Or long.
* * *Like the day before, I was woken up early by my phone ringing.
It was not Angelica or Brian.
It was Mom.
I tried to erase the grogginess from my voice, and avoid any indication that I’d woken up with not only a small amount of heartache that Boone was not beside me, but also not a small amount of remorse and also fear that I’d been (partly) responsible for that (and Mom would read all of that, as moms had eerie abilities to do, even over the phone).
“Hey, Mom,” I greeted.
“You okay?” Mom asked.
See?
“I didn’t sleep great,” I told her. “What’s up?”
“Okay, well, I hate to ask this, but Angelica called, and Portia is still acting up. So we have to go back on our plan since Ang was unable to get her to school yesterday, so she called her in sick, and your brother showed to help, but he was inebriated and…”
All of a sudden, her words stopped.
And this was because her voice cracked.
I had a moment of skull-splitting fury at this before it hit me (fortunately, though unfortunately belatedly) that maybe going with the emotion of the moment wasn’t working for me.
Evidence suggesting this was very, very correct was I’d screwed things up with Boone when he gave me the info about Angelica’s bullshit because I’d rolled with the moment, blaming him for something that wasn’t his fault. And if I hadn’t been kidnapped, who knew where we’d be?
Though my guess was, we wouldn’t have had bathroom sink sex.
I’d then torn out to confront Angelica before thinking how that confrontation should go, which got me banned from the kids’ lives. And now Portia was acting out, and even if that wasn’t fully on me, I had to put my hand up that I was partially to blame because, even if I was justifiably furious at Ang, I had so not taken the high road in that sitch.
And then there was the fuckup of yesterday (and it was early, but I’d noted when I’d picked up the phone that Boone still hadn’t texted).
Not to mention, hauling me and my girls’ asses to Smithie to get up in his face, only to have it made known that I was behaving like I was pathologically self-involved.
So I had to learn to calm my shit.
And in taking a second to calm my shit, the enormity of all my shit hit me, and I was currently shoved into a situation where I had to land that on my mother, who was already dealing with too much…
Goddamned…
Shit.
But the bottom line was, if these assholes had targeted me, I did not need to lead them directly to Portia and Jethro.
Or Mom.
Or really (as angry as I was with them, I still loved them) Ang and Brian.
“Mom,” I started. “I’m sorry. This is heavy for you and it’s tearing you apart, but I gotta share something.” I sucked in a huge breath then let it out with, “You know that sitch that happened a few months ago, when I was kidnapped?”
That would have been something I kept from her as well, but I’d had to tell her, seeing as it was on the news, including cell-phone video footage of me being dragged among the cars with bullets flying.
Not a stellar evening-cooking-dinner-watching-the-news-catching-up-on-current-events time, something my mom often did.
“Ryn,” she whispered.
Yeah, she remembered me being kidnapped.
And she wasn’t liking me bringing that up.
“I…there’s some more stuff happening, uh, kinda with that, and as much as it sucks, I need to stay away from the kids. And probably you.”
“Are you in danger?”
Her voice was high-pitched.
Damn.
I did not check, but no doubt the murder yesterday was on the news. I hadn’t seen any news trucks outside my house, but I also didn’t look. So who knew?
But obviously, she hadn’t seen it.
That I wasn’t going to share.
Yet.
(Or maybe ever.)
“I just need to lay low. It’s nothing I did. Nothing anyone did, really. It’s just getting caught in something that doesn’t have anything to do with me. And mostly, it’s being super safe when probably nothing is going to happen.”
God, I was blathering and just making it worse.
Time to sum up.
“But Mo and his friends are looking out for me so it’s going to be okay. I just need to be careful.”
“I don’t understand this, Ryn.”
Honestly?
I didn’t either.
“Can you bear with me until it’s over, which should be soon?” I said that last fast. “Then I’ll fill you in.”
She didn’t reply.
“We can still talk on the phone,” I offered.
When she continued to say nothing, I kept going.
Even though what I said next hurt.
“Mom, I haven’t shared this either, because it’s new, but Boone and I started seeing each other and he’s a good guy. I think he likes me a lot. And he’s going to go all out to make sure I’m okay.”