Safe With Me by Stephanie Rose

Author:Stephanie Rose [Rose, Stephanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: That's What She Said Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2024-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

12

MIKE

“So you’re telling me that you’re not going to come out to see me at all before summer ends?”

My head fell back against my driver’s seat as my mother’s disappointed sigh filled the inside of my truck. This was the argument we had all the time. I had time off coming to me and could have made plans to see her in California.

But did I want to?

I loved my mother and I missed her, but I knew what would happen. I would fly all the way out there, and she’d be happy to see me for about an hour before the questions would start.

Am I really happy settling in Kelly Lakes, and why did I ever become a cop?

Then, and for the rest of the trip, she would pry about my father—his business, his young wife, and about all the things that my sister was probably getting that I hadn’t when I was a kid.

When I was younger, I’d had no choice but to believe her, because why would my own mother lie to me? And despite that, I still, even to this day, didn’t think she had done it on purpose.

I had no recollection of a time when my parents were happy together. For as long as I could remember, they’d fought about everything. While I’d hated leaving our house and my dad, I still remembered the relief when they’d begun living apart.

I’d tense up on weekends when my father would pick me up, but he’d never played into her attempts to pick a fight.

She’d tell me later that it was because he didn’t care. I’d learned as I got older that he’d never reacted because he was the only one of them who’d put me first.

She’d never gotten over my father or been able to let go. My aunt Kristina had told me that fixating on my father was her twisted way of staying connected to him.

I’d distanced myself from my mother ever since I was a teenager, but I always worried about her. While my father’s sister had her own bias against the woman who tortured her brother and traumatized me in the process, Aunt Kristina was spot-on.

Openly and actively hating my father was my mother’s way of holding on to him, however fucked up it was.

Her second husband had never offered her much, other than a big house and a more-than-comfortable lifestyle. He worked all the time and had never bothered to make any kind of connection with me. He’d claimed he wasn’t good with kids, but I’d also looked exactly like the man his wife was still obsessed with, so I’d never blamed him for his automatic resentment of me.

“I’ll try, Mom, but you know how it is over the summer. I’m still new on the force.”

“Haven’t you been a cop for two summers already? You should have some kind of seniority as to when you want vacation, or is Kelly Lakes still that backward? If you can’t this summer, come in the fall. Or whenever.

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