Page 42 of Alien's Luck
He sounded disappointed, which was kind of sweet. They hadn’t actually spent a lot of time talking. Shouting and threatening, yes, but not talking. It took her a second to puzzle out what he meant, though.
“You fought back against a cruel man,” she said.
“He was helpless.”
“And when you were a child, dependent on your father? When you needed him. Was he kind and loving then?” Secondhand anger stirred inside her. Okay, not secondhand, but unresolved emotional baggage. She’d like to claim she was working on it, but she didn’t have therapy money, and psychologists were thin on the ground.
“You couldn’t fight back then,” she continued, going more impassioned. “Who cares how you did it? He had it coming, and you were strategic. Back on Earth, poison is considered a woman’s weapon because we’re smaller and weaker than men. We can’t strangle them or beat them in a fistfight, but we can sure as fuck put arsenic in their tea. Is that cowardly or just being smart? When I was a kid, there was this terrible TV movie, Burning Bed or something, about an abused woman who finally snapped and set the bed on fire to kill her asshole husband. I remember wondering why everyone doesn’t do that because fuck yeah, you have to sleep sometime, ya jerk.”
Silence.
Yeah, maybe she went a little too bloodthirsty too fast. She refused to dial it down, but she could have eased Ari into it before going on a rant about setting beds on fire, though it was very on -brand for her.
Well, this was awkward.
“I’m seventy-five percent certain my mother poisoned my father and buried him in the garden,” she said. There. Now, they traded family secrets.
“Why the twenty-five percent uncertainty? That is a considerable margin of doubt,” Ari said, sounding intrigued.
“My mom is the nicest person you’ll ever meet. Just really sweet, genuinely nice.” It felt weird repeating nice, but she couldn’t think of another word to convey the wholesome Midwestern-ness of her mother. She was every stereotype, right down to the Jell-O marshmallow salads. “And my dad wasn’t. He was mean when he drank, and he was always drinking.”
Carla’s voice wobbled, annoyed that she could get emotional over such an old wound. Two decades should be long enough to form scar tissue or grow numb to the memories, but no. Still hurt.
She cleared her throat, taking the opportunity to organize her thoughts about her messy family. “He was a mean drunk, like I said. Did all his talking with his fists. Didn’t matter who, though it was usually Mom. He turned up for work drunk once and threw a punch at his boss, so he got fired. Jobs aren’t exactly plentiful in a small town, especially when you burn bridges. Was that a wake-up call? Nope. He just carried on drinking all day. Hell, I think his life got easier not having to pretend to be sober from nine to five.”
Her and her mom’s lives got harder, though. Carla remembered shoving her feet into shoes she’d outgrown but couldn’t replace because there was no money. Or the powerbeing cut. Empty cupboards and food boxes from the local church. She remembered her mother covering bruises with heavy makeup and long sleeves, even on the hottest August days.
Mostly, she remembered how the town turned a blind eye. It infuriated her.
“Anyway, one night, Mom and Dad had a big fight.” They fought most nights. Young Carla learned to ignore the angry shouts and somehow managed to sleep with her mother’s quiet sobs as a lullaby. “He was gone in the morning. That wasn’t weird. Sometimes, he went away for a few days to work, and I don’t know what, but nothing good. He always came back in a good mood with cash to splurge. We’d pay the tab at the grocery store or go to the movies.”
Those brief idylls never lasted long. Soon enough, he was back home, drinking and terrorizing his family.
“Only this time, he never came back. He was gone for good,” Carla said.
“I do not see a reason for you to accuse your mother of murder.”
“Yeah, but that night, she made his favorite: biscuits and gravy. I wasn’t allowed any. I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.” She remembered being incensed at the injustice of it. “And the day after he left, Mom put in a raised garden bed in the backyard.” Carla hadn’t thought anything of the rusted old stock tank. Recycling stock tanks into garden beds was pretty common. “She planted tomatoes but they never really took. She just let that one fill with weeds.”
She had been twelve when this happened, and it took a decade for her to put together the obvious pieces.
Ari made a thoughtful noise.
“She died when I was twenty. Car accident. I can’t exactly ask,” Carla said. Even if she could ask, she couldn’t picture howthat conversation would go. Hey, Mom, did you bump off Dad? I wouldn’t blame you. I would have helped you bury the body.
She would have. She really would have.
ARI
Ari turned over in his mind all that Carla had shared. He saw no purpose for such a disclosure. He needed to explain his warrant to maintain trust between them, but Carla could have kept her family secrets to herself. The only reason he deemed plausible was to build an emotional connection.
This pleased him. Such a connection was completely elective and unnecessary for their agreement.
“This is nice,” Carla said, breaking the silence. “Not the peril. Peril can go fuck itself, but talking. We haven’t really talked. Mostly, we bicker, but talking all civilized is nice.”
“I enjoy the bickering.”
She made an odd strangled noise, like she was trying to hide laughter. Even though it was tepid, it was the first true laughter he heard from her. No mocking. No exasperation. Simply mirth. He liked it.
