Page 114 of Worse Than Wicked
“I can’t deal with you right now.”
“Don’t leave me,” she slurs. “He left me, just like your father. You won’t do that, will you? Promise me!”
“Ma. I’m in the middle of something. Can you go sit down and wait for me?”
Ma stares up at me, her eyes wide. Then she lets out a loud cry. “You don’t have time for your grieving mother?”
Colt is motioning for our grandmother, who comes hurrying over.
“Nonna,” I say. “Can you get her inside?”
“But I need you,” Ma wails. “I need my baby boy!”
I disentangle myself and shift her into Nonna’s arms. “You got her?”
“I got her,” she assures me, even as Mom clings to her neck, sagging toward the ground.
“Fine,” Mom snaps. “Abandon me, just like your brother. You always put him first. As if I didn’t give you both life! I gave you everything, and this is all the thanks I get?”
“No one has the strength to carry the burden of your grief,” Nonna says to Ma. “We’re all collapsing under the weight of our own. Now put some starch in those legs and stop acting like a baby, or I’ll let you lie on the ground and throw a fit like one.”
They stumble off together, Ma berating her mother-in-law now.
I turn back to the others. “When did this happen?”
“Damn,” Colt says, shaking his head and watching my family depart. “So that’s your mom. Explains a few things.”
“Yeah, and yours is braindead, which explains you. So let’s get back to business.”
“It was a year ago,” Gloria says, having collected herself in the few minutes since she spoke last. She looks like the cool queen we made her, hard as diamond and just as implacable. “I put the date of conception around Thanksgiving. Maybe that day in the library. It was before Colt, and after Rylan. Not long after, so he’s an option too, if the pregnancy wasn’t exactly 40 weeks.”
“Five guys fucked you in the library.”
She swallows, and something flickers across her face, but she lifts her chin and holds my gaze. “Cotton wore a condom. Gideon didn’t cum. And DeShaun is Black, so unless it has none of his features at all, it’s not his. Which leaves you and Duke.”
A heavy silence stretches.
Finally, Mabel speaks for the first time. She’s standing motionless, having not moved an inch since she came over. Her face is a mystery, her expression one that Duke might have solved, but I can’t.
“Why are you telling us this?”
Gloria shrugs. “I just thought you might want to know. Now that he’s gone… Of course I can’t be sure it’s his. There’s no way to know, really. But… I don’t how. I just do. Maybe you don’t believe in intuition, but I know.”
She can’t know, though. No one can. That baby is mine as much as it is Duke’s. Because biologically, we are the same person. One person.
I open my mouth to correct her, but then I see Colt’s frown, the way he’s glaring at me, like the close call with the casket never happened.
But it did happen.
He didn’t have to do that, to save Duke’s body its dignity. But he did.
I give him a curt nod, then a deeper one to Gloria. “Thank you.”
twenty-nine
Mabel Darling
Baron’s busy making calls and searching things on his computer, so I wander the hallway of my old house like a ghost, with Seeley at my heels. Summer House is gone, so we have nowhere else to go but here, with the other broken pieces of our broken families.
