Page 38 of Brewbies
Her lips curved beneath her celebrity-in-search-of-invisibility sunglasses, but the smile was as brittle as the rest of her. “Of course I am,” she said. “I’m just a bit tired.”
Ethan frowned. He’d never seen his mother look so fragile before. Her delicate frame seemed almost insubstantial, and her skin was pale, stretched tight over her Greta Garbo bone structure. Even her usually voluminous hair had thinned and lost its luster, though she’d styled it with her usual eye for perfection.
“Have you been eating enough?” he asked, concerned for her health, despite everything. She’d aged a handful of years in a handful of months.
Accountability could do that to you.
Caryn waved away his worry with a long-suffering sigh. “I’ve been eating alone. Doesn’t leave me with much of an appetite.”
And here he’d forgotten to pack his luggage for the guilt trip she was about to take him on.
Should have known better than to ask.
“Well, you’d have plenty of dining companions in jail, if that alternative appeals to you,” he muttered, doing exactly nothing to keep the bitterness from his voice.
Caryn Townsend had been a “Karen” before Dane Cook had canonized the name as the invocation of every middle-aged white lady with an entitled chip on her shoulder and a burning need to talk to a manager.
Her meager—if perfectly lined—smile disappeared as she pressed her mouth into a thin line, indenting every groove of age beneath her nose. She stepped out of the way of a pack of dogs intent on sled-team-pulling a teenaged walker down the main thoroughfare, nudging them closer to the streetlamp from which swung a basket of begonias and rosemary.
Though her glasses were dark enough to hide the darting of her eyes, Ethan could feel that they didn’t stay focused on him, but frequently slid over to Roy Dobson’s dingy shop windows.
“I’m going to talk to Anton Gilmore at the city building about taking the Kiki Forrester signs down from Water Street,” she offered. “Really, Ethan, Mayor Stewart knows better.”
The door through which Darby Dunwell had only just disappeared yawned like a hellmouth in Ethan’s periphery, but he could only handle one infuriating woman at a time.
“Don’t bother,” he muttered. “I doubt your inquiries or suggestions will hold much weight at City Hall these days.”
She winced as if he’d slapped her, and he had to stuff down a wellspring of compassion.
“I know you’re still upset with me about the Townsend Building,” she ventured, pulling a burgundy cashmere wrap from her tote and draping it over her shoulder when the sun disappeared behind a traveling cloud. “But I thought after some time had passed, we could discuss—”
“This has exactly nothing to do with the Townsend Building, and you know it.” He said the harsh words in the gentlest tone he could muster, though his enunciation was entirely too sharp to use when speaking to a matriarch. Karen or no Karen. “I’m not upset, Mom. I’m fu—I’m freaking pissed.” Welp, emotional honesty wasn’t a Townsend family practice, apparently, but he’d fucking grown in the past few months.
Kinda.
“I’m pissed that you set me up with Cady Bloomquist in the mercenary hopes of gaining access to and ownership of the Townsend Building.”
Blanching, she fluffed her chic bob to cover her distress. “I thought the two of you would be a good—”
“Then, when she wouldn’t cooperate,” he interrupted, in no mood for excuses, “you used me to gift her that camerathrough which you illegally surveilled her.”
Not that Cady seemed to have a problem with illegal surveillance, seeing as how she didn’t press charges against Caryn… And she was shacking up with Roman “binocular boy” Fawkes, the huge, shaggy hermit who broke into a cold sweat at the sight of a closed door.
Caryn’s throat bobbed beneath her silk scarf in a difficult swallow. “I didn’t think—”
“And thenyou had your henchman, Roy Dobson, sneak in and search for papers that would substantiate your claim, scaring her half to death. And do you know what happens when women are afraid of intruders?”
“We’ve already been through all—”
“That’s right! They call the cops. So, I run around town investigating like a clueless douchebag while mymotheris her terrorist the whole time.”
At this point Caryn was squirming, her head on a swivel in search of eavesdroppers. “I think terrorist is a bit of a strong—”
“And if that wasn’t enough, you go and do the same thing to me that Dad did to you, selling the Raven Creek property to a woman who makes coffee damn near topless for every pervert from here to Forks not a stone’s throw from Grandpa’s ashes.”
“I didn’t know what sort of business she planned to put there. I’m not informed of the buyer’s occupation. I had no idea that plot meant so much to you.”
That ratcheted his temper up to eleven. “You would have,” he snapped. “If you’d actually listened to the plans I had for it.”
