Silent Screams by Zachary Ryan

Author:Zachary Ryan [Ryan, Zachary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kingston Publishing Company
Published: 2020-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifty-Five

Cass

“Do we honestly need to be here?” Ben asked, as he was picking up trash from Gabe’s yard.

I couldn’t sleep the night prior after therapy session. Dr. Clarkson had been right. We hadn’t kept in contact with Gabe’s mom, and we should have. “We’re doing this as a nice gesture,” I said.

“Why?” Lane looked at me with curious eyes.

I was fed up with everyone complaining about being here. “Because Gabe’s mom was more of a mother to me than my own. I know damn well you guys connected with her too. She’s a sweet woman that doesn’t deserve any of this bullshit,” I said.

“It’s good to see you still look at me with such fond eyes,” Gabe’s mother, Candice said.

Everyone turned to look at Candice standing there on the porch. She hadn’t done her hair in a while. You could see the gray mixing in with her reddish hair. You could see the bags under her eyes. The woman that had always been so sweet to us, had become an empty shell. She always had a petite frame, but she, in this moment, looked fragile.

“Ms. Athens,” Zachary said. “We didn’t know you’d be here.”

She walked down the porch toward us. We didn’t know how she would react to us. We hadn’t come to see her in months, and we didn’t know if it was appropriate for us to be here. We hoped we didn’t cause her more pain than she deserved.

She touched the side of Zachary’s face before looking at us. “I wish I could leave, but there is a part of me that can’t run away from this place,” she said. She looked around at the mess. “It’s quite tragic when everyone’s true nature comes out during tragedies,” she said. “Why don’t you guys come inside? You don’t need to clean up. It will continue to pile up. God knows I’ve learned that lesson.

We didn’t argue with her. We walked inside, and she had boxes all over the place. We could tell that she was trying to move. She ushered us to the kitchen. We had always remembered it as a bright space. There would always be fresh cookies on the table whenever we came over to see Gabe.

“Can I grab you guys anything?” she asked.

“We’re good,” Ben said.

She turned around to look at us. She smirked. “You’ve always been the type of people to never take from someone else,” she said. She opened the fridge and pulled out a glass of lemonade.

We all looked at each other. This wasn’t the same Candice that we loved. She wasn’t the type of mom that asked us all about our love lives, drama, or what we were failing in school. We all looked at Lane, because we hoped that he had some way of getting her to open up to us the most.

He rolled his eyes. We knew he didn’t want to have that conversation with her. “Are you okay?” Lane asked.

She placed the pitcher of lemonade down. “You raise this sweet boy.

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