Wake for Me (Life or Death Series) by Irons Isobel

Author:Irons, Isobel [Irons, Isobel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vivid IIInk
Published: 2013-12-10T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” –Sigmund Freud

“Let’s talk about your mother.”

Viola rolled her eyes. With his walrus-like face and jagged yellow tusks, Dr. Horace seemed to wait on her reply like a fish from the hand of a marine trainer. God, he was wearing on her patience.

“Isn’t that a little trite?”

She looked around the room, at the pale green of the walls—probably meant to be soothing, but only looking like a slightly more sea foam-tinted asylum—the gray steel filing cabinets, the cheap industrial desk and chairs. No location had ever been less likely to make her want to spill her secrets. Least of all the ones she’d never even really admitted to herself.

“In what way?”

“Well, come on.” Viola crossed and uncrossed her legs, re-crossing them again at the ankles. “Every passé head-shrinking session in every movie uses the same line. It’s always about the mother.”

“In my experience, it’s true more often than not.” Dr. Horace smiled, giving her that ‘I’m way older than you and therefore you should automatically believe everything I say’ look. Viola had always hated that look. It reminded her of Sister Baylor, her sixth grade home economics teacher.

“Alright,” she said. “You want to talk about my mother? I’ll tell you a…story about…my mother.” Furrowing her brow, she looked at the ceiling and counted to three. In her mind, she pictured a giant, old-fashioned typewriter. Whereas before, her brain had been a badly-alphabetized dictionary with a few missing pages, now she could pull the words she needed out of thin air, letter by letter. If she remained calm, and kept her focus, of course.

“The first time I got into trouble at school, I was thirteen.” Viola smiled, not because the memory was a good one, but because she was proud of the fact that she hadn’t struggled over a single word. “I talked back to a teacher, nothing major. But Sister Baylor sent me to the mother superior’s office, and they called my mom.”

“What did you say to the teacher?”

Viola fixed Dr. Horace with a direct stare, wanting to watch his reaction as she told him, because she had a feeling he would side with Sister Baylor.

“She told us that every woman needed to learn how to cook, because someday…she would be cooking for her husband and children. I asked her why my husband couldn’t learn to do his own cooking. Then I asked her…for that matter, why she was assuming that all women wanted to get married and have children in the first place. After all, she was a nun.” She smirked. “It wasn’t as if…the Lord cared whether or not she knew how to cook.”

“And that was when she sent you to the principal’s office?”

“Mother superior’s office,” Viola corrected him. And no, that had happened after Sister Baylor had yelled at her in front of everyone. After which, Viola had called her a ‘sexually frustrated 1950’s throwback.’ Or something to that effect.

“So, what happened when your mother arrived?”

Of course, he’d come back to that.

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