Page 34 of Iron Cross

Nothing ever made a bored, upper-middle-class mom bristle than the idea that their child wasn’t the best ever. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything at all. Not within earshot of the plastic bitches.

“You should really put a scarf on him.”

They wereobviouslytalking to me. I had once tried to ignore them, and keep to myself, but that didn’t work. If I didn’t answer, they’dmaketheir presence known.

“He won’t keep it on,” I said, flatly, hoping that was enough for them to leave me alone.

I didn’t need mom advice from women who put Baileys in their drive-through iced coffees.

“Well, you should make him,” she chided, giving her fellow bitties a side eye, as they nodded in agreement.

That whiny upspeak had the grating quality of being both condescending, and incredibly annoying. We weren’t in the San Fernando Valley. We were in Massachusetts. I bet their real voices didn’t find anrthey didn’t drop.

“When you get him home, put him in a hot bath right away, that’ll stop him from getting sick.”

What was it with women like this telling me how to raise my kid?

“That’s not how colds work,” I said, turning to walk away, but then shetsked.

Legitimatelytsked.

No one had evertskedat Kira Kekoa. No one ever told her anything. I imagined that if I had continued as Kira Green, no one would look at me sideways without quivering in fear, as the menace I had married stared them down. I missed having someone in my corner like that. I missed someone calling me the lady of the house, and acting like a chivalrous knight.

There were days my old life just didn’t seem to fit in this skin.

Anna Jones was too much of a fucking push over, and I hated it.

“You haven’t been a nanny very long, have you?” she said, with a shake of her head as ifshewas doingmea favor.

I stared at her, and blinked. The head Jessica-Tiffany-Ashley Pumpkin tossed her hair then pursed her lips with a smug little expression, as if I was nothing but a peasant in her midst.

She could go fuck right off.

“Actually, I found him in a cart at the grocery store,” I said, just to wipe that smug idiocy off of her botoxed face. “I’m not even sure what his name is.”

She soured, like a grape that had been ignored in the sun.

I turned back to Cillian, assuming that would be it. They tittered, probablybaffledby my sarcasm.

It was always the fucking same. If you weren’t exotic the way theywantedyou to be, an exotic that elevated them to a position of “taste”, then you were nothing.

The exoticness that the upper class had seen in me when I walked them through art museums made me seem rare and knowledgeable about Hawaiian beliefs, as part of their pathetic search for meaning in religions that their own pigment didn't start. How many white people had quoted their bizarre-o sense of whatho'oponoponowas, attaching the recitation of some bullshit English prayer about forgiveness, thanks and love?

Just recite some sounds, and follow the white gurus with their singing bowls, andohms, and you’d find enlightenment over your other smug friends…

As long as people like me never talked back to them.

“I’m here to report a kidnapping.” The words from Miss Pumpkin pulled me from my thoughts, as my head snapped to glare at her.

What did that bitch just say?

“Yes, she said she took him from a shopping cart.”

Was she fucking serious?

It was definitely time to scram.

“Come on, Cillian.”

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