letting you out of your drafty ten by ten cell and into the clutches of your screaming gorgon of a mom.
“Thank you, Officer. I promise you won’t be seeing this maniac in here again,” my mother assured him, the same way she used to tell the dentist I’d never have another cavity and my principal I’d never get caught making out with Becca Cowart in the back stairwell during band practice again.
“Mom, lay off. I’m not a kid anymore and—”
“Oh, you’re not?”
She grabbed under my elbow with a biting claw of a hand and marched me outside, her flip-flops skidding on the salt that had half-melted the ice on the stairs. Her feet must have been cold as hell, and a new level of shame helped me bottom-out even further. If my dad and I hadn’t been the two biggest raging assholes in the world, my mother would be home knitting some kind of atrocious Christmas sweater vest for one of us instead of braving the icy winter in the first shoes she found lying around when she got my panicked call.
“Because I honestly can’t think of the last time you acted any older than about fourteen, Landry,” she continued, her lecture losing some of its edge when her teeth chattered. I rushed to get her car door, but she was gripping the keys, her eyes spearing daggers in my direction. “Get the hell in the passenger side, you idiot. You’re probably still legally drunk.” She shook her head. “Your father owned that bar for how many years, and that man never, ever came back to our home with so much as a drop of alcohol in his system. You turn twenty-one and can’t stop funneling it in?”
“I’m not an alcoholic—”
“Shut up. Did I ask you for your opinion?” She kicked up gravel peeling out of the police station parking lot. “The answer is ‘no, I did not.’” She was driving hunched against the wheel, trying to peer over the glasses perched on her nose. She looked ridiculous, but now wasn’t the time or place to laugh at my mother. Unless I had a sincere death wish. “Here’s what I have to say to you, son. Grow the hell up. Grow up. And do it fast. Because your father is running a business, I am running a family, your sister and brother are trying to keep things together at school and with their jobs, and all of my attention is going to my adult child. How does that make any sense?”
“Mom, I know I’ve had a couple rough patches—”
“Rough patches? You haven’t had a steady girl since Annie, which is fine. The last thing you need is a girlfriend messing with your head. But a dozen girls in and out every week, Landry? You keep putting off finishing your business degree, you spend every second you’re not at the bar with that loser friend of yours, Tyler...what’s going on with you, Landry? When are you going to wake up?”
“I am awake!” I groaned miserably. “I’m wide awake, Mom, and shit just sucks right now.”
“Shit just sucks right now?” She mimicked my voice with such accuracy, it made me slump into the passenger seat. “You have a roof over your head, a full belly every night, your family loves you, and you have employment during one of the worst recessions in history, but ‘shit just sucks right now’?”
“I don’t know if this is what I want to do with my life.” I regretted the words before they left my mouth.
“You don’t know if this is what you want to do with your life?” She echoes the question back like it was the rock-bottom most entirely idiotic single thought ever pondered in the history of humanity.
I had no idea the simple act of repetition could be used as such specific, dramatic torture.
“Hear me out—”
“Enough!” She crunched on the brakes and we pitched forward a few yards from our driveway. “I have a husband with a black eye in my house because our idiot son lost his temper. I have a business falling apart under my nose because that same idiot son wants more time to figure things out. I have to keep this family together, Landry! We have all made sacrifices while you tried to figure out exactly what it is you need, and I feel like the more time and energy we put towards that, the more selfish and stupid your actions get.”
I shook my head, regret and rage and total