Mom's Taboo Wish

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~~ All characters in this book are over 18. ~~

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Chapter 1: Picking Up the Pieces

It all started with a phone call on a sunny May afternoon.

"Hey, Mom," Brendan said, as he picked up his cell, and muted the television with the remote in his other hand.

"Hi, honey." His mother's voice sounded weak and strained. "Can you do me a favor? I need you to come pick me up."

"Sure." He frowned. It was in the middle of the afternoon. Why did his mom need a ride? "Where are you?"

A short, tired laugh. "The hospital."

"What?" He sat up straight, the ballgame forgotten. "What happened? What's going on?"

"I'll explain it all when you get here, all right? I don't feel like having this conversation over the phone."

"All right." He stood and plucked his car keys from the hook near the front door. "I'm on my way."

The trip to the hospital was thankfully short. Mayfield was not a large town, even by the standards of western Kentucky. Barely twenty minutes after he left the house, Brendan pushed through the front doors of the large, modern, glass and steel building which had replaced the old brick-built hospital. After a couple of wrong turns which left him seething, a helpful nurse pointed out the way to his mother's room.

"All right," he said, staring down at her from the doorway. Fortunately, she did not seem to be badly hurt. "What happened?"

Miranda Dallben rolled her eyes at his peremptory tone. "Just because you're taller than me, Brendan, doesn't mean that you can talk to me the same way your grandfather used to."

"Right." He crossed his arms and leaned against one wall of the small room. Luckily, the other bed was unoccupied, so there was no one else to listen in on their conversation. "Aren't you supposed to be at work?"

"Rusty picked me up for lunch."

Alarm bells began to ring in the back of his head. "And?" he asked, when she paused.

His mother adjusted her right arm in its sling. That seemed to be all the damage, though she was moving without her usual vivacious energy.

"And he decided to read a text message in the car and he ran a red light on Cumberland and we nearly got t-boned by a soccer mom in an SUV and I do not need you to read me the riot act right now, Brendan James Dallben," she said, voice clipped with impatience. "I've already heard it from the police officer, the nurses, and the doctor. Everyone seems to be really happy to tell me what an idiot I was for going out with Rusty in the first place."

Brendan took a deep breath, held it, and slowly let it out again. "Well," he grimaced, though he was aching to throw out an 'I told you so.' "I guess there's no point in repeating it then, is there?"

His mother's shoulders slumped in relief. "No."

"So where is the enormous prick, anyway?"

Her voice went small. "Jail."

"What?"

"He panicked, Brendan. After that woman hit us, I guess he thought he could make a run for it before anyone recognized him. So he tore through town until we got to his place, pieces of the car falling off the whole way like the world's worst set of breadcrumbs, even though I was yelling at him to stop and turn around." She snorted bitterly. "The police got there about five minutes after we did. It's not like that car of his is inconspicuous or anything."

"Gotta love small towns," he smiled. And the fact that a moron like Rusty Barwick probably drives the only Pontiac Fiero in Graves County. God help me if I ever turn into a sad sack like him. Trying to recapture the glory days when he was seventeen when he's almost three times that age.

"Yeah. So they picked him up for a hit and run, and dropped me off here on the way to taking him to the county slammer." She shifted on the narrow hospital bed, wincing with pain. Even accounting for the unflattering florescent light, her face looked wan and pale. "God knows what they'll end up charging him with."

"Are you okay?"

"Not really," she sighed. "I'm bruised all over and my arm hurts like hell." She mustered a feeble smile. "And my hair is a disaster." She ran a hand through the honey-blond strands and sighed.

"Well, here." He offered her a hand. "Let's check out and get you out of this dump."

"Whose hospital are you calling a dump, young man?" A short, dark-skinned nurse bustled into the room. Her eyes flashed with a mixture of aggravation and good humor. "And people don't check out of hospitals. They're released. If they can prove they're fit to leave. This isn't a hotel, you know."

He laughed out loud and gave the African-American woman a hug. "Hi, Mrs. Jackson."

Mabel Jackson gave him a quick embrace in return, then stepped back and set her hands on her wide hips, looking him up and down with a stern eye. "Humph. Well, at least the boy has some manners. When it took him so long to come here and make sure his momma was all right, I started to wonder."

"I came here as quick as I could," he protested.

"He really did, Mabel," Miranda said.

The older woman snorted. "I guess you raised your boy right, Miranda, for all your wild ways. So how is school, Brendan? You doing all right up there?"

"Good enough," he shrugged.

"And your grades?" Her dark eyes were sharp as tacks. "Your momma told me you're studying business. I hope you don't turn into one of those Wall Street boys, not caring for anything but how much money you have."

"Accounting," he corrected. "And no."

"Good." She pulled a slim tablet out of the pocket of her scrubs and started tapping on it with her fingers. "So how are you feeling, Miranda? Do you have a headache? Blurry vision? Anything like that?"

"No. I'm fine. I told you already."

"Let me be the judge of that." She held up a hand. "How many fingers do you see?"

His mother's lips twitched. "All of them."

"Smart ass. Try again."

"Three."

"Better," Mabel sighed. "All right, girl. You don't have a concussion, though a woman as smart and pretty as you shouldn't be spending time with that sack of garbage you been hanging around with. So maybe you are soft in the head, after all.

"You can go. Keep the sling on for a week. You got a sprained shoulder and you're going to be all over bruises on that side, so take it easy. No heavy lifting, no strenuous exercise, no sex."

"What?" His mother froze, halfway off the bed, and Brendan's face turned bright red.

The nurse tilted her head back and laughed, her chortle filling the small room. "Got you! No," she added, "you can have as much sex as you like, as long as you find yourself a decent man for a change."

"You're awful." His mother tried to frown sternly at Mabel, but a smile kept on breaking out over her face, like a small child who didn't know the rules to hide-and-seek peeking around the corner. She rose from the bed, her smile turning into a grimace of pain. "Shit! That hurts!"

"Here, Mom." Brendan hurried forward, offering her his arm.

"Thanks, honey." She grabbed his shoulder and slowly pulled herself upright, hissing as bruised muscles made their unhappiness known. "Crap. I feel like I got rolled down a hill inside a barrel full of rocks."

Nurse Mabel held up a warning finger. "Aspirin only tonight, Miranda. Your body took one hell of a whack, but you don't need to get messed up on painkillers. And praise God that Betty Ogilvie's car wasn't a little bit faster."

"Hmmm. It would have been a lot more helpful if God had made sure that Rusty didn't try to read a text message at forty miles an hour."

"Maybe it was just His way of telling you that it was time to look for someone better." Her smile was white in her dark face. "And Brendan?"

"Yes, Mrs. Jackson?"

"You help your momma out for the next few days, you hear me? She won't be able to do much for herself, so you're going to need to be her arms and legs."

"I'm not crippled, Mabel."

"Yeah?" She raised a sardonic eyebrow. "Tell me that tomorrow morning. You're going to be hurting." She waved a hand. "Go on, get out of here, so I can help someone who is really sick."

*****

The ride home was quiet. His mother leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. Brendan drove slowly through town, not wanting to jar her bruised body if he hit a pothole.

"I called work," she said at last, her voice tired. "And I told them what happened. They can get by without me for a half-day, I think. And tomorrow, too, probably."

He nodded. His mother was an assistant manager at a plant nursery on the outskirts of town, having worked her way up from cashier over the past nine years. "I doubt the place will fall to pieces over the weekend."

"You never know," she said darkly. Her brows pinched in a frown. "Are you sure you want to work for us over the summer? Some boys wouldn't like to be taking orders from their mothers."

"I don't know," he said slowly. "It's pretty confusing. I mean, that would be a really enormous change in my life, wouldn't it? It's not like you've been telling me what to do since...I don't know...since I was born. Have you? Oh, wait." His face sank into an expression of vacuous stupidity. "Actually, you have!

"So don't worry about it," he said, turning onto their street. "I'd rather work out at your place than be one of the zombies out at the Wal-Mart, or flipping burgers in some cruddy fast-food place all summer. At least I'll be out in the fresh air. I can work on my tan and get a hot body so I can impress all the ladies when I go back to school in August," he smiled.

Miranda laughed softly. "You keep thinking, Brendan. That's what you're best at." Her arm made an abortive move towards the door-handle as he parked his car neatly in the driveway. "Shit. Ouch."

"Stop it," he said, getting out of the car and hurrying over to her side. He opened the door for you. "Nurse Mabel would have my hide if I let you hurt yourself again. Here." He gave her an arm out of the car. "Come on, Mom. Let me help you. You don't have to do everything yourself, you know."

"Yeah, yeah. I know," she sighed. Her shoulders slumped wearily as she stood in the gravel driveway.

"Listen," he said. "I'm going to need to go and get your car from the nursery. Go inside, sit down, relax, and take it easy, all right? When I get back here I'll make us some supper, and you won't have to do anything."

"You?" Her lips curled up. "Cook?"

He cocked his head, hearing the challenge. "Yeah. Me."

Chapter 2: Cut From A Different Bolt

Brendan left a few minutes later, waving goodbye to her as he set off on his ten-speed. Miranda hoped that he would be able to fit the bike into the trunk of her Camry. Or maybe he could lock it up at the nursery and they could have someone drop it off in the morning.

She sank into the couch, one hand massaging her aching head. Her right shoulder was a throbbing blot of pain, like a bad toothache, and even thinking about moving that arm made her jaw clench. How had such a promising day turned to crap so quickly?

The same way your life did, Miranda. Bad choices.

It was the same old story, told by thousands of small-town girls in thousands of small towns all across the country. She had been seventeen years old, young, pretty, and foolish, a cheerleader and not a bad student either, really, and that was no more than the truth, despite all the "dumb-blonde" jokes people told. Eager to explore her budding young body, she had given in to the pleas of her then-boyfriend, who had sworn up and down that a girl couldn't get pregnant her first time.

And who knows. Maybe Jimmy was right, she smiled bitterly. After that first time, in his upstairs bedroom while his parents were at bible class, they had screwed in every possible place their fertile imaginations could think of for the next two months. As long as it had a horizontal surface and a door that locked, it was fair game. And sometimes the horizontal surface was optional, she recalled, her lips curling up in tender memory, recalling a particularly energetic tryst up against the wall in a closet in the art room at the high school. They were young, good-looking, and horny as hell for each other, and in a town like Mayfield, well, there really wasn't a lot else to do besides screwing each other's brains out.

But all of their fun had come to a screeching halt when she missed her period one cold, rainy week in March. Panicked, she had gone to her mother. But if she expected sympathy and a way out of her predicament, she had gone to the wrong store and had forgotten her wallet, too. Muriel Dallben came from the old school. And if she didn't like the idea of her daughter bearing a child out of wedlock, she liked the idea of Miranda putting her eternal soul in peril by having an abortion a whole lot less. By the following winter, Miranda was the only girl on the cheerleading squad with a baby boy at home. Jimmy, for his part, had enlisted in the army as soon as the ink was dry on his high-school diploma, never to return to Mayfield. When his hitch was up, he moved to Nebraska and took a job with a heating and air-conditioning company. The child-support checks came through like clockwork, but he had shown absolutely no interest in building a relationship with his son.

Miranda, for her part, had somehow managed to claw her way through her last year of high school while caring for a newborn. College now being out of the question, she had moved out of her parents' house as soon as it was practical, quietly determined that she would never again let someone else's rules control her life. A series of low-paying, high-stress jobs had followed - waitress, cashier, receptionist - even, for three humiliating months, a maid in a cut-rate hotel on the edge of town. Luckily, several years ago, she had allowed her passion for gardening to tempt her into an entry-level position at the nursery. It had turned out to be the best decision of her life. Finally working for people who let her take advantage of her skills, she had reached a point where she and Brendan were...secure. Not rich. Not even comfortable, as southerners liked to say. But five years ago, after over a decade of living in crappy apartments or rented houses, she had been able to afford to buy a real home of their own.

If only you were as good with men as you are with plants, Miranda.

She balled up her one good fist. But the dreary train of her thoughts was broken by the crunch of tires in the driveway. A few minutes later Brendan appeared, lugging a pair of grocery sacks.

"That was quick," she said, pushing herself to her feet, one hand braced on the arm of the couch.

"Pat Longstreet was still there. He says he's going to be out in the truck early tomorrow, delivering some saplings. He'll drop my bike off here on his way out to Hickory Hills."

"Good." She frowned as her son emptied the grocery bags. "So should I be angry that you bought alcohol when you're only nineteen? Or should I be impressed at your ingenuity?"

He smiled at her, setting a package of chicken on the counter. "Remember Adam Johnston? He was a couple years ahead of me in school. He's working at that liquor store on Taylor Street. I ran into him a few days ago, and he told me that if I ever needed it, he could hook me up."

"I don't like the idea of you drinking at your age, Brendan."

"Mom," he sighed. "It's just a six-pack. And seeing as how I'm a complete lightweight, it'll probably take me all weekend to drink it. Besides, that was just camouflage." He pulled out a bottle of rum and a twelve-pack of Coca-Cola. "This is for you. After a day like today, I think you deserve it." He plucked a large glass out of the dishtray. "Rum and coke, little lady?" he drawled, for all the world as if he were a bartender at an old-timey saloon.

She smiled. She couldn't help it. "Sure. Why the hell not? Heavy on the ice, though, all right? Or I'll pass right out before dinner."

Brendan filled the tumbler with ice, then poured a can of coke into it. "Say when," he said, opening the bottle of rum.

"When," she said, after a generous splash. She closed her eyes and took a sip. Cold, sweet, with a strong hint of the rum underneath. Just the way she liked it. "Nice. Maybe if this college thing doesn't work out for you, you can be a bartender instead."

Brendan made a face. "God, I hope not."

She nodded at the sacks. "So how much do I owe you for all this?"

"Sorry, Mom. I think I'm going deaf in this ear." He stuck a finger inside and wiggled it around. "Nope. Sorry. Can't hear a thing."

"Come on, Brendan. I know good rum isn't cheap."

"Neither is sending me to college."

Despite her misgivings, Brendan was able to put together a dinner that was more than satisfactory, though by the time it was ready, Miranda was taking very, very small sips of her drink. She had never been a heavy drinker, and she didn't want to pass out in front of her son. But one benefit of a light buzz was that the pain of her bruises faded into the background, and the gnawing self-disgust that she felt over the end of yet another failed relationship was almost forgotten.

They ate out on the tiny concrete deck, moths bumping drunkenly against the outside light as the last of the late-May twilight faded from the sky. Barbequed chicken, ready-made potato salad from the store, baked beans, and garlic bread. At least it was easy to eat, requiring only one operational arm. Trying to maneuver food to her mouth with her left hand made her feel like she was three years old again and couldn't be trusted with anything sharp. Brendan had a tiny frown on his face as he watched her, and she wondered how far he was from offering to help. She gave him a stern look, and smiled, satisfied, as he settled back into his patio chair.

"The yard looks good," he said, obviously not wanting to raise her ire.

"What there is of it," she sighed. "I wish we had a bigger one." Mayfield wasn't an expensive place to live. But she did wish she had been able to afford a house with a bigger yard. Their first summer here, she had ruthlessly gotten rid of some of the more cockeyed ideas which the previous owners had bequeathed to them. A pair of prickly bilberry bushes near the front door had been removed, replaced by a trio of cute little azaleas. Brendan had been dragooned into digging a strip along the side of the house, where they had planted roses. And day lilies, hardy flowers that could survive almost anything, bordered the concrete patio on two sides. She had even added hanging planters along the back fence, where she grew herbs for the kitchen.

"Oh," she said. "I just remembered. I have a hair appointment tomorrow. Would you mind driving me?"

"Well," he said. "That would really interfere with my plans." He smiled crookedly. "I mean, dinner with the king. How often does an opportunity like that turn up?"

"You're a goof," she laughed. "So, can you drive me?"

"I suppose," he muttered morosely. "But you are putting one hell of a crimp in my social life, Mom."

"Yeah." Loosened by rum, her tongue blathered on, despite her tardy attempt to rein it in. "The girls have been beating down the door, ever since you got home from college." A pang hit her heart as his face shuttered. "Oh, shit. I'm sorry, honey. I didn't mean to act like..."

"Act like your son went through his freshman year and didn't even sniff a girlfriend?" Brendan put an empty beer bottle on the table with slightly more force than was really necessary. "Don't worry about it. It's nothing but the truth."

She leaned back in her chair. "Trust me, honey. There's worse things."

"Like having a son at seventeen?"

Fuck. How can I stick my foot in my mouth two times in one conversation? "No. No, Brendan. Not you. Never you. I regret a lot of the choices I've made in my life. But you're not one of them."