Page 18 of Child of Mine

“Mom, areyouokay? You’re being weird.”

“Everything’s fine.” She tries to shield the last of the papers from my view, but I catch a glimpse of red.

“Mom.” I cover her hands with mine to get her to stop shuffling papers. “You’re a terrible actress.”

After pulling her hands from under mine, she drops her forehead into them. “Dammit.”

My hands are shaking, so I press them to my sides. “Are you sick?”

She just rocks her head from side to side. The movement draws my attention to the paperwork on the desk.

“What is it? You’re scaring me.”

Clasping shaking hands together, she whispers, “We’re about to lose the store.”

“What?” The chair by her desk catches my butt when my body suddenly gives up on the battle with gravity. “What do you mean?”

With a heavy sigh, she drags herself to the armchair where she usually sits to pore over advance reader copies and book catalogs. Then she meets my gaze.

“We’ve been operating at a loss for more than a year,” she says, her voice ragged. “I took out a second mortgage, thinking that things would turn around, thinking that it was the financial crisis. But—” Her breath hitches and takes a moment to swallow before continuing. “Things just keep getting worse.” Her hands flail in a circle. “Customers go to the mall to shop. I can’t afford the rent there like the chain stores can. I can’t offer the big discounts they can. Another author cancelled a signing.”

“What? Are they cutting down on publicity tours or something?” The store gets a big uptick in sales when an author does an appearance, so I know that’s not good news.

“I think they’re just not coming tomystore. I have a feeling I’ll see something posted at the Waldenbooks at the mall.”

“That sucks. You’ve always taken such good care of the authors. They love you.”

She sags into the couch cushions. “It’s not really the author’s choice. It’s the publicity people.”

I do the day-to-day shelf stocking, but she orders and pays all the bills. I’m embarrassed to admit that I haven’t noticed a change in sales. It does seem like fewer people come in than used to, now that I think about it. Scrambling for a solution I ask, “Well… what about my money?”

“Your money?”

“The savings set aside from the soap. The chunk that I couldn’t access till my thirtieth birthday? I haven’t touched it. I’ll loan it to you if it makes you feel better.”

The look on her face makes it clear that there’s more bad news. “I didn’t tell you at the time because you were already so mad at him, but…” Her hands make a helplessWhat could I do?gesture. “I had to help him.”

She doesn’t fill in any more blanks, but the conclusion isn’t hard for me to find. “Are you fucking kidding me? Dad stole my money?”

“He didn’t steal it.” She shakes her head. “He got into a financial bind and let me know that he was borrowing from that fund to get out of it. But as far as I can tell, he hasn’t paid it back.”

“How long ago was that?”

“A couple of years.”

Any response I could have to this news would wake up Lilah, so I swallow the words I’d like to scream. Instead I mutter, “Just when I thought he couldn’t be any more of an asshole.”

“Sweetheart, he has reasons. If you’d just talk to him—”

“After everything else he did, I’m supposed to be understanding about why he’d take the money that I earned? I can’t believe you forgave him after what he put you through.”

“I had nothing to forgive.”

It pisses me off that she always says this. “Right, because you weren’t there. You didn’t get to come home after a long day at work to the apartment you paid for—at the ripe old age of seventeen—to find it full of a bunch of strange men, your dad high out of his mind, playing show tunes on the piano!”

I press my palms over my eye sockets to try and contain the rage that threatens to explode out of me.

When my mom takes my hands and pulls them away from my face, I resist until she says, “I’m sorry, Bella. I’m sorry for all of it. I should’ve told you. About the money, about the store, but I just”—her head drops with a heavy sigh—“I don’t know how to do anything else, and I don’t know how to fix this.”

---