Break For Him (Volkov Crime Family 2)

“Oh.” The word was an exhalation. “I am too sweetie. Are you at the Levittown station right now?”

“Yeah, just got here.”

“Okay. Don’t move. I’ll be there soon.”

She hung up. I slipped my phone away and leaned up against a black wrought iron railing. Mom’s brown sedan pulled in ten minutes later and the nostalgia that washed over me was almost too hard to ignore. I walked down the ramp and got into the passenger side.

My mother looked thinner than the last time I saw her. She had reddish hair, freshly dyed and cut short. Her green eyes sparkled out from a gaunt and wrinkled face. I wondered when she’d gotten so old, and guessed it was when Jason died.

“It’s good to see you.” My mom leaned over and they hugged across the center console. I felt her ribs through her long sleeve shirt.

“It’s good to see you too mom. I’m sorry I sort of disappeared there for a while.”

“Where have you been?”

“Around. Just dealing with things. The shop’s been crazy.”

Mom gave me a skeptical look but started driving. “I’m glad that’s still going well.”

I wanted to say, yes, I’m selling drugs out the back now, but figured that was a bad idea.

“Sometimes I think it’s all I have left, you know? Of Jason.”

“I know what you mean.” Mom’s gaze out the front windshield sent a chill down my spine. I couldn’t imagine what Mom was going through, not really, even though I’d lost a brother.

Mom lost a son. That meant something different.

“Are you still going to church?” I asked, grasping for conversation.

The question worked though, and Mom talked about the church ladies for the whole drive. When we got back to Mom’s small Levittown house with its blue shutters and ancient brown door, I sat down at the familiar kitchen table and let Mom make some tea and sandwiches.

It felt bizarre being home. The house hadn’t changed at all since I was a little girl, and everything felt familiar and right. I reverted back to my childhood self the second I walked through that front door, and as much as I wanted to resist the transformation, I knew it was impossible. I looked around at Mom’s collection of rooster statues, at the oil painting of a barn, at the large Ansel Adams photographs hanging in the small living room, and I couldn’t help but smile.

We sat the table, drank tea, and ate. I almost forgot why I came all the way out here as Mom went on about the church ladies, about her tennis instructor—this strange old man that sat in a folding chair and fed them balls and blew a whistle and grunted as he smoked a cigarette—and I drifted into the familiarity of it all. Once Mom got talking, I knew she’d never stop, and that was almost comforting.

The spell didn’t last much more than an hour. We finished the tea and Mom poured wine instead without asking. As she sat back down, placing a glass of white with two ice cubes in front of me, someone knocked at the door.

Mom looked surprised. “Who could that be?”

“Probably a package.”

She got up with a frown and walked to the front door. I took a sip of my wine and stared up at a picture of me and Jason when we were little kids wearing bathing suits and standing in front of the community pool. Jason’s hair was wet and his freckles looked splattered on his nose. His pale chest looked so skinny, but he was smiling huge, like the world would never break him, even though it did eventually. I stood a little behind him and looked right into the camera like I was about to tell my mom to stop taking a picture, and I wished I could remember that moment, remember all the time we spent at the pool together, back before Jason had turned into such a sad person and turned to drugs to feel something better—but I couldn’t bring the memories back anymore.

Even coming home didn’t seem to draw them through.

“Honey?” Mom walked back into the kitchen, looking uncertain. “There’s a man at the door for you. A very big and very handsome man.”

I felt my blood run cold and stood. “Did he say this name?”

“He was very polite. Said his name is Owain and that he’s worried about you. That he’s been looking.”

I had a choice. I knew it, right then and there. I had to choose and choose right, because if I was wrong, the consequences could be so horrible.

I could tell my mother that I didn’t know Owain, or that he was some stalker, or any story except for the truth and hope that she’d chase him off, and that would be that. I’d move home, get a job, and start my life over.