Page 29 of Break Your Fall

“Are you selling the house?”

“None of that,” she reprimands my tone, pointing a finger. “He’s into houses, Reyna. He might wanna look around.”

“Well, he won’t be looking inmyroom,” I say pointedly, and Mom huffs back to the table. When she realizes I’m not as quick to join her circus, she stops and turns around, snapping her fingers at her side, mouthing,Let’s eat!

“What are we eating?” Banks asks as we approach the table. “Ow, fucker,” he curses down at the chair after colliding into the side of it. “Did I say you could get in my way?No.”

Everyone around the table stills, all eyes on Banks as he takes his seat like nothing happened. For him and myself, nothing has happened, but my mother and her guests aren’t aware of Banks’s tumultuous relationship with inanimate objects.

“Ignore him,” Mom says to Aspen, releasing an uncomfortable laugh. “He won’t be here again after tonight,” she adds with a sharp look at me.

Riley slumps in his chair.

I pass out the wine glasses, dropping one a piece in front of Riley, Mom, myself, and Banks. Mom snatches the one from Banks and relocates it to Aspen as I plop onto my chair.

“Yeah, it’s okay, I can drink from this,” Banks announces as he reaches for the wine bottle, instead of the juice bottle, in the middle of the table.

Mom yanks it from his grip, scolding through her teeth, “You’re underage.”

“You’ve let me do it before,” I point out, mybe nicementality framed in resentment.

Aspen’s stare drags up to my mother and she catches his eyes before hurrying to remove the cork from the wine bottle as she starts in on defending herself. “Yes, the key word here beingbefore. There are things that I’ve donebeforethat I no longer doanymore.” She pierces me with a stare as the cork pops from the bottle and wine splashes onto her plate. Banks cheers and I chuckle.

“We all have a past,” Aspen excuses with a smile and mine slips.

“Yes, we do,” Mom agrees, raising her now filled glass into the air with a smug stare back on me, and I just can’t help myself.

“Alcohol again, Mom? She never stops drinking that stuff,” I say to a furrow-browed Aspen.

“All right, that’s—”

“Neither do mine,” Banks cuts off my mom’s scolding, and she jumps on his admission to remove the attention from mine.

“Yeah, how are your parents, Money? Still sniffing off of tables?”

“Mom,” I scold her as Banks snaps out a “Yep” with a pop of the p.

My mom smiles down at Aspen whose one forehead line has deepened since his time here. “We don’t condone that in my house.” She finally sits. “Let’s eat.”

After the lobster rolls are passed around and the wine and the juice are poured, Mom fingers her curls with a smile at Aspen. “You haven’t said anything about my hair.”

I’d gotten my mother to repaint herself, to brush herself away from me with dye and a curling iron.

Aspen swallows a sip of wine and dabs his mouth with a napkin. “I love it,” he says with a hitch at the end.

“But?” Mom prompts with a side glance in my direction as if his potential criticism is my fault.

“But … it’s kind of drastic for a first date,” Aspen finishes, sounding guilty, like he somehow made my mother feel like she needed to change her looks.

I chuckle around a sip of juice and Mom waves off the comment with a laugh. “Oh, well, I’ve been meaning to dye it. This all just happened to fall on the same day.”

Aspen plays along with a smile around a bite of lobster roll.

“Oh, how is it?” Mom asks next with a gesture to the food. I have no appetite for this meal, and Banks is sucking his fingers clean, his plate already empty. Mom gives a warm smile to Riley and a shameful longing raises my temper. “Good?”

“Yeah, it’s great,” I chime, then tell Aspen, “She got it from this restaurant on the boardwalk. They have the best lobster. You should go there sometime.”

Aspen’s face falls and Mom drops her emptied wine glass to the table, directing the attention from me back to Riley. “So, Riley, is it? How’s your—?”

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