“I’ll talk to him about it,” Mom said. Twin clouds of smoke gushed out of her nose. She crushed out her cigarette after taking two drags and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms. I hadn’t seen her in two days and this seemed important.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“What do you want me to do, sweetie?”
“Mom, he was sucking on pills and then crunching them up with grandma’s old pestle. You don’t think that’s a little—” I grimaced. “—odd?”
I set down the plate of toast and poached eggs—barely cooked and wobbly with warm, raw yolk, just the way she liked them—and handed her a fork. She broke off the corner of her toast and dabbed it in the bright gold yolk several times until it popped and oozed.
“Just let me sit here a while and relax before you start hammering at me with all this.” She took another bite of toast. “I think you need a new pair of school shoes. There’s a sale going on over at the J. C. Penney in Statesboro.”
“Mom, why aren’t you taking this seriously?”
“I saw a real cute pair of sandals I think you’d like. But then they probably wouldn’t do for when it gets cool. If the sale’s good, maybe we could get you a couple—”
“I think you should break up with him.”
She dropped her fork and folded her arms across her chest. The only sound in the room was the faucet drip-drip-dripping.
“How about this, Lynn? You just attend to your business and let me handle my own affairs. The way I see it, this has nothing to do with you and I don’t appreciate taking romantic advice from a pimply teenage girl.”
Almost without meaning to, my fingers found the zit above my eyebrow.
Mom slapped the table, making the saltshaker bounce and fall over.
“You hear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. And swallowed the but I wanted to add.