The Best of Winter Renshaw - An 8 Book Collection - Winter Renshaw Page 0,46

seconds from dying of boredom when I saw her.

“Oh, okay.” I unfold the chair and make myself a little bed. Not sure how much sleeping I’ll be doing tonight, but I’m going to try.

Something tells me tomorrow’s going to be a long day.

Twenty-One

Royal

* * *

“Mona, open up.” I pound on the front porch door of my biological mother’s saggy-roofed house. For as long as I can remember, she’s lived in this hellhole, rotting floors and all.

We were extracted from her care when I was in first grade. Misty was still in diapers. And ironically enough, when shit went down seven years ago, Mona was the only one there for me. She came to my trial and visited me in prison.

It’s the only reason I’m standing here, pounding on her door, or giving her the time of day.

“Royal? That you?” The creak of her front door is followed by the stench of cat piss and dirty litter boxes. “Hey, baby, come on in.”

I show myself in. Mona’s in a yellow mu mu with Hawaiian flowers. She waddles to the living room and plops down, all five hundred pounds of her, and lifts her remote to pause her show.

“Ain’t seen you in a good while, Son,” she says. Mona grins with a mouthful of pearly whites. Those are new. Must’ve finally gotten those dentures.

I hate when she calls me Son. Like we’re family. I mean, we are, by blood, but where was she all those years I was shipped around from foster family to foster family? I’m convinced the only reason she reappeared in my life at nineteen was because she’d finally gotten cleaned up and realized she had no one left.

She had no choice but to try to make amends.

Out of everyone, she believed me when I told her I was innocent. Or at least, she said she did.

“Did you tell Misty where I live?” I stand in the middle of her living room. Every time I sit for too long, I leave here smelling like death and can’t get the smell out of my nose for days.

Mona’s moon-shaped face scrunches, and when she shakes her head, her chins flop.

“No, baby,” she says. “Misty knows better than to ask me that.”

“She showed up at my place,” I say. “Wanted me to take her in off the streets.”

Mona rolls her eyes. “What’s she doing on the streets? Rick kick her out?”

“She said Rick died.”

Mona’s small mouth hangs, and she lifts a pudgy couple of fingers to her lips like I’ve just delivered tragic news.

“Your sister is troubled.” Mona states what we both know to be the indisputable truth. She hasn’t had much to do with Misty since everything went down seven years ago, but I think she wishes she could bring us all together again. One little, happy family.

Never going to happen.

“Where’d she go?” Mona asks.

I shrug. “Don’t know, don’t care.”

She clucks her tongue, tilting her head and exhaling. She’s so loud when she breathes. The doctors want her on oxygen, but she’s refusing until it’s absolutely necessary.

“Might be time to start forgiving and forgetting, Royal,” she wheezes. “How long you going to hold onto that night?”

I stare into her beady eyes, my shoulders heaving with each drag of a breath. The fact that she has the audacity to suggest such a thing is infuriating.

“That night,” I say, “cost me everything. I’ll never forget.”

I’m not sticking around.

I move to the door, turn back, and look at Mona one more time.

“I wish I could,” I say.

“Baby, people change all the time. You two are both young. I’m not going to be around forever, and someday when I’m gone, all you’ll have is each other,” she says. “I’m just saying, don’t write your sister off forever because of one little mistake she made at fifteen.”

“Little?” I spit the word at her. “Little?”

“You know what I mean, Royal.”

With that, I’m gone. I don’t trust myself to not say horrible things, hurtful things I can never take back. How fucking dare Mona lecture me on family? Of all people. The woman who left her kids to feast on canned cat food after a four-day casino binge. The woman who let CPS remove her children and didn’t once try and stop them.

She’s lucky I’ve forgiven her.

But I’ll never forgive Misty.

Never.

Twenty-Two

Demi

* * *

I wake to the sound of Brooks’s machines still breathing his every breath. Brenda’s passed out in a chair at his side. My hand flies to a shooting pain zinging up my neck.

Brooks’s eyes are shut.