in his mother’s dark eyes when she smiled at him.
He grimaced because it was her real smile. Not her fake one. And it wasn’t for him. It was for his rat bastard of a father. To make matters worse, she’d put on her best dress and had splurged on new lipstick for the occasion.
“Bran, baby.” She pulled him into a hug. He was taller than she was now. Bigger too. But he still felt like a child in her arms. “I hafta go.”
“Why?” he demanded, bitterly pushing out of her embrace. “Why do you have to go?”
She shook her head. “I know you don’t understand, but the bad parts of him don’t outweigh the good. I love him, Bran. And if there’s a chance…” She drifted off, not finishing the sentence.
Frustration and fury were twin fires in Bran’s chest. They licked flames into his face. “What’s wrong with you?” he demanded hoarsely. “How can you still love him after…after…” He didn’t finish. He was too busy angrily wiping away tears that made his eyes feel like they were filled with fine-grained sand.
His mother placed gentle hands on his cheeks. “Because that’s how love works,” she whispered. “No matter what, it doesn’t go away. It remains part of you. Forever. Someday you’ll understand.”
“No, I won’t,” he swore, disgusted when his voice broke and more impotent tears filled his eyes. “Because if love is what you say it is, if it makes a man beat his wife—”
“Brando Pallidino,” she tsked, glancing around the bus stop. “Keep your voice down.” But they were alone on the sidewalk, the garbage truck across the way and the lonely sparrow chirping on a nearby limb their only audience.
“If it makes a woman stay with a husband who calls her names,” he went on like she hadn’t spoken, “and is so eaten up with jealousy that he can’t help but hurt her, then I want no part of it.”
“Don’t blame that on love, baby.” Her expression was sad. “That doesn’t have anything to do with love. It has to do with…” She paused to drag in a deep breath. “Your daddy didn’t have it easy growing up. There were things that…” She didn’t finish, just shook her head again.
“And that makes it okay?” He blinked at her, realizing just how…crazy she was, how deluded. And blind. She didn’t see. She’d never see.
“It doesn’t make it okay,” she told him. “But it should give you comfort to know that when you fall in love, it’ll be different for you because you’re different from him. Different from me too.”
Bran stumbled away from her. “You’re wrong about a lotta things, but you’re really wrong about that,” he told her as the crosstown bus turned the corner and rumbled in their direction. “What’s in him is in me too.” He beat a closed fist against his chest. “All that fury. All that rage. I got it too, Momma.” Some of it was flaming inside him even now, shouting for his father’s head on a pike.
“No.” She let her gaze run over his flaring nostrils and bloodshot eyes. “You’re all our good parts, Bran, and none of our bad. You’re all our loyalty and none of our jealousy. All our courage and none of our cowardice. I thank God every day for that.”
She was deranged. Completely, utterly deranged. He had all of their bad parts in him, and he opened his mouth to tell her as much, tell her she didn’t have the first fucking clue, but with a squeal of air brakes, the bus stopped beside them and the door popped wide with a squeak and a shhhh of sound.
Panic set in. His heart skipped a beat. “Let me come with you,” he begged, a dark sense of foreboding wrapping cold fingers around his throat until he could barely breathe. “Let me—”
“Your father and I need some time alone,” she said, cutting him off.
“But—”
“Bran.” She grabbed his hands, giving them a squeeze. “Please stay. I’ll be—”
“In or out, lady?” the bus driver called, chewing noisily on a monster-sized piece of pink gum. He blew a bubble bigger than his face as he waited on Bran’s mother’s reply.
“In!” she yelled, hopping onto the bus’s first step. Before she turned away to pay for her ticket, she smiled down at Bran, the hem of her new dress tangling around her slim ankles as the wind suddenly blew up with serious intent. But it wasn’t the breeze that made Bran nervous. It was whatever