’s what was expected of her. My entire existence is a sham. My family. My life.

She laughs, adding another spoonful to the dish and spreading it out. “At first, no. He’s a grouch, but under all that vinegar, he’s a good man. He loves me and loves being a father.”

I try to hold back a laugh of my own, but it plows through the barricades.

God, she’s going to need to work harder at selling this train wreck than this.

“I’m serious, Mason. He’s made a lot of mistakes—we all have—but he tries.”

I cross my arms over my chest, unimpressed. “Is this you trying to talk me into letting you pick a wife for me? Because it isn’t working.”

She and Dad are hardly examples of marital bliss. Sure, they do the hand-holding and lip-locking, but she isn’t allowed to know about the family business or work on her own outside of the house. She can’t travel without a guard. Tolerates his drinking. Ignores his meltdowns and affairs. I don’t know what the hell I want or if I even want any of this someday. But I know I don’t want that.

She shakes her head, still fussing around with her pie construction. “Not at all. I want my boys to do things differently.” She sets down the spoon and takes a shaky breath. “Watching Spencer being lowered into that hole… I knew things needed to change. You don’t want to hear it, and I’m not allowed to say it, but I never wanted this life for you, Mason. Not for you, not for Spencer, not for Grady…” She crumbles before she can finish.

My irritation over the subject dissolves, and I cross the room to pull her into a hug, offering the comfort she’s given me so many times before. Here I thought… fuck, I don’t know what I thought. Maybe that we shielded her from most of it. Kept the bad men out. Kept the money coming in. She never complained. Until someone slipped between the cracks and robbed us of the magic curtain. Exposed the world we really live in.

“I wish I’d left, Mason,” she whispers, rubbing at her tears furiously with flour-coated hands. “I wish I’d been strong enough to save my boys. Now Spencer’s gone.”

I rub a hand along her back, glancing at the clock. Dad and Grady should be back any minute, and if Dad overhears any of this, I don’t know what he’ll do to her. But I know I’ll end up in a jail cell or worse if he tries anything. “Mom, none of this is your fault. Spencer. Dad. Me. Grady. We’re all adults. We made our choices.”

I don’t know which led to Spencer’s death, but I’m working on it. I’m doing a lot more listening. Eavesdropping. Watching actions, too. And no one’s said a goddamn thing to me about shooting Giambelli’s guy at the docks on Saturday. And no one checked in, either. Or bothered to make sure I didn’t drive across town that day and slaughter them all. I hear the bullshit loud and fucking clear.

“It cost me my family,” she says through tears, her shoulders rocking with a jumpy whimper. “He was my baby, Mason. A piece of my heart. No one can tell me why. No one can tell me anything.”

I reach for a kitchen towel and use it to wipe off a streak of flour high on her cheek. “Because we don’t know anything, Mom. If we did, they’d be dead.”

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