Page 33 of Dirty Pucker

Anger simmers beneath the calm exterior I try to show my mom. When I think back to the day she called me last month, I can hear the terror in her voice clearly.

Out of the blue, my dad called her. He demanded she give him half the money for their house. Even though he never made a single payment toward the mortgage. He was too busy going out, getting drunk, and gambling away our money.

I’d bet anything that after all these years he ran out of money to feed his gambling habit, and now he’s harassing my mom to get what he wants.

When she refused to give him anything, he threatened her.

Her trembling voice echoes in my mind.

He threatened to kill me if I didn’t give him the money, Del. He threatened to come to the house and take what’s his. I’m so scared. I-I don’t know what to do.

When I asked if she called the police, she said she did, but they refused to do anything. It was a he said, she said matter.

Rage simmers inside of me like lava.

She glances at the grass for a long moment before she looks up at me. Her eyes are shiny with unshed tears. “I just feel so guilty, Del. I let you uproot your life and change the team you played for, just so you could come back home. I should have told you no when you offered to come back to Denver. I know you wanted to get away after all the bad memories you had growing up here with your dad. I was just so unnerved to hear from him after all these years…”

Her lips wobble and my chest cracks in half.

I hate seeing my mom cry. I saw her cry so many times because of my dad growing up.

I hug her tight.

“You have your own life, honey. And I feel so awful being such a burden on you with all this. You’re so busy with hockey and I hate taking you away from it to help me.”

My throat aches. I swallow through it. She feels so small in my arms as I hug her. “Mom. Listen. You’re not a burden. Not even close. I wanted to move back. I want to be close to you and Dakota. You two are my priority.”

She sniffles and exhales as she squeezes her small arm around me.

“If anything, I’m the burden. You sacrificed so much just so I could play hockey.”

I think about all the overtime my mom worked as a nurse when I was a kid to pay for my gear, all the traveling I did, and the extra coaching I had as I got older and became a better player. Even when she was married to my dad, he didn’t help much financially. He was too busy going out and getting wasted to hold a job for more than a couple of months. And when he did work, he gambled away his paychecks. When my parents finally split up, he never paid child support, so my mom worked her ass off to support Dakota and me as a single parent.

My mom leans back and frowns up at me. “Del, honey. Don’t you talk like that. A child isn’t a burden to their parents. It’s our job to take care of you.”

“And now I’m an adult, and it’s my turn to take care of you. So please don’t call yourself a burden, Mom. You’re not. Everything I do, I do it because I want to.”

She blinks and a small smile pulls at her lips. She reaches up and pats my cheek. “Thank you, honey.”

We walk through the sliding glass door back inside to the kitchen. I boil her a kettle of hot water for some tea. A cup of tea is the best way to help her calm down when she’s nervous or upset.

She sits at the dining table. “How was practice today?”

“Good. Tiring.” I grab the milk from the fridge.

“You’re twenty-nine. Too young to complain about being tired.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you did the drills Coach Porter ran us through.”

She smiles. When the water finishes boiling, I drop a couple of tea bags into our mugs and pour in the water. I splash a hefty amount of milk into hers, just like she likes it. I pour myself acup and join her at the table. She thanks me and takes a careful sip.

“How is working going at the nursing home?” I ask.

“It’s okay.” She sighs. “One of my patients passed away the other day.”

She works part-time at a nursing home a few miles from her house here in west Denver.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mom.”

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