Page 44 of Stowaway Whirlwind
“Hey, hey.” I straighten on my knees and palm Goldie’s cheek, directing her to look at me. “If I’m going to be honest, I expected a lot worse. I know it had to be overwhelming doing everything by yourself. I couldn’t sleep anyway. Too excited to be home. Too worried about you and Lily and what we’re going to do moving forward. So I didn’t mind picking up.”
“This was a lot more than just ‘picking up’. The house was a wreck.”
“Eh. It could have been worse. Actually, I should be the one apologizing. I should have thought of hiring a cleaning crew to come in and help since I wasn’t around like I should have been.”
“‘Should have’…Davis…you’ve already done too much. Been so generous. I should have been able to do this one basic thing—”
Our ears perk up at the sound of a vehicle pulling into our driveway. I stand and grin, holding up my index finger. “That’s one.”
“One?”
“One spanking. For thinking bad about yourself.”
Goldie rolls her eyes, though I catch the small smile she tries to hide. “Not this again.”
I go to the front door when we hear a car door open and close. “That’s two. For the eye roll.”
Goldie growls, and it’s as cute and effective as a kitten.
“Keep it up, baby. Daddy loves making your ass turn pink,” I say just before our visitor knocks on the door. I swing it open like a jackass without checking the peephole first, expecting it to be the landscaper I called earlier to give me a quote on cutting back a tree with roots that are creeping too close to the foundation of the house.
I don’t get a chance to ask who the older woman is before she tries to push her way inside. She screeches, “Where is she?”
I fill the doorway, and the woman bounces off my chest, dropping a packet of papers that scatter on the porch in the chilly breeze. I wave to the papers. “The fuck is all this?”
“I demand to see my granddaughter!” Alarm bells are blaring inside my mind as the tiny woman produces manicured claws and attempts to rake them down my torso.
I catch her by her skeletal wrists and back her up to the porch steps.
She snarls, “Don’t touch me, you fucking hillbilly! Let me go!”
“Fine by me.” I let go with a little shove that sends the skinny blonde chihuahua stumbling down the short steps onto her ass on the dewy front lawn. I’d feel like shit about pushing a womanif it weren’t for the fact that I’m one hundred percent sure this is Goldie’s ex’s mother who tried to take Lily yesterday.
I have my phone out and dial 9-1-1 before the woman has recovered enough to reach her feet. Goldie might not have wanted to get the cops involved yesterday, but with the woman tracking her down and attempting to force her way inside our house, I won’t let her get away with this or try anything else.
I whip my head around when Goldie raises her voice and says, “Oh my god, what is she doing here?” Goldie hugs Lily close to her chest, her eyes so wide with fear that the whites completely surround her irises. “Davis!”
I swing my head just in time to find the ankle biter trying to dart around me to get to Goldie. I catch her around the waist and walk her away from the porch while she kicks and screams, and I dump her again on the lawn. I can’t hear a damn thing the 9-1-1 dispatcher is saying, but I’m pretty sure they get the drift with the banshee hollering up a storm in the background.
Before I’ve even hung up the phone, Sheriff Gibson arrives, parking his cruiser at an angle behind Mrs. Fitzroy’s white sedan, which looks to be a rental. My blood boils when I spot a car seat buckled into her back seat. The crazy bitch thought she could just waltz in and out with Lily.
If the cops don’t deal with her soon, I’ll take matters into my own hands. I’ve never thought about killing someone before, but I know without a shred of doubt that I’m willing to kill for my family, consequences be damned.
The thing about our small town is that everybody knows everybody, and it usually doesn’t take too long for Sheriff Gibson to show up on someone’s front porch—whether that’s a good thing or not, depending on their situation. Mrs. Fitzroy and I apparently both find it to be a good thing as she stands, dusts off her dirty white pants, and charges at him, hollering just as loudly and unintelligibly as before. She ought to be grateful heshowed up when he did before I took my murderous thoughts any further and decided to drag her into the woods behind the house.
I walk back to the porch to help Goldie onto one of the rocking chairs when she sways on her feet. I stand at Goldie’s side with my hand on her shoulder, watching the scene unfold until she shakily hands me the papers she had picked up. I crumple them in my fist when I see that they’re documents for the termination of parental rights. I will never allow that to happen.
Sheriff Gibson is a bulldozer of a man and doesn’t take too kindly to Colton’s mother waving her arms about in his face. And he certainly doesn’t tolerate her jamming a finger in his puffed-out chest. He catches her wrist, spins her around, and cuffs her hands behind her back in the blink of an eye.
For half a second, she goes silent with shock, and then she loses it, kicking and screaming, “Get your hands off me, you dirty hick! I’m going to sue you and this whole damn town. Just wait until you hear from my lawyer!”
Sheriff Gibson says nothing—he just wrestles her into the back of his cruiser and slams the door shut. Despite the temperature, he wipes sweat from his forehead beneath his Cowboy hat and joins us on the porch.
We shake hands, and I ask, “How did you get here so fast? Two minutes has got to be some kind of record.”
“I was already on my way after an interesting conversation with Wyatt this morning when he called in a welfare check since he couldn’t get ahold of you. Goddamn, Davis, what the hell have you gotten yourself into?”
“It’s a long story I’ll have to save for later,” I say, pointedly looking toward the old rabid animal in the cruiser, trying to kick the window out. The woman is clearly fucking mental, because who acts like that?
