Page 98 of Puck Princess

“I’m at the… swim bar. The surf place. Bar.” She snorts out a laugh, but nothing about this is funny. “I feel like I’m swimming. But I’m in the bathroom.Shh.Don’t tell him.”

“How much have you had to drink, sweetie?” I ask as slowly and clearly as I can.

“I don’t… not much. But that one he brought to our table was a doozie. He wants me to come home,” she mumbles. “But I don’t really want to go with him.”

She literally sounds like she’s going to pass out.

I gape up at Owen. I can’t see anything past the massive red flags waving.

He drugged her?I mouth to Owen.

“Summer, you need to stay in the bathroom,” Owen demands. “I’m going to come get you. Do you understand me? Stay in the bathroom. And do not get in the car with him.”

“Aye-aye, Captain.” She cackles again.

Without another word, Owen grabs his keys and is out the door.

With Nicky asleep in the other room, all I can do is sit on the couch and worry.

32

OWEN

My mom had this uncanny way of smiling while she was in pain. I could even hear it in her voice when she called. I could always picture her perfectly, phone pressed to her ear, bloody mouth split in a smile while she called me for help.

“Where are you?” I already knew she was at someone’s house. I already knew she needed me to come pick her up. The question was simply, which piece of shit guy was it this time?

It would take a while to get the answer out of her. She was either drunk, high, or had had the sense knocked out of her. Sometimes all three.

“I can’t come get you if I don’t know where you are.”

Every night it was the same. I went to school. Went to practice. Came home. Watched hockey videos. Filled out applications. And waited for the phone to ring.

“You know… you know where the methodist church is? The old one with the statue out front. The one Summer was scared of that time we walked past.”

“I know where it is, Mom.”

“I’ll meet you there. I’ll walk, and we can?—”

“Stay where you are, and I’ll come to you. Don’t walk?—”

The phone line went dead, and I didn’t bother trying to call it back. I grabbed the keys to my truck and drove the neighborhood, following the grid of the streets until I found her stumbling by the back entrance of the public pool. But I was too late.

A cop was parked next to her, talking out his window to her.

When she spotted me, she jabbed a finger in my direction. “See? My son is here to get me.”

I rolled the window down and killed the engine so the cop could hear me.

“This your mother?” the officer asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Why’s she wandering the streets at midnight with no shoes?”

“She gets lost sometimes.”

“I do. I get lost.” She smiles, and I could see the chip in her front tooth. The fresh bruise under her eye. “My son always comes to rescue me.”

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