Page 2 of Past Due

“I wouldn’t care if it was your money, Kim. Considering you haven’t worked a goddamn day in your life—"

“You wouldn’t let me! You wanted me to stay home and take care of Marley so I did!”

“Did you, Kim? Then explain to me how you didn’t fucking handle this heart problem of hers when she was a kid!” Spider demanded angrily. “That doctor said she’s had this since she was born! It’s in her records that she needed to have it fixed!”

“They told me it wasn’t serious! I had a lot going on at the time, and the doctor told me it could wait.”

“He probably meant for a few weeks, Kim! Not twenty goddamn years!”

“She was fine! She never complained—”

“Would you have even listened if she had? Or did she feel like she had to hide how she was feeling because you always have play the victim about everything? You have to be the most selfish—”

“How dare you! I gave up everything to raise her! Everything! Selfish? Look in the fucking mirror, Spider! While you were off running drugs and guns and God only knows what else for the cartel and your club, I was home alone!”

Spider chortled. “Alone? You’re going to sit there with a straight face and pretend you weren’t bringing home every swinging dick that crossed your path?”

“Oh, because you were such a saint, huh? Judy, Vanessa, Marlene, Melissa, Luanne, Sabrina, Amanda, Dawn, Marcella—”

“You made your point!”

“That’s not even counting the one-night stands!”

“I get it! Okay!”

“And you have some nerve sitting there judging me for not being a better mother when you spent most of her childhood in and out of prison! If you cared so much, why didn’t you try harder to be there for her?”

“One of us had to make money! As fast as you spent every dime I earned, I had to keep working like a dog.”

“Work?” she scoffed. “Since when is smuggling drugs real work?”

“It’s more real than those bullshit makeup and diet pill scams you keep pushing!”

“Excuse me!” A forceful female voice interrupted their bickering. “I need you two to step out of the room.”

“She isn’t awake yet,” my mother protested.

“Well, when she does wake up, she needs to rest. We can hear you out at the desk! Get your things and go to the waiting room.”

“You can’t throw us out! I’m her mother!”

“She’s an adult. If she wants you back in here when she’s awake, I’ll send someone to get you.”

Embarrassed by their behavior, I kept my eyes closed until I heard the door click. When I opened them, I realized I wasn’t alone. The nurse who had thrown out my parents held her hand under the sanitizer dispenser mounted on the wall. As she rubbed her hands together, she turned toward me and smiled. “How you feeling, hon?”

“I’m so sorry,” I croaked out, my throat sore and dry.

“Oh, sweetheart, don’t you worry about that.” The nurse gently patted my hand. “They aren’t the first arguing parents we’ve had to toss out, and they won’t be the last.” She traced the IV line snaking out of my hand up to the pump where it disappeared. “Stress makes people act like that.”

I didn’t want to admit that they fought like that every single time they were in the same room. For as far back as I could remember, they embodied dysfunction. It was the reason I had moved out of my mother’s place as soon as I finished high school. I couldn’t handle the constant arguing and yelling and things being hurtled across the house.

“How are you feeling? On a scale of one to ten, how’s your pain?”

“A four?” I tried to judge my discomfort. “Mostly in my leg.”

“That’s normal,” she assured me. “It will be a little tender for a few days. The doctors try to be gentle when they’re sliding through that artery, but there’s always some bruising.” She opened the door on the pump and punched in a few numbers before closing it. “How about nausea? Do you feel like you might throw up?”

“No.” The thought of puking after having wires slipped through my veins and into my heart terrified me. What if I busted something open?

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