Dream Chaser (Dream Team #2) - Kristen Ashley Page 0,23
telling it like it was, I was part of the problem.
No more.
I had no reason whatsoever to shield Angelica from whatever shit was going to befall her because of her own actions.
None at all.
“Angie gets bi-monthly massages. She’d called me about a migraine which meant she needed my help with the kids, but she really just wanted to sleep in. She was having a facial that day. She goes out to lunch with her girlfriends, has food, wine, a good time. And she does it wearing designer flip-flops that cost over three hundred dollars that she hides from us because if we saw them, we wouldn’t give her money for her massages, her lunches, her facials and her designer shoes.”
Mom said not one word.
She didn’t even make a noise.
So I kept going.
“That morning, I came to the house and Portia had made breakfast for her and Jethro. Cereal. She also helped Jethro pack his lunch. And she stuffed his book bag. While Ang had a lie-in. The house was a mess. There was little food in the kitchen. But she had a facial planned.”
Mom remained silent.
“When I looked in on her, she asked me for money for a field trip for Jethro that I’m assuming she either already paid for, since this month you’ve given her a couple hundred, Brenda has given her a couple hundred, I’ve given her more than a couple hundred and Brian has given her two thousand.”
That brought a gasp.
I kept going.
“Or she made it up, and that money was for her facial. It doesn’t matter. When I found out about all this and went back not an hour later, she was up, in the shower, had already stuffed my money in her wallet, but the laundry on the couch had not been sorted.”
Mom finally spoke.
“This can’t be true.”
“It is,” I confirmed. “I have pictures. So yes. I went there and I confronted her for swindling thousands of dollars from me, you, Brenda, and I got in her shit about taking care of her kids and getting a job. And outside the fact both Angelica and Brian have now cut me off from the kids, I don’t regret it.”
“Brian?”
“She’s been on to him too. And he says she needs ‘me time’ after all that’s befallen her. But no one had a gun to her head to date Brian, move in with him, get pregnant by him, get pregnant again by him, and then do shit about it when he started drowning himself in a bottle. That’s not on her. That’s on Brian. But the rest, that’s hers. She needs to own it. I can see being twenty-two and suddenly facing a life with two kids, no man, little work experience would be scary as hell. I might be wrong, Mom, but when you have two kids, you don’t have the luxury of taking years to sort your shit out. You lick your wounds on the go and keep motoring. And I doubt you’ll think I’m wrong, because you might not have been that young when it happened to you, but you licked your wounds on the go and kept motoring.”
It took a sec for Mom to speak again.
“How did you find out all of this?”
“Lottie’s friends, the commandos. I don’t know why one of them got curious,” that was a lie, obviously, but Mom didn’t need to know that, because Mom never needed to know about Boone, “but he did. He found it out and he shared it with me.”
“That’s a little…invasive, sugarsnap.”
I loved it when my mom called me “sugarsnap.”
She called Brian “honeycrunch” and I loved that too.
It was sweet.
In this instance, I wasn’t about to take her careful admonishment softened by a “sugarsnap.”
“You’re right. It was. But that’s negated by the fact that Ang has been playing all of us for years. Mom, she wears three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar flip-flops and the kids are eating Cap’n Crunch for breakfast.”
I had silence again from Mom.
I’d said my piece, so I waited through it.
She sounded a whole lot different when she spoke again.
“Do you still have those pictures?”
Um…
Hell.
I knew that tone.
Mom was again pissed.
No, she was morally outraged.
No, that wasn’t right.
She was grandmotherly outraged.
Crap, Ang was in for it.
“Mom, I told you this so you wouldn’t be grifted by her anymore, and straight up, so you wouldn’t be pissed at me. I think we need to let Ang and Brian and Brenda, if she doesn’t cotton on, handle this how they handle it from here on out.”