Page 24 of Liar Byrd
I automatically lean away from the gray-haired woman with pale blue eyes as she turns to face me from the seat next to me.
Then I spot the plastic bag that she’s thrusting toward me.
Inside, a sandwich is sweating. It’s no surprise when we’ve been on this bus for the better part of an hour, which is about how long it took me to unclench my fingers from the tight grip I had on my stolen bag and fully relax in my seat.
“Excuse me?”
“You haven’t eaten so much as a seed, and I can’t have you starve to death while I have three grandkids who packed so much food I’ll be the size of a melon if I eat it all.” She thrusts it at me again. “So here. Cheese and ham.”
I shake my head. “I can’t take your food.”
“You a veggie?” She asks me with narrow-eyed suspicion, and I can’t help but smile.
I shake my head. “No. Just…”
“Then take it.” She practically flings the bag at my head.
“What’s wrong with being a veggie?” I ask her, slowly opening the sandwich I was forced to catch or have smack me in the face.
“Don’t have time for picky eaters.” She clicks her tongue, and a man twists around to look at her, then whips back to the front when she glares at him. “Eat what you're given,” she tells me. “That’s how my mama raised me, and that’s how I raised my little ones. None of this nonsense about gluten being the devil either. Who has time for that?”
My lips twitch as she turns to pick up her bag. “Some people are allergic to gluten.”
“Some.” She tuts. “Not the whole damn planet.” A small bottle of water with condensation forming on the outside is thrust toward me.
“Thanks, but you don’t?—”
“Take it.”
I’m too afraid she’ll throw it at my head like the sandwich, so I reach for it with a grateful smile. “Thanks.”
“You need a napkin?” She’s riffling in her bag before I can refuse and offering it to me before I can respond. “Of course you do.Here.”
Her help is impossible to refuse. I feel like I’m being bullied, but it’s the nice kind of bullying, if that makes sense.
Fussed over.
I’m used to being the one who looked out for Mom. I always felt more like the adult in our relationship, gently reminding her that not all guys had good intentions and that paying rent had to take priority over buying a new dress for a date, so this experience is new.
“Well…” she prompts. “Eat, child. You’re practically wasting away.”
I twist the lid of my water and gulp it down. It’s slightly warm, but insanely refreshing.
She nods, pleased.
When I take a bite out of the cheese and ham sandwich, she sits back in her seat and retrieves the knitting she was working on before she assaulted me with a sandwich.
I thought she was going to be nosy. I expected her to pepper me with questions about where I was going and who I was going to see, the punishment (or payment?) for her having fed me. But she seems content to return to her knitting now that she’s eaten her sandwich and fed the girl quietly starving in the seat beside her.
As I eat, my thoughts return to Mom, the way they often do.
I feel like I was always the mother in the relationship. Her desperation to be loved made her blind to flaws so big you could drive a tank through them. I’m not perfect. I know that. But the men she wanted to love didn’t care about her.
They were all like Jeremiah in some way. Not as extreme or manipulative, but controlling. So controlling.
Jeremiah was the worst of the worst.
It takes six hours to reach Massey, Arizona.
