Further, she’d told me it had been in her family for generations.
She loved it. She loved the family in it. In all that was Josie, who was her brand of kind and sweet but still kind of a hard nut to crack, those two facts were plain to see.
“What?” I breathed to Mickey.
“Yeah. And not up front. He did it nasty. Freaked her out. Scared her shitless. Brought back family, the bad kind Josie hadn’t seen in years, who not only got up in her face publicly, but also tried to break in to steal shit in the middle of the night.”
“Oh my God,” I whispered.
“Good people, Boston Stone,” he said sarcastically and my spine snapped to.
“You could have said this to me yesterday, Mickey.”
“You weren’t big on listenin’ to me yesterday, Amy.”
“That’s because you were being kind of a jerk yesterday, Mickey,” I retorted.
“Kind of a jerk lookin’ out for you, Amy,” he shot back.
He was kind of right about that so I changed tactics.
“I’ll have you know,” I began, “that my daughter was standing on the sidewalk and she heard what you said about her father.”
“I’m sure that’s supposed to make me feel bad,” he returned instantly. “But it doesn’t. See, I’ve been tryin’ to puzzle out why a woman who makes unbe-fucking-lievable cupcakes, who plays Frisbee in my backyard, who’s got so much money she doesn’t have to work but she doesn’t spend her time at the spa and instead spends it at a goddamned nursing home, who looks about ready to rope my kid to the chair at the fuckin’ possibility he might do something dangerous for a living, that happening in a fucking decade…why that woman has only got her kids for two days of the month.”
I sucked in a breath.
But Mickey was not done speaking.
“Instead, they’re with your ex, who’s a fuckin’ dick.”
“Mickey,” I breathed. “Are you spying on me?”
“Red Civic in your drive, babe, not hard to see.”
Time to give Auden a garage door opener and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t already.
And if my son didn’t respond to a text to come get it (which he wouldn’t), I’d mail the thing to him.
Mickey spoke into my silence.
“You’re loaded so it can’t be that you don’t have the cake to hire a decent lawyer to look out for you. So not sure what it could be. ’Cept he did what dicks like him do. Especially dicks like him who think they can treat women the way he treated you. He convinced you that you were a piece of shit when he is and you went down without a fight.”
Oh God.
“Mickey, please—”
He again spoke over me. “And maybe he’s convinced your kids you’re a piece of shit too. They’re old enough to get to you if they wanna see their mom. But that Civic isn’t in your drive but a coupla days a month. So maybe your girl heard me and woke up a little to the way it really is, Amy, and I gotta tell you, I don’t feel bad about that shit at all.”
“I…can’t talk about this with you,” I told him shakily, his words rattling me.
“Not surprised,” he replied and then socked it to me. “Down without a fight.”
I forgot about being rattled and snapped, “None of this is any of your business.”
“Yeah, you’ve made that clear.”
What did he mean with that? How did I make that clear?
No. No, I didn’t care.
“Not clear enough,” I returned. “Has it occurred to you with all you’ve said about things you know nothing about that perhaps you are treating me much like Conrad did?”
“Oh no,” he whispered and a chill chased up my spine at the sound of it. “No, you fuckin’ do not, Amelia,” he kept whispering sinisterly. “If you were mine, no matter if you fucked me, you’d get respect from me. I know that shit because my wife sunk into a bottle, she fucked up our lives, our future, our kids, and she never gets that shit from me. You cannot tell me that whatever it is that happened between you two is as bad as you pickin’ booze over your family. So you cannot tell me the way he spoke to you was what you deserved because I know that shit isn’t fucking true.”
Again, he was right and this time, not kind of.
This time, he was really right in a way that again rattled me.
“I can’t imagine why we’re discussing this,” I said defensively. “We hardly know each other, and again, my business isn’t yours.”
“I figure you’re right, you can’t imagine why we’re discussing this because even someone who gives a shit about you, we hardly know each other or not, lays it out straight with no bullshit, you’re so deep in what he’s taught you to believe, you refuse to see.”
Again.
Right.
Again.
Rattled.
“Maybe we should stop talking,” I suggested.
“Maybe,” he returned.
“Like, ever,” I went on.
“You want it that way, Amy, in your big house all alone, accepting the dregs when a woman like you should be handed everything, you got it.”
Before I could reply, he hung up on me.
I took the phone from my ear and stared at it, asking, “Did that just happen?”
The phone and the entirety of my house were unsurprisingly silent.
He convinced you that you were a piece of shit when he is and you went down without a fight.
Mickey’s words pummeled me so hard mentally, my entire body jerked.
Did I?
Did I go down without a fight?
It felt like I’d been fighting for years. Anytime I saw Conrad or Martine, anytime I forced them to see me, I fought.
But I didn’t.
In the game they made me play against my will, each time that happened, I wasn’t fighting.
I was showing them my cards.
So it wasn’t a big shock that they’d bested me.
And maybe he’s convinced your kids you’re a piece of shit too.
My husband had cheated on me. He’d left me. He’d destroyed our family.
I thought we’d been happy. For years, years, I’d run through moments, snippets, hours, weeks, months and the only thing we consistently disagreed about was how he didn’t want me to spoil the children. Outside of that, I’d never found a single second where he’d given me any indication things were going wrong.
Conrad had never sat me down and shared something wasn’t working. He’d never found his time to find his way to say something I was doing upset him, troubled him, annoyed him.