The Reckless Oath We Made - Bryn Greenwood Page 0,45
in the number. Three rings later, someone answered.
“Yep.” That was all he said. Older and raspier, but I still recognized his voice. He sounded how I remembered my father.
“Uncle Alva? It’s me, Zhorzha,” I said.
“Girl, what kind of fool are you? Don’t call me again.”
He hung up before I could say anything. The timer on my phone showed the call had lasted seventeen seconds. So fast it was like it hadn’t happened. I put my phone back in my pocket and went outside to see what Gentry had figured out about the china hutches.
The answer was nothing. He was standing in the middle of the yard, holding a cardboard box. My mother was picking through another box and putting things in the one Gentry held.
“Mom, why don’t you go inside and sit down? Gentry and I are going to try to bring in the china hutches and—”
“I don’t need to sit down,” she said. “Stop nagging at me.”
“Okay, fine. You do whatever. We’re going to try to move the hutches back inside.”
The cops had carried them out with everything in them, but they’d had a dolly and half a dozen men. Gentry and I were going to have to empty the hutches to move them. As soon as we opened the doors on the biggest hutch, Mom started going through everything in it.
“Oh, look, this is the champagne glass your father won for me at the state fair. I think it was the ring toss. He won two, but the other one got broken.
“Your grandmother liked to collect all these little blown-glass animals. She’d get them on all our family vacations. Oh, the little elephant’s trunk is broken! I knew it. I knew the police would break things. They have no respect for anything.”
Just like that we weren’t emptying the hutch. We were taking a stroll down memory lane with occasional side trips to saying really harsh things about the cops. After fifteen minutes of that, I reached past Mom and started taking things out of the cabinet.
“Mom, we need to get this stuff moved inside,” I said. “Anything you want to keep.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Me and my big mouth. Of course, she wasn’t going to get rid of anything. It was all going back in the house.
“Fine, but it needs to go inside. Can we do that without looking at every single thing?”
“There’s no need to get snippy with me,” Mom said. “You’re welcome to go and do whatever you like. I’ll have this all cleaned up by the time you get back.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, because Mom was delusional. It was going to take weeks to deal with what the cops had done.
She put something else into the cardboard box that Gentry had been holding. The bottom was about to give out, and she’d jammed it full of a bunch of random crap including those chipped and stained Snowbabies. The whole thing was so pathetic, I couldn’t stand to watch.
“Oh, here are LaReigne’s baby dishes. Look at how cute they are. It’s the whole set: a plate, a bowl, and the little cup.”
“Mom, I can’t spend all day at this. I need to pick Marcus up from school and find a place for us to stay tonight.”
“Well, you can stay here now.”
“We can’t stay here,” I said.
“Why in the world not? You can sleep in your old bedroom and Marcus can sleep in LaReigne’s room. There’s plenty of space.”
“Just because the police emptied those rooms doesn’t mean we can stay in them. The mouse shit in my room is ankle deep.”
“Well, whose fault is that? You were always leaving food in your room,” Mom said.
“Oh my god. How is it my fault? I haven’t lived here in ten years. I had to leave home, because I couldn’t get to my bed. I was sixteen years old and you buried my bed under all your fucking crap.”
“Don’t you swear at me! You’re responsible for the condition of this house, too. You never help—”
“You won’t even let me take the trash out without checking it, because you think I’m throwing away your treasures!” I hated myself for getting sucked into the same old argument. I knew better.
“You’re always breaking things,” Mom said. “You’re as bad as the police. You’re just a big hoyden, always stomping around and breaking things. You broke that whole box of good crystal, and that can’t be—”
“I was twelve! And you had it stacked on the edge of the fucking