“Glad to hear y’all have it sorted out for us.” He didn’t look at her.
“Don’t sass,” our father intoned from his end of the table.
“Sorry,” Antony muttered under his breath.
“That wild boy of hers needs a Daddy with a firm hand.”
“Yes, ma’am. The answer is I don’t know … yet. Rosie and I … we have to figure out … some … details.”
Aiden fidgeted in his chair next to me. Antony shot him a dark look. I met Kieran’s gaze across the table with a raised eyebrow. He shrugged, lost in his own world, probably. Dreaming of life with that dreadful woman I’d met the night before.
“Kieran,” Mama said, making him flinch and drop his fork. It clanged off the edge of the plate and hit the floor. He stared up at her like a deer in the headlights.
“Ma’am?”
“Be sure to coordinate yours and that Melinda’s wedding date with your brother’s. She strikes me as the type of gal who wouldn’t pay attention to that detail.”
He nodded. Mama raised her eyebrow at him before patting her lips with her napkin. “Yes ma’am,” he said reaching down to fetch his fork.
“Aiden, my sweet,” she said, using her old phrase, and making my brother flush deep red while Dominic snickered.
“Ma’am?” He’d served himself a second helping of everything and had been digging into it.
“I warned you about that Renee, if I’m not mistaken. I know she came here last night. I do have ears.”
Dominic snorted and choked on his coffee. Daddy punched his shoulder, making him wince and then scowl. I glanced at Antony. He wore a self-satisfied smirk. I looked at Kieran. He nodded.
Intrigued, recalling Dominic’s laughing description of last night’s scene, I watched Aiden’s face stay red while he chewed and swallowed the bite of biscuit and gravy, then use his napkin, mirroring her, stalling, I knew.
“Yes, ma’am. I’m real sorry about … that.” He blinked in the face of her hard glare. He rarely, if ever, displeased her. Even when he was a knucklehead.
“No need to discuss it any more.” My father leaned his head, indicating me.
“Oh for heaven’s sake, Anton,” Mama snapped, making all of us look at her, recognizing the tone. “She’s a grown woman.”
“I am well aware of that, Lindsay,” he said, slowly, indicating his own rising temper.
I stood at the same time Kieran did, both of us picking up plates and moving toward the kitchen, hoping to escape a looming argument. Mama glared down the table at Daddy, her fork gripped tight in her fingers. Aiden got up to help.
“Shame on y’all, makin’ all that noise,” I said, bumping his hip with mine at the sink. “Whose lousy idea was that, anyhow?”
He put his dishes down and sighed. “Oh, well, Renee came to pick me up last night and we … um …”
“You were fucking in the pool and they all heard you.” I made this a statement.
“Well, kind of.”
When I turned, everyone was piling into the kitchen with their dishes. Antony and Dom brought the empty platters. Mama and Daddy were right behind them.
“Please, I dare anyone in this room to claim they haven’t done the same thing in that pool.” Mama refilled her coffee mug and turned to face us. We all stared at her, slack-jawed. “Well? Go on. Anyone who hasn’t had sex in the pool raise your hand.”
I glanced at my brothers. They all stood in various stages of shocked embarrassment; fingers tucked in jeans pockets or hooked in belt loops. Daddy glared at them, then at Mama. Neither of them raised their hand, either.
“Oh, my sweet Lord, that is way too much information on a Saturday morning for me,” I said, winking at my brothers. They all chuckled nervously, glancing between our parents’ stony faces. “Somebody wipe off the table.” I threw a wet rag in the general direction of the Love Brothers peanut gallery, and then turned to the sink.
“I have a project for you while you’re home,” my mother said, taking the dishes I handed her and loading the dishwasher.
“Oh?” I left off the bit about me planning not to be here much past her surgery.
“Yes, the downstairs family room, I want to strip the paint off the paneling and restore it.”
“You can’t pay to have it done?” I wiped the slightly worn Formica counters, wondering why in the world she never did anything to upgrade the kitchen other than replace an appliance every few years.
“Why would I do that when I have a couple of my youngest children in town?”
I sighed and reached into the broom closet for the final set-in-stone stage of kitchen cleanup.
“All right, Mama,” I said, unwilling to engage. The day stretched like a long ride to nowhere right then. “I think I’ll go fetch AliceLynn, and we’ll go shopping. Or something.”
“That’s fine,” she said. “Dominic, you were in early last night.”
“Yeah, well,” he said, pulling his long hair into a ponytail. “My date didn’t quite go the way I’d planned.”
“You’d better be behaving like you were raised right,” she said, giving his face a not-so-gentle smack.
“Why’re you staying here anyway?” I asked, handing him the broom and dustpan to put away.
“Want to be nearby, in case she needs anything.”
“That rathole of an apartment over the old brewery needs fumigating, probably,” Antony muttered, ducking to one side when Dom threw a punch.
“Get on out, now. This place is too small for all you boys,” Mama said.
They stood in a line, looking at her like so many overgrown puppy dogs waiting on their mama to tell ‘em where to pee. She crossed her arms. “Shoo, beat it. You starin’ at me won’t make the cancer disappear.”
Aiden and Antony headed out. Dom and Kieran stayed, and we three got the lecture on the whys and wherefores of our mother’s latest redecoration concept. She’d bought the stripper already and had it sitting on the lower family room coffee table, with drop cloths and scrapers. Once she’d finished and headed down to do laundry or ironing the three of us collapsed on the couch and flipped on the TV.
“Where’s your sweetie, Francis?” Dom asked.
“Fuck you,” Kieran mumbled.
“I heard that, Mister Love. My swear jar best be a dollar richer when next I see it,” Mama called from the lower level.
Dom smiled sweetly at Kieran and got flipped off in return. “Mama, he’s—” But Kieran lurched across me and tackled Dom before he could get out another word. While they rolled on the floor I kept lifting my legs up so I wouldn’t get squashed.
“You boys are the sorriest pack of so-and-so’s,” Daddy said, coming in from the patio. “If y’all are bored enough to be rassling, I’ve got work needs doing outside.”
I jumped up, eager to do something to get me out of the way of the brawl on the floor. “No, not you. You need to help your Mama.”
“Help her do what?” I could hear the whine in my voice and hated it.
Kieran got to his feet first, straightening his clothing, his suck-up smile fixed in place. I adored him, but he and Aiden would be hard-pressed to sort out who was the bigger brown-noser between the two of them. “I’ll help,” he said, giving Dom a hard shove, flattening him when he was trying to get up.
“Help her get the house in order for while she’s gone. You know how she is.”
“No, I don’t. But whatever,” I said, throwing up my hands in the overgrown teenager-ish way I realized I’d adopted the longer I stayed in this house.
Ignoring my snit, he took off his ratty UK Wildcats ball cap and wiped his forehead. “Docs say she’ll be ten days in the hospital after they do the surgery, so they can sort out the … whatever comes next.” He looked closer to crying than I’d ever seen him before, which freaked me all the way out. I didn’t stick around to watch the three of them head outdoors.
Once I’d slaved over laundry, bed sheet changing, bathroom scrubbing, and vacuuming of rooms that didn’t need it, I told Mama I wanted to sit out by the pool for a few minutes before we got dinner together, and didn’t wait for her reply. Dom and Kieran were out there, skimming and checking chemical levels.