Page 5 of Running Feral

Kasia shrugs and turns away from me. I want to breathe out a sigh of relief, but I can’t find it. There’s too much pressure. In my head, on my chest, in my general state of existence. No matter how hard I try to focus, I can’t stop thinking about what Eamon and Tobias are doing right now. If this is going to be the day that Tobias never comes back again, and I’m left spending the rest of my life with nothing butwhat ifsfor company.

Soon, more customers filter in, and at least I have something immediate to distract myself with. For whatever that’s worth.

Whenever I visit my mother, I go after work. Because it’s late, and it’s kind of a drive, which gives me an excuse to cut the visit short if she starts to rub my nerve endings raw.

The deliberateness of this makes me feel like a horrible person. But I have to do something to protect my sanity if I don’t want to end up abandoning her altogether.

“Do you want some tea?”

“I’ll get it, you sit down,” I say, seizing the opportunity to escape the initial bustling around me she does when I walk in the door. I’m never quite sure what she’s fussing over, but it always feels artificial, almost performative, in a way that makes me deeply uncomfortable.

I return to the sitting room a few minutes later with two glasses of iced tea in my hands and place one in front of her before I install myself on the well-worn couch.

“How are you doing? Do you need anything?”

Mama blows out a breath, already in the eye-rolling stage of our conversation, obviously.

“I’m fine, Gunnar. I can take care of myself. I’m a grown woman, after all.” She peers at me over the lip of her glass for a minute, and I feel like I’m about to be peeled apart and placed under a microscope. “What about you? You seem more high-strung than usual. Doyouneed something?”

“No,” I answer on instinct. There’s a pause while I huff out a breath and run a hand down my face, trying to collect myfrazzled thoughts. But those images from before of Tobias—where he might be right now and what he might be suffering at Eamon’s hands—are still screaming front and center in my mind, distracting me from reality. “I’m just tired. It’s been busy at work recently.”

Mama shakes her head in that way she always does, and it makes the tiny muscles in my neck tense up. If I stay here too long, I’m going to develop a migraine. I can feel it in my bones.

“I still can’t believe you moved home to open a gay bar. In these parts, after you made such a fuss about wanting to get out of Missouri. You could have stayed in Chicago if you wanted to do that.”

Now it’s my turn to roll my eyes, which feels immature but is also unstoppable.

“It’s not a gay bar, Mama. It’s inclusive. If everyone who cares about being progressive moves to the city, then there’s no one left to support the people they left behind. Believe it or not, but queer people in the countryside also want to have safe spaces to exist.”

“I suppose,” she says, taking a large sip of tea.

There’s a mountain of unsaid words there, but I mentally breeze past them. My mother’s not a homophobe. She’s just… I don’t know. I can’t even think of the word.

Because the only one that comes to mind is ‘hateful’ and that’s the kind of thing you’re not supposed to think. Maybe ‘bitter’ is a nicer shade of the same concept.

Yep, that’s definitely a migraine I feel brewing. All the muscles in the back of my neck are tightening bit by bit, like ropes slowly being ratcheted to their full tautness, and the skin around my hairline is beginning to feel like it’s pressing inwards into my skull.

I need to flee before lights start doing that glittery, overwhelming thing they sometimes do, and driving becomes a crapshoot.

“It’s not too late to buy your father’s shop back. Have something to show for his hard work. Help people instead of selling them liquor.”

I manage not to scoff. Only Mama could do the mental gymnastics required to consider a pawn shop proprietor some kind of pillar of the community. She acts like my dad was out there running soup kitchens instead of barely legal grifts. Ever since he died, it’s like she’s trying to canonize him in her memory. There’s a faint sneer at the end of her words, though, and it combines with my burgeoning headache to make this situation seem suddenly intolerable.

A thought flashes through my mind—you can’t sit in the same room with your mother being snide for twenty minutes, but you’ll stand by and wring your hands while Tobias suffers god-knows-what. But I don’t have time to pull it apart right now.

“Look, if it’s going to be one of those conversations, I’m going to go home. I’m tired, it’s been a long day, and I have a headache. I’ll come back in a couple of days to see how you’re doing, okay?”

Mama sighs and looks away from me, clearly dedicated to being in a huff.

I get up and put my glass in the kitchen sink before coming back and leaning down to kiss her on the cheek. She softens a little, looking me in the eye.

“Do you want some aspirin before you go?”

“No, thank you Mama. I have some meds in the car. I’ll see you in a few days. Call me if you need anything.”

She rolls her eyes again, but the tension has leached out of the atmosphere at least.

“You too.”

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