Page 83 of Virago

“But not special.”

“Okay. I make a solemn vow to believe you’re just as lame as I am.”

Now it was her turn to truly laugh, and he smiled brightly at the sound.

“Can I kiss you, Gia?”

“It’s about fucking time,” she growled and grabbed his hair to pull him close.

Chapter Twenty-One

Mom put her hands up in surrender. “Don’t take my head off, Zellie. All I’m saying is I didn’t know you could get so hurt doing roller derby.”

Zelda threw the serving spoon back into the bowl with a metallic clang. “No, you said you thought I should stop doing it. And I’m just wondering why you’re deciding now to act like a mom.”

Mom flinched. “Zellie, don’t be mean. Please.”

“Don’t harsh on your mom, Zel,” Pop cut in from the fridge. “Anybody need a fresh one?”

Zelda gave him a lethal look but didn’t answer. Nobody did. With a shrug, Pop pulled a beer out for himself and hipped the fridge door closed. As usual, he seemed unmoved by the tension between his wife and daughter. Zaxx sometimes wondered if Pop was neurodivergent, too, or if it was the decades-long daily weed habit, or if he was simply incapable of actually feeling any emotion intensely enough to recognize it. Apparently, that circuit had fried out.

Every couple of months or so, Mom got a poke from some recess of her derelict maternal instinct, and she called everybody together for a family dinner. Usually they were harmless affairs, with a dried-out meatloaf and instant mashed potatoes, or, in summer, some burgers Pop had grilled to the consistency of hockey pucks and some not-too-bad homemade potato salad.

It was summer, so tonight it was hockey pucks and potato salad. They’d meant to eat at the picnic table, but it was raining, so they were in the kitchen. Mom had made an effort to tidy up the house and fill the fridge with drinks everybody liked—and ice cream for dessert, too. All evening she’d been putting on a 1950s-TV-mom thing. Her attempt at it, anyway.

After her initially chill response, Mom’s reaction to Zelda’s injuries had been more energetic than either Zaxx or Zelda had expected, as if the need for maternal care finally dug deep enough into the bedrock to reach hers. Now she was seriously worried, and seriously hovering. Pop, on the other hand, was Pop. He’d hissed sympathetically when he’d first seen Zelda’s face—she was hiding the rest of her body from them—and then pointed at the one across her nose and told her it would leave a scar, and that was about the end of it for him. But Mom acted like she meant to pack twenty-two years of mothering into the time of Zelda’s healing.

Like a kid who’d blown off the whole semester and tried to turn in all the late assignments and also cram for the final in a weekend. Zaxx had been that kid in a few classes, and he’d usually gotten away with it enough to stumble into a passing grade.

Zelda, however, was not accepting late work.

Zaxx got it. Their parents had done a better job with Zelda than with him, at least hitting her basic needs regularly enough, but they’d never been really parental or, frankly, shown any interest in it. To have Mom suddenly all up in her grown daughter’s business was a major intrusion.

But it was worse than that. Zelda had explained to Zaxx, reluctantly and with manifest irritation, that Mom’s sudden meddling over her ‘roller derby injuries’ made it harder for Zelda to deal with what had actually happened. Every day that Mom made a Big Thing about Zelda’s injuries, every pillow she wanted to fluff, every admonishment that Zelda needed to rest so she could recover, every worry that derby was too dangerous, they all piled onto the Big Thing that had really happened and made it an even Bigger Thing. What Zelda wanted to do was heal up and move on. Act like it hadn’t happened, never think about it again.

Zaxx thought that was probably not a good idea, but he’d expressed that opinion exactly once and gotten a face full of red-hot sister, so he meant to keep it to himself from now on. What did he know, anyway.

He was having his own issues. He’d been crashing in his room at the clubhouse all week because he couldn’t make himself stay in his own house. The club had cleaned everything up and even repaired the damage bullets had made, but Zaxx didn’t need to see blood stains or bullet holes to know exactly where poor Doof had bled out from his open throat, where Gia had been shot, or where Zelda had lain waiting for him to make everything better, not knowing that he was the one who’d made it all worse.

Of course he would never tell anyone he was struggling; it was all too fucking pathetic. Zelda had been savaged, Gia had been wounded, and Doof had been killed. Zaxx had caused it all, and now he was freaked out by the mess their pain had left? No, he was not going to say that out loud. Especially not when the women who’d been truly hurt were so damn resilient.

It had been only a week since the whole awful mess. Zelda was healing, and she was absolutely committed to carrying on as if nothing important had happened to her. Her main frustration with her wounds, at least those on her face, was that they announced to the world that a Big Thing had happened. She was getting the stitches out in the morning, and she was looking forward to that day like it was Christmas and Easter and her birthday altogether.

Knowing in too much detail what had been done to her, Zaxx was sure her facial injuries were not the most severe or painful, but he didn’t ask such questions. Though he believed she needed to talk to somebody, he knew for sure it shouldn’t be him, so he meant to let her have whatever she needed from him. She said she needed him to back up her cover story, so he backed her up.

“It was a bad crash, yeah,” he lied to Mom now. “But Zel’s been doing derby since she was thirteen, and this is the first time she got so hurt. There’s no reason to worry, Mom.”

“Except now I know it can happen,” Mom insisted. “I just want you safe, Zellie. That’s all.” She reached out and clasped Zelda’s hand, but Zelda snatched it free. Mom flinched again, and then sighed. “Okay. It’s not my business anyway.”

“You didn’t give a shit when it was your business, Brittany,” Zelda snarled, using Mom’s first name to drive home the point that she’d never really been a mom. “It’s too fucking late now.”

Quiet descended on the kitchen. Mom stared at the half-eaten meal on her plate and said nothing more. Zelda sat before her mostly untouched plate and glared at the top of Mom’s head. Zaxx sagged under the responsibility to smooth this out, but he had no clue what to say or which one to say it to, so he sat there thrumming with tension.

Pop grabbed the serving spoon and scooped up a heaping mound of potato salad. “Man, I love this shit, Britt,” he said, breaking the thick silence with tone-deaf enthusiasm. “You should make it more often!”

~oOo~

Zelda dropped the beaded bracelet back in the basket of them on the sales counter. “Don’t you start, too,” she hissed under her breath. “I need you in my corner.”

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