Dead Heat (Alpha & Omega #4)(20)

Michael’s bottom lip stuck out. “I liked Mrs. Glover.” Tears gathered.

“Mrs. Glover was my teacher,” Mackie said. “She liked me better than she liked you.”

“Shut up, you freaks,” snapped Max. “Shut up.”

“‘Shut up’ is a bad word,” said Michael, incipient tears interrupted by the chance to point out his older brother’s fault.

“Just shut up anyway.”

Anna touched his arm. “Who is Mrs. Glover?”

“My teacher,” wailed Mackie. “She died and never came back.”

“She did too like me,” said Michael, crying in earnest.

“And now Mommy is dying,” Mackie said. “Everyone is dying.”

“Stop it,” said Max tightly. “Just stop.”

“Your teacher where?” Anna asked. Mackie might be old enough to go to elementary school—but Michael wasn’t.

“Preschool/day care,” said Max. “They both go. Different classes. Mackie is five, but she was born after the September deadline, so she’ll go into kindergarten next year.”

“So your mom leaves work, picks up the kids, and then goes home, right?” Anna said.

“That’s right,” Max said. “I get home an hour or so after they do. Hey, Mackie, was Mom okay when she picked you guys up at the day care?”

Mackie had been bickering with Michael, but Max’s question made her fall silent.

“Mackie?”

“Mackie was in the time-out chair,” said Michael. “Her teacher was mad at her, but Mommy wasn’t.”

“Yes, she was,” said Mackie in a small voice. “She didn’t sound like it when she talked to Miss Baird, but when Mommy was talking to me in the car she got mad. She didn’t talk to me at all, and then she sent us to watch TV.”

“That’s unusual?” Anna asked.

Max nodded. “Mom doesn’t do the silent treatment, not ever. My grandmother—her mom—abused it. Mom swore she’d never do that to us. She yells.”

“Once she threw dishes at Daddy,” Michael said. “But she hit the floor instead of him. Then he laughed and cleaned up the glass. I didn’t touch the glass.”

“She wasn’t trying to hit him, just make a point,” said Max. “But yeah, Mom is loud. She doesn’t do the silent treatment, and she doesn’t like the kids to watch TV by themselves.”

“Half hour a day,” said Mackie. “Michael gets a show and I get a show, unless we’re at Granddad’s. There’s the park.”

“And Mom or Kage or I watch those shows with them,” Max said. “She’d never just send them in on their own.” He glanced at Anna and gave her a half smile. “Especially not after Grandma let them watch Supernatural; Michael had nightmares. She says she can’t control what they watch at their granddad’s house, but she can make sure they’re not watching grown-up shows at home.”

The park was small and carefully tended without a single bit of plant life. It was beautiful anyway. There were two fountains on either side of a play area that was covered with a giant roof held over the playground equipment on painted steel poles. It was pleasantly warm right now, but Anna expected that anything left out in the sun in high summer would be hot enough to burn skin.

A comfortable number of children were playing on the equipment, with a few adults sitting on the ubiquitous benches set around playgrounds to encourage parents to watch over their children. One woman talked with extreme animation into her cell phone while a man of approximately the same age was deeply engrossed in a book.

Michael and Mackie bolted for the play fort as soon as their feet hit the sand of the playground at the edge of the sidewalk. Evidently that was where walking with grown-ups was no longer necessary.

“Tell me about your mother,” Anna said. “Where does she work?”

“She’s a trainer like Kage,” he said with a wry smile. “But instead of training horses, she trains people to sell things. She’s very good at it. She’s part owner in a company that sells that training to other companies. And because she really is very good at selling things, lots of companies hire her company.

“People like her,” he said. They’d stopped on the edge of the sidewalk, right where Mackie and Michael had taken off. But now Max walked with quick determination toward an empty bench. “She says everyone likes her because she’s good at selling herself, too.”

He swallowed and said without humor, “Except for Hosteen. Kage says that if she really were selling herself she’d have the sheiks at her feet with piles of money. Then she says, ‘There’s that one who came to buy a filly from you. He’d have bought me, too.’ And then Kage says…” He looked at Anna. “It’s not going to be like that anymore. You can’t bring people back from the dead—they come back different.”

Anna pursed her lips and then nodded. “Life changes people more than death does, in my experience. Ten years from now you wouldn’t see her the same way you do now, any more than you see her the same way you did when you were Michael’s age.”

Max’s face flushed. They’d reached the bench, but he didn’t sit down. “You don’t have to patronize me. I understand you’re a million years old like Kage’s grandfather and that means you know so much more than I do. But this is different from being a child looking at a parent. I’ve seen Hosteen when he isn’t playing human, and I don’t want to look in my mother’s eyes and know she’s thinking how good my liver would taste.”