Page 194 of Smooth Sailing

“Mother!” Mom shouted.

“I’m shattered, Maggie,” Gram whispered. “You might not have been here for all that just happened, choosing, as ever, to live in the fantasy world in that head of yours, but I was. Order a damned Uber.”

“I’ll call for one,” Dad offered.

“I don’t want anything from you,” Mom snapped at him.

“Fine,” Dad murmured.

“So this is it?” Mom asked me.

“That’s up to you,” I said.

“Well, I certainly won’t come all the way down from Idaho to be treated like this again,” Mom warned.

“I think all that needed to be said was said,” I stated. “It’s up to you to apologize and?—”

Mom interrupted me. “Apologize?”

“Call the Uber, Maggie,” Gram ordered, still my mother’s mother, and even as shattered as she was, she was trying to stem the flow of disaster.

“I won’t be coming to visit you either,” Mom sniped at her.

Gram’s face fell.

“Christ, you’re a piece of work,” Hugger muttered loudly.

“Like I give a shit what a man like you thinks about me,” Mom retorted.

Uh-oh.

Hugger just shrugged and moved out of the way to her exit.

By the time I got used to the fire burning in my belly and searing its way through my veins, Mom was moving.

“Stop,” I demanded.

Mom turned to me.

“No contact,” I said.

Dad made an alarmed noise.

Hugger started moving to me.

“What?” Mom asked.

“That’s the term they use when you cut yourself off from a member of your family. You go no contact. I’m blocking you on my phone. We’re done.”

Hugger stood at my back as Mom stared and whispered, “What?”

I shook my head. “You don’t get it. None of it. You never will. And your finale was to talk shit to my guy, again, like that’s quite all right. Well, it isn’t. You talked shit to Dad, to Gram, to Big Petey, and I let it slide. Hugger, no. Absolutely no. That was the last straw. Like I said, we’re done.”

Mom’s face grew haggard before she asked, “You can’t be serious.”

“Deadly,” I replied, my stomach sinking and twisting.

But we were here.

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