Dream Chaser (Dream Team, #2)(106)

Anne-Marie twisted toward her son. “I’m not acting up.”

“Mom, you’re telling my girlfriend what an ugly fuck I was.”

“Boone Andrew Sadler! Language!” she cried irately.

Oh my God, these people were funny.

“Mom, I’m thirty-three. I can say ‘fuck’ in my own house, especially when you keep talking about this shit with my woman,” Boone retorted. “I think you get I like her. So I’d also like her to hang around after you leave.”

I fought, and won, against the desire to laugh.

“It isn’t like you didn’t tell me yourself, honey,” I reminded him, though in his current mood, I did it carefully.

“Yeah, Rynnie, but I’m not a huge fan of it bein’ discussed through Dad eating three doughnuts,” Boone returned.

“Are we counting?” Porter asked.

“Porter, really. Your cholesterol,” Anne-Marie said low.

“I’m fit as a fiddle,” he declared.

She gave me another head shake, this one meaning men and their delusions about their health.

“You know, this isn’t all that brilliant, now you got a woman to gang up on us with,” Porter pointed out, not missing the shaking head, or, it seemed, the message it sent.

“Finally,” she shot back, and to me, “You can imagine,” she said that last word in a dire tone, “me and four boys in my home. It does not start, nor does it end, with their proclivity toward the f-word, let me tell you.”

She gave a fake shiver.

It was a good one.

At that, I let myself start laughing.

“I’ve been absolutely living for the day when my sons found women so I’d have a break from all…things…man,” she finished.

I laughed harder.

My phone started ringing.

“You loved every second of it,” Porter claimed.

“I don’t when one of my boys says the f-word around me,” she replied as I got up to get my phone.

“Mom, give it up. I’m a guy. I curse. I don’t gamble, cheat or steal. Consider yourself lucky,” Boone said, bringing his mother her latest cup of Nespresso.

He was also a son who brought his mother coffee, and that had to count for something.

I mean, seriously.

I loved these people.

I stopped smiling at them and checked my phone.

My heart twinged.

Angelica.

I hadn’t heard from her since she hung up on me, what was it now? Weeks ago?

In the meantime, Mom had reported that Ang got a “job” working for a friend who had an Etsy business that was taking off and she needed someone to do the packing and mailing so she had more time to design stickers or carve placeholders or whatever.

It was part-time. Cash under the table (probably so Angelica could still fleece the government for whatever she got from them). And, in my opinion, totally bogus.

Mom’s take: “At least she’s trying.”

My take: It was horseshit.

But no one asked me, and I wasn’t in it anymore, so it had nothing to do with me.

Now she was calling.

Word on the kids was nil. Portia was apparently back at school. From what I knew about how Brian was, Jethro would always be Jethro, someone there to take care of him, even if it wasn’t a parent.

And I was out of it and doing my best to pretend I didn’t miss them, but I couldn’t do anything about that now anyway, just in case they wouldn’t be safe because I wasn’t safe, so as ever…onward.

And again, she was calling.

The phone quit ringing, I stared at it so long.

But as with Angelica anytime she wanted something, it started right back up again.

Or it could be something bad with the kids.

I snatched up the phone, turned to the Sadlers to see two of them were looking at me with friendly curiosity, one had his brows drawn, and I said, “Sorry. I have to take this. Just a sec,” and moved toward the bathroom.

“Hey,” I answered.

“Your brother is at the hospital,” she declared. “They’re discharging him today, then he’ll go to jail since he’s already been arrested, though he was so drunk, he probably doesn’t remember that. And he’ll need to be bailed out. I’m no longer in this. I don’t have any money, no matter what you think. But even if I did, I wouldn’t give it to his drunk ass. And he’s not seeing his children until he gets his head out of that ass. And you can tell him I said that. And you can also tell him not to even try to come over here if he’s still drinking, or I’m calling the cops.”

Halfway to the bathroom, I’d stopped dead on the word “hospital.”

“He’s in the hospital?” I whispered.

“Hit a parked car while driving. No one was hurt but him. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and hit his head real bad, fucked up his arm, got all torn up. They thought he might have a concussion so they kept him overnight. Now that they’re releasing him, he’s fucked, and just to say I’m glad. Maybe this will mean he’ll wake the fuck up.”

I had questions, about a billion of them, but I didn’t get them out before she kept rolling out her vitriol.

“And just so you know, since I’m done with him, so I get to be done with you, it wasn’t easy, losing Brian. It wasn’t easy, getting pregnant so early and not having a life. All my friends having fun and doing stuff. Going to school. Starting jobs. Getting apartments. Getting all dressed up and going out clubbing. And I was home and fat with Portia or changing dirty diapers and my husband was drinking himself to sleep. So maybe I wanted to have a little bit of fun. Maybe I wanted to be normal. Or pretend for a while. And not have some bitch get up in my face because she doesn’t get it. All I did was fall in love, and the next thing I know my life is in the toilet.”