Page 63 of Bring You Back

“Oh, don’t worry,” I pipe in with a sarcastic smile. “Only one of us came back.”

Under normal circumstances, Reyna would defend me and my brother to her mother, but my words don’t give her the chance. She eyes me with her mouth agape.

When I say nothing more, her teeth reconnect as she directs her attention to Valerie. “Anything else, Mom?”

“Yeah, I might be late, so you’re good for dinner?”

Reyna’s face falls as she poorly expected her mother to send off with some loving sentiment. She’s given them, but it’s just blowing hot air. Reyna breathes it in to get by until next time. But Valerie won’t give that to her with me around. My presence makes her more sour.

“As always,” Reyna mutters.

“And last night was fun, but stay out of the wine in the fridge,” Valerie adds with a pointed look as she steps backward into the hall, out of sight.

“She still misses the hints,” Reyna says with a small smile, still head of the excuses committee.

“Then why do you?”

She gives me a look similar to the one her mother gave her. “Unlike you, I don’t give up on people.”

I’ve heard worse. “Yeah, see, that’s your problem.”

She stares at me like I’m making zero sense, another excuse on the tip of her tongue. “She’s my mom.”

I roll my eyes. “You put way too much stock into labels.”Into words.“It doesn’t matter who or what she is. It matters what she’s good for. And if she’s good fornothing, then she is nothing, and she shouldn’t have a place in your life.”

With those words, I have a lightbulb moment. I spring off the bed and out of the room, Reyna at my heels all the way to the kitchen.

“What are you doing?” The question is suspicious, worried.

I open the fridge and spy the wine—front and center. I grab the bottle, stalk to the sink, and pour—the missing cork making this easier.

Red splashes the steel surface, like blood. I falter, bombarded with memories, but I breathe in the pungent smell of wine to remind me it’s not blood I’m seeing. It’s not a blood-stained shirt I’m holding, it’s a bottle of booze, now almost half-empty.

“You can’t do that!”

“You need to learn to stand up to her,” I say over theglug, glug.

“Ido.”

I stop pouring and challenge her with a look. “Then do it better.” I hold the bottle out. “Pour.” Her eyes slip down to the bottle, then lift back to mine. “Unless you want to drink it again.”

She yanks the bottle out of my hand and shoves it back inside the fridge. She walks back over, and I step aside in her haste, watch as she rinses the leftover red down the drain, as if we’ve committed a crime and she has to dispose of the evidence.

I don’t break it to her, but the evidence is still in the half-empty wine bottle.

This is me caring, and this is her rejecting. As usual.

But I suppose the push and pull from all of us no longer matters. Soon, Reyna won’t have to be around her mother anymore.

I relay this thought to her, and she sighs against the counter with the same look she gave me in the ice cream shop when I mentioned the future. “I don’t know what’s gonna happen to me.”

The defeat in her voice draws me closer. “You’re not going to art school?”

She shakes her head. “I didn’t apply. Mrs. Wright told me I’m too good for art school, I’m a natural. That anything they would teach me in college, I already know. She told me I don’t need a degree to be an artist and I can start selling on my own.”

So that’s where the art show came in. And why she was so upset when she didn’t sell.

Her face brightens as her mind plays a reel of possibilities, then dims with the reminder of reality. “Well, you saw what happened.”

---