Spite Club (Mason Brothers 1)

Then Nick’s voice broke it with his low rumble. “What does that mean?”

I risked a glance at him. He was still sitting back in his chair, his dinner ignored. His posture was relaxed, but I could see the tension in it. He was looking straight at me.

“It means Evie was a bad kid.” Trish filled him in. “I hear it all the time. I had so much trouble with Evie. So much trouble. She doesn’t want me to be like that.”

I locked gazes with Nick. His eyes were unreadable. I had a second where I was afraid he’d raise his eyebrows, needle me, tease me. Instead, he just looked at me, like he was seeing something new.

“You had a problem?” he asked. Just him and me.

“Evie sometimes makes bad decisions,” Mom said.

I felt my face heat. Humiliation, anger—take your pick. I swallowed it down. “I got in trouble in high school,” I said. “I almost flunked out. Then I, um, almost didn’t go to college. Mom got me in. And

I flunked that, too.”

“There were parties and such,” Mom said. “Or so I hear. You’re impulsive sometimes.”

I tore my gaze from Nick’s and looked down at the table.

“I was worried to death,” Mom went on. “You gave me a heart attack a million times when you came home late, or didn’t come home at all. Then you left college, and I thought that you wouldn’t have a career. You went to work at that bakery.”

“I liked the bakery,” I said.

“I never understood it,” Mom said. “You were so difficult.”

I slapped a palm on the table and leaned forward, looking at her. “I was difficult because Dad died.”

Another second of shocked silence. This was the worst idea I’d ever had, the worst dinner anyone had ever had. And I only had myself to blame.

Well, myself and Nick.

What must he think? That we were miserable and dysfunctional? Maybe he was right. We were. Besides, who was he to judge, when he didn’t speak to his parents and refused to talk about his brother?

“Here’s what I don’t get,” Nick said in the middle of the tension. “High school was a long time ago. Evie flunked out of college, what, five years ago? So what? That’s a long time.”

“The bakery was after that,” Mom explained. “Thank God she got in at the bank.”

I said the words. I could see the doom before my eyes, and still I said them. “I got fired from the bank.”

“What?” Mom looked bewildered. “I don’t understand.”

Trish was looking at me with her mouth open in shock.

“Things were going so well,” Mom said. “It doesn’t make sense. You had Josh, and the bank, and now—”

“Hey,” Nick cut in.

Mom went quiet, staring at him, pale-faced.

“I get it,” he said to her. “You’re doing the best you can. But when you talk to her like that, you make her feel like shit. So cut it out.”

Oh, God. Oh, God.

“I beg your pardon,” Mom said softly.

“You make her feel,” Nick said again, more slowly as if my mother was hard of hearing, “like shit. Her little sister, too. Every time, you get it? Every time. So cut it out. If Evie wants to work in a bakery, she should work in a fucking bakery.”

Mom pressed her lips together. “That’s your idea of dinner table language?”