Alan’s eyes dropped to the floor. “It’s a tough market out there.”
Right. For a man who’d been working at a car wash when my mother took him in, I found it hard to believe that there weren’t other car washes in the area looking for good help. Then again, good was probably not a word I’d use to describe Alan Kapersky. Lazy, yes.
Standing there, not knowing what else to say, I tried to pretend it wasn’t awkward. “I’m gonna go talk to her.” I nodded toward the kitchen.
“Yeah.”
Luckily, Alan chose not to follow me when I started down the short hall that led past the stairs and to the kitchen and the main living room at the back of the house.
I found my mother at the counter, tossing Styrofoam food containers into the trash.
“Hey, Mom.”
Deborah jumped, shoving one of the boxes down before dropping the lid on the trash can. Apparently she was attempting to make me believe she’d cooked. I knew better.
“Hey,” she said, smiling, her light blue eyes sparkling in the overhead lights.
In my mother’s defense, she might’ve been fifty-five, had always had an interest in younger men, but she looked at least a decade younger than her age. She had a very strict routine when it came to her vanity, too. She was always dieting, went for a mani/pedi every two weeks without fail, and her naturally dark hair was lightened and cut in the same, short, 1990s-Rachel, layered style she’d always had.
And she acted far younger than her age, as well.
Not that it’d been easy growing up with her dating men who were much closer to my age than hers—drastically so, once I’d turned twenty-two—but my sister and I had lived through it and come out the other side without a mark—mostly—so I considered us lucky.
“I’m glad you could make it,” she said. “How’s the book coming along? Almost finished?”
They were the same questions she asked every time I came over. If I were to ask her how many books I’d published, she wouldn’t know. And though I’d mentioned the movie at least a dozen times, I doubted she knew the name of that, either. But that was the way my mother was. She was fiercely self-centered, always had been and likely always would be.
I still loved her unconditionally.
“Workin’ on it,” I told her, knowing she wasn’t paying much attention anyway. “Where’s Paige?” I peered around as though my sister and my niece might possibly jump out and surprise me, salvaging the evening.
“Abby had a counseling appointment,” she muttered, evidently not happy about that.
Lucky them.
Although my mother cared mostly about herself, I had to give her credit for raising me and my sister. She’d been mostly a single mom until I was six, when she’d married husband number three, though according to her tales, she’d dated since the day I was born.
I honestly hadn’t had a bad childhood. We’d moved around a lot, sure, but other than changing schools every few years because of my mother’s most recent marriage (and subsequent divorce), it hadn’t been terrible. I probably had her to thank for the fact that I was a loner. I preferred to keep to myself, didn’t have a lot of close friends, mainly because I’d never been in one place long enough to make any.
“What’s for dinner?” I asked when the tension in the brightly lit room became too much to bear.
“I made chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes,” she said with a grin.
By made, she meant she’d either stopped to pick it up at the local diner or they now delivered. The Styrofoam container of mashed potatoes still sitting on the counter was a dead giveaway.
“Fantastic. I’m starving.”
After helping my mother carry the plates to the table, I took a seat when she motioned me toward a chair. She disappeared from the room—I assume to summon Alan to dinner—and returned a minute later, a frown on her face. I don’t think she’d meant for me to see that, so I pretended not to notice.
“Abby said you took her to a movie a couple of weeks ago,” Deborah prompted.
“Yeah.”
“Does she seem okay to you?”
I picked up my fork. “Yeah. Why? Something wrong?”
My mother shook her head. “I’m just worried about her. Seems like she’s gotten over this rather quickly.”
I wasn’t sure a year could be considered quick by any means, not to mention Abby was still going to