Mom's Errant Panties

My sisters and I had been staying with Grandma Caldwell (Mom's mom) while Mom was away. We didn't get to go back to the house with the unfinished basement for about a month after Mom was released. We visited her once before moving back home, but that was when I stupidly suggested she was partly to blame for Dad's death.

I know... I've physically cringed both of the times I mentioned it, and I probably will for the rest of my life.

Mom was out of it, doped on heavy meds for quite a while. If I wanted to be around her, I had to go into her room. If she was able to acknowledge me (sometimes she just stared at the wall) we'd talk a little, mostly about school and if I was getting enough to eat.

She apologized a lot, often without even looking at me. I told her many times that I hadn't meant what I'd said about her role in Dad leaving, but I've come to believe that wasn't what she was apologizing for.

Even at ten, I think I understood that she was broken inside. I think the Mom I grew up with was in there somewhere, for a time, but I've come to believe she ultimately didn't survive the heart ache.

She slowly started getting back to work about a year and a half later when the life insurance money started to run out. She's a realtor, and with a lot of medication and a few therapy sessions (she skipped most of them) she started selling houses again.

We all thought she slept excessively but I'd chalked it up to the medication she was on. I checked on her before and after school, per her request, until I started doing remote learning, then I started seeing her less and less because I had less reason to check in.

I rarely left the house; I was almost always in the basement. If Mom left the house, she would sometimes message me and tell me I was on my own for meals, but mostly she would just be in her room.

My sisters were primarily occupied with the business of serial fornicating their way through their school's varsity athletes, but we'd sometimes pass each other and ask how Mom was doing.

They rarely had any insight in that regard, but I wasn't much better. It was difficult to see Mom the way she was, knowing she would refuse any help that didn't come in a prescription bottle. Mostly we all just grew further and further apart until my sisters moved out.

A few months after Amy and Ashley left for college, I found my mother passed out on the couch in the living room and she wouldn't wake up.

I called 911 and the paramedics came, injected her with Naloxone (I know what it's called because I keep several of the little lifesavers around the house these days) and she barely survived her first opioid overdose.

There was supposed to be time away at a rehabilitation clinic after Mom came home from the hospital, but she didn't go. Instead, she quit the prescriptions cold turkey, thumbing her nose at everyone telling her she couldn't do it that way.

Telling Mom, she can't do something is the best way to get her to do it. I've come to believe that that's part of the reason she was so interested in Dad, at least initially. He'd been off limits due to his family's religious beliefs, and I think Mom took that as a challenge, ultimately showing Pastor Fred Savage where he could stick his bible.

She also showed those dubious medical professionals that she could, in fact, quit cold turkey without any rehab... for about two years, and then she started taking a low dosage of Xanax to get through the day, which turned into a large dose, which turned into abusing opioids again.

She hid it pretty well for a time, and then I found her unconscious again, this time she was still in bed.

The phone had been ringing off the hook one morning, and I'd finally answered it just to silence the constant interruptions. Her client was trying to figure out why she wasn't attending the open house she'd scheduled, which led me into her room.

That was about seven months ago.

When she finally regained consciousness in the hospital, Mom gave me all the same promises and assurances that she'd offered the previous time, but I was older and knew she was stubborn to a fault, so I told her that if she came home without going to rehab, I was going to go live with Grandma. I said that if she was going to turn me into an orphan, I wasn't going to be the one who discovered her lifeless body.

I think it was that comment that really landed. Something about her demeanor changed when I mentioned being an orphan.

She still didn't agree to rehab--I think I mentioned how stubborn she is--but she begged me to stay and promised to let me search her for pills and submit to any drug tests whenever I presented her with one.

I was certainly dubious, but I thought I could make it unpleasant enough for her that she would elect rehab rather than remaining subject to my persistent nagging. And the truth was I really, really, didn't want to live with my grandmother, which would have, at a minimum, involved weekly church attendance.

In addition to the cell inspections where I turned out her purse, checked every nook and cranny of her bedroom and bathroom, I set up a pyramid of sealed drug test kits in the linen closet, and I kept it fully stocked all the way up to the capstone.

I may have taken it a bit too far, even waking her up at absurd times in the early AM to take a surprise test. Her facial expressions were daggers and fury, but to her credit, she never uttered a single verbal protest.

To hedge my ill-advised bet on Mom's effort to go cold turkey again, I took the additional step of wiring the house with hidden cameras while she was still in the hospital. I can see every part of the house from my computer. If she tries to hide anything, I'll be able to review the footage of her hiding it.

Additionally, I set up exterior cameras around the house, including one that's centered towards the west side of our property, a fortuitous angle that just happens to also record the pool in our neighbor's backyard.

I may or may not have known that Mrs. Snow, a yoga instructor at a gym downtown, occasionally sunbathed out there in the afternoons.

It's not lost on me how the hidden cameras are an invasion of people's privacy, and that did bother me when I was setting them up in Mom's room, but her life is more important than her privacy, and I wasn't going to lose her just because I'd failed to find pills she was hiding, or because I'd relented on the rehab she needed.

The external cameras aren't hidden at all, but I'm convinced Mrs. Snow wants to be seen when she's laying out. She cranks up her music, making sure all the neighbors are aware that her body will be on display for the next hour or so.

Since I'm already searching her room, I keep the hidden cameras in Mom's room, turned off to preserve her privacy so long as she doesn't give me a reason to feel suspicious.

I had to turn them on once for troubleshooting purposes because all my cameras had gone offline, but she wasn't home then. It turned out that the cameras were offline because of a change I'd made to the network while stoned the night before.

I tend to get paranoid if I overindulge on the cannabis, but I occasionally smoke a little or take an edible to relax, or when I'm planning a special evening with my penis.

Jerking off while high is an epic experience. If you haven't tried it, you're missing out.

Being stoned also used to help me suspend my disbelief with Kikko. It was much easier to imagine her warm plastic cunt was a real pussy when I was lit, but that's a moot point now.

Things really started to improve for Mom when she started working on her fitness a few months back, spending hours at the gym working with a personal trainer. She goes four times a week and seems to work hard based on how frazzled she looks when she gets home.

That seemed to kickstart a difference in her that carried over to her career. She soon made it into the upper tier of realtors at the brokerage she works with, which improved her split, so she's been making good money recently.

Despite not dating, Mom has had a few suitors send flowers to the house. One guy even sent a diamond bracelet, delivered by a crooning Dean Martin impersonator, no less. But she returned it, telling me it was from a wealthy old man she'd sold a house for.

I suggested she marry him just to score that inheritance, but she didn't think it was funny.

Sometimes it feels like I lost two parents when the one died. I miss the mom I grew up with, the one that loved life instead of just getting through it. I want to see her happy the way shew was when Dad was still around, and that was never going to happen if she didn't give someone a chance to get close to her.

The dynamic between us ebbs and flows but has mostly improved. I still pop in with the occasional, random drug test, or to turn her room inside out looking for contraband... or both. But the frequency of both has declined steadily as my confidence in her sobriety has increased.

An

unfortunate side effect of that sobriety has been an increased, somewhat manic obsession with fixing my basement hermit lifestyle, which recently escalated to the point that she arranged a playdate with the daughter of a coworker.

It went about as poorly as you're imagining.

Mom told me she wanted to take me out to eat, so I got ready and when I went upstairs, she escorted me into the living room where a girl roughly my age was sitting on the couch. I was instructed to sit next to her, and Mom turned on one of her favorite romcoms, leaving us to awkwardly watch her old-fashioned movie.

I was annoyed but I tried to make conversation with the poor girl. She was brunette, which I prefer, and I thought she was kind of pretty, but we had absolutely nothing in common, outside of being completely embarrassed.

It was easily one of the most humiliating things Mom has ever done to me.

I simply couldn't let it happen again, so I squashed any future playdates by bringing my laptop to Mom the next day, showing her the myriad eligible realtors from her brokerage that I would be contacting on her behalf to set up blind dates. It was easy to get their contact info because, well, they're realtors; they want people to call them.

I'd say it worked, but only in the sense that she stopped trying to arrange hookups for me.

Mom didn't talk to me for several days after I'd made the blind date threat, and while we eventually reconciled, she just switched her nosey tactics to more general prodding about getting out of the basement instead of stewing in isolation.

She even started suggesting that my window of opportunity was closing, bringing up anecdotes of lonely people she'd heard about, and the terrible consequences they'd faced for choosing careers over family.

This irrational and hypocritical rhetoric led to new arguments, the last of which culminated in her shouting after me as I stormed into the basement, yelling that I would become too weird to be around if I didn't get laid soon.

I'm not gonna lie, the comment bothered me quite a bit.

I was flabbergasted that she'd gone there when she seemed to be actively avoiding any sort of relationship for herself, not to mention the fact that she was technically closer to ending up old and alone.

All the things I thought to say after the fact went unsaid.

Once I'd calmed myself down, I started to just feel bad for her. She was clearly wrestling with some things I didn't understand.

It was soon after that argument that I was compelled to enable her bedroom camera for the second time since I'd installed them.

It was the night everything changed between us.

** 2 /**

I got a call from Mom's cell around 2:00AM but when I answered, it was a man's voice.

The caller turned out to be an Uber driver who'd picked Mom up from the club and was trying to drop her off. She'd passed out in the back seat, and her driver thought she was too drunk to get in safely.

The guy could have been an asshole about the inconvenience, possibly even dragged her onto the curb, but he seemed genuinely worried about Mom getting in safely.

I gave him a good tip from Mom's phone later.

"Ooooh Greg. Greguh Gre- Gre- Greg... Why'r youn muh-Uber?" Mom had slurred drunkenly into my ear as I was pulling her from the car and getting her on her feet.

"Yep, lets' get you in the house," I replied as I propped her against the car, evaluating her briefly for stability before ducking back into the car to thank the driver and take one last look in the back seat for errant possessions Mom might have had.

I had to stay right behind her as she walked, playing human guardrail as she made her wobbly way up the cement path that led through our front yard's desert landscaping towards the front door.

The various cacti and agaves were a fine choice for the hot climate but falling in one would certainly exacerbate the hangover she was likely to experience when she woke up.

"There wasth so sssssow SO many hot guys at the... at the club, and some very pretty girlsth were all over the-them," she informed me as we crossed the threshold.

I propped her up against the wall just inside the door once I got her in the house. She remained there, semi-upright, just long enough for me to lock the front door and step quickly back to catch her by the shoulders just before she went down.

"Those girlers woulda bend all over you, mister... beeeeee-cuuuuz... Greeeeeg, beep bope boop," she garbled, pushing imaginary buttons up the center of my chest and I think the last one was supposed to be my nose, but she got my cheek.

She giggled at that for a moment and then her eyes closed, and she looked like she'd suddenly fallen asleep on her feet.

"Are you okay, Mom?" I asked, ready to catch her if she suddenly started to drop.

She leaned her head to the side, pushed her cheek into the hand a had steadying that shoulder and closed her eyes, smiling warmly and saying, "Just peachy, Marcus."

"You mean, Greg," I corrected, starting to feel nervous about the state she was in. Marcus was my dead dad's name.

"Oh Greg," she replied as her eyes opened, "I'm s'post to tell yu-you that Wendy wants to-- Oh. N-n-n-n-n-nope," she shook her head and then pantomimed locking her lips with a key, "that's shhhh... secret. But I can tell you that Greg is uh-tract... NO! nope... wait a minusth. Wait just a cotton picking minute, here. Gregsth more... he is MORE hot-t-t--er-tractive... You-are-you... handsssSOME... like your far... like your faw... like your dad."

"Uh, thanks Mom," I replied, helping her step away from the wall and steering her into the hallway that led to her room.

We made it about four steps, but she stopped walking and then dramatically flipped around to look at me. I let go of her shoulders as she spun in place, and then I grabbed them again when she was facing me, just barely saving her from going down, but she seemed to think my assistance was superfluous.

"I-- I-- I'm good, good. I got it. I got this," she said, pushing my hand off her shoulders one at a time and then I think she was trying to show me how steady she was, raising her eyebrows smugly, seemingly oblivious to the steady wobble in her posture.

Then, she seemed to reconsider and took a step towards the hallway wall that was lined with family pictures. She slowly turned to face me as she leaned back, propping herself up against the wall and nearly knocking a picture of my sisters down in the process.

I saw her start to slide towards the floor, her eyes drooping like she was falling asleep again. I reached out to catch her, but she pushed herself back up, sliding her head into the same picture. It went askew but still didn't fall.

"I'm good. I'm good, good, good, Theeeeeey're Great!," She assured me with a Tony the Tiger impression that left her giggling again.

"Ssssoo, I told Wendy about-- she says you don't know that you are Mr. Sir, are more uh-uh-tractive than you think, Greg-o-reeee," she pontificated poorly, then giggled again, this time presumably at the way she'd said my name.

Then, to the degree that was possible in her state, she composed herself, putting her shoulders back and trying, it seemed, to present the posture of one about to deliver sage council.

When she attempted to make eye contact with me, her efforts crumbled, probably because she was seeing double or triple at that point. She leaned her head back against the wall and I thought she was falling asleep for the third time since getting her in the house.

"Alright, let's get you to--" I started to say, moving to put my hands back on her shoulders, but then her eyes suddenly went wide, and she pushed me aside with a surprising strength, her other hand shooting up to cover her mouth.

She lunged past me, crossing the hallway and opening the bathroom door with a sudden dexterity I hadn't been expecting.

Once inside the bathroom, she went down immediately with a dexterity I had been expecting.

She mostly landed in a heap on the furry rug that sat in front of the sink, which I think spared her knees some injury as it looked like she landed pretty hard.

She was immediately up on all fours, scrambling wildly the rest of the distance across slippery tile to the toilet, one hand pushing the seat and lid out of the way just in time to begin projectile vomiting into the bowl.

Luckily, her hair was in an updo that evening and didn't fall into the line of fire.

Her whole body seemed to be involved in the effort, her back arching high as I struggled to decide if I could reasonably excuse myself from the repulsive sounds or if I needed to stay and make sure she didn't fall in.

"Yeah, I'm so attractive I make women puke their guts out when they look at me," I quipped, reaching down to pick up the purse she'd dropped outside the door.

Her phone was lit up inside and I retrieved it, noticing a short message from Wendy, the woman she'd gone to the club with.

The text message just asked if she was okay and I replied, saying she made it home and I was helping her to bed.

She texted back an eggplant emoji, a heart, and a laughing face.

I didn't bother trying to decipher it, assuming Wendy was probably as drunk as Mom. I did give the Uber driver a good review and tip before returning Mom's phone to her purse, however.

When I looked back to see how she was doing in the bathroom, that's when I saw it.

I had to have seen it before. There's no way I didn't. But either for my revulsion to the vomiting or the fact that her slinky dress was almost flesh-toned, my brain

simply didn't recognize or register that her ass was exposed and pointed directly at me.

Her dress was up around her middle, which probably happened as she'd drunkenly spasmed across the bathroom floor. But why wasn't she wearing any underwear!

Whether she'd left the house sans panties or lost them at the club, I couldn't begin to guess, but I'd never felt so many conflicting sentiments in such a short amount of time.

I wasn't sure if I was supposed to walk over and pull her dress down or if I was supposed to pretend like her ass and genitals weren't exposed while I remained there waiting to help her get to bed.

Would she even care, given how drunk she was... Did that give me a responsibility to care on her behalf... Would pulling her dress down for her while she was puking make it more awkward, perhaps giving her the false impression, I was taking advantage in some weird way?

How would she remember it in the morning?

Maybe it would be better if she didn't remember it and maybe I would be doing her a disservice by getting involved, perhaps making it embarrassingly rememberable.

As I was debating all of this, something was happening that I didn't understand until later when I had time to replay the events.

I spend a lot of time looking at naked women. I've mentioned my porn addiction, and fondness for lady butts. I won't kick a tit out of bed for eating crackers, but shapely asses are my thing. I'm a little obsessed with them, in fact, and I preserve the best ones in an online, virtual museum that I've curated over the years.