Page 39 of Forty and Fighting Dirty
At a glance, I knew what had happened. They’d gotten bored and tried to climb the chairs, with disastrous results.
It only took the sight of his mother for the boy on the ground to start crying. Piper sprinted over and dropped to her knees. “Nate,” she said, panic and tension making it come out as a rasp.
“Mama,” he answered, voice sounding much younger than it had when I’d heard it before. “My arm.”
“Don’t move it. Stay there, baby.”
“I dropped your phone,” he said, eyes moving to the device.
Tension gripped me. This was the moment Piper would flip. I’d seen it a thousand times. How many memories did I have of acting out, being reckless, just for a scrap of my mother’s attention? And then for her to yell at me, to turn her aggression on me, to punish me for it. Call me names, tell me how little she thought of me.
I broke one of my mother’s vases once when I decided to throw a baseball indoors. I stepped on a shard and cut myself so bad I needed a dozen stitches on the bottom of my foot, and my mother railed at me for weeks. She was angrier about the vase than she was about my injury. I still had a scar running across my heel to prove it.
So I knew what was about to happen. Piper would snap at her sons, and all that anger that had been directed at me would turn to them. Vulnerable little boys, who just needed their mother’s care.
Wasn’t that how it always went?
It was how it had been for me. If it wasn’t my father’s fists, it was my mother’s ire. They loved beating up on the one person they had power over.
Piper turned and glanced at her phone, and my blood turned to ice. Every single muscle in my body clenched—hard. I took one step toward them—and stopped.
Because Piper didn’t yell. She didn’t vomit out all that anger I’d stoked in her. All she did was turn back to her son and say, “Don’t worry about the phone. Is it just your arm that hurts?”
“And my ankle,” he said.
“Don’t move,” she repeated, then looked at the other boy. “Alec, are you hurt?”
He had tears shimmering in his eyes, but he shook his head. “No.”
“We didn’t think they would fall over,” Nate said, face turning even whiter.
Piper’s hands moved quickly but gently over Nate’s body as she checked him for other injuries. “We’re going to the hospital,” she said. “Alec, grab my purse.” She slid it off her shoulder and, almost as an afterthought, tossed the raffle ticket inside. A ticket she’d been ready to go to war for, chucked into her bag like it was an old candy wrapper. She shoved the phone into the purse and gave it to the younger boy.
Then she got to her feet and crouched down, one arm going around her elder son’s back. “On three, I want you to put your weight on me and your good leg, okay? We’re going to hop down the hallway, and then you and your brother will sit on that bench just outside the entrance while I bring the car around. Got it?”
The boy nodded.
She wasn’t asking for help. She wasn’t getting caught up in her panic or her emotions. She was the rock on which her sons could stand and feel safe. She was dropping everything for them—even the promise of a free house.
It was so far removed from everything I expected that I’d moved before I realized what I was doing. When I scooped Nate into my arms, Piper let out an outraged noise. The boy clung to my shoulders with his good arm, his injured one cradled against his chest.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Piper’s eyes blazed brighter than I’d ever seen them. The mama bear’s claws were out.
“I’m taking you all to the hospital,” I said. The thought had only been half formed until it came out of my mouth. But now I was sure.
“Put my son down and back away.”
“Piper,” I said, keeping my voice calm, “you can’t drive with two kids, in the dark, on unfamiliar roads right now. You’re trembling.”
“I am not.”
“Hold out your hand.”
Sticking her jaw out with the kind of stubbornness that I could almost admire, Piper thrust her palm out. Her eyes dropped down and widened when she took in the violent shaking of her fingers. She extended her other hand and inhaled when both extremities trembled together.
I gentled my voice. “I’ll drive you. I know these roads, and I can get you there faster than you’d get following your GPS.”
I knew she wanted to refuse. The internal battle she waged against herself was written in every tense line of her body, every conflicted emotion raging in her eyes.
