“Was that Aaron I saw you talking to outside?” Padraig asked.
“Yeah. He, uh, had some news for me.”
Padraig studied his face but didn’t ask what news. He was giving Gavin the chance to decide if he wanted to share or not. Padraig’s quiet nature was what made him a very good bartender…and friend. Ever since turning twenty-one, Gavin had found himself sitting at this bar many a night, just because he enjoyed talking to Padraig.
Gavin had very few confidantes because he found it difficult to share things about himself and his past. Oliver had been the first person he’d opened up to, and then slowly, over time, he’d felt safe revealing more of himself to Sean, Lauren, and Chad.
Lately, he’d been thinking he would like to talk to Erin about his childhood. Erin was the first “girl” friend he’d ever had, as he’d always preferred the company of guys. Sometimes he wondered if that was because his experience with females was pretty much limited to his mother, and God knew he didn’t talk to her about…anything. Not unless he wanted it used against him.
The main problem with confiding in Erin was that when the subject of him and Oliver being foster brothers had initially come up, he’d made some comment about his mother being gone for good—which Erin had misinterpreted as she was dead—and he hadn’t corrected her because it was still hard for him to talk about…fuck…anything personal.
Gavin had decided to let Erin continue to believe what she did because with his mother locked away, he could pretend he’d always been a part of the Collins family and had something resembling a normal life.
What a joke.
Gavin had stopped trying to get his mom out of the hospital near the end of his first year with the Collins family. Prior to that, he’d been determined to “save her,” convinced that it was his job to take care of her, that she couldn’t make it on her own without him. Primarily because his mother had always told him she couldn’t. And he’d believed her.
While logically, he knew he’d only been a kid when he suffered the worst of his mother’s abuse, it was still hard for him—as a man—to admit to ever being so weak, so helpless, so manipulated.
The problem was, his mom hadn’t always been horrible. When she was lucid, she tried. Tried to hold down a job, to pay the bills, to be a good mother. Or, well…maybe it was better to say she just tried to be a mother.
Yeah. The fact she was out was bad. Really bad.
His feelings for his mother were—and always had been—a jumble, something he’d never managed to sort out in any way that made sense to him. If she’d just been a mean drunk, it would have been easier to explain away her abuse, but it wasn’t the alcohol—or just the alcohol—that drove her actions. And then there were those days when she’d been nice to him.
He’d known this day was coming. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself, but he’d known. She’d always been there, in the back of his mind.
Unbeknownst to everyone—Oliver included—when he’d gotten his driver’s license, Gavin had begun making two trips to the psychiatric hospital a year, once on his mother’s birthday and again on Christmas Eve. He would drop off a package, usually containing nothing more than some snacks, magazines, books, stuff like that for her. He never included a card and he never gave it to her personally, unwilling to face her.
“You okay, Gavin?” Padraig asked when the silence lasted too long.
Over the years, Padraig had been slowly indoctrinated into Gavin’s small group of confidantes. And Gavin now realized he’d eschewed the trip upstairs because he wanted to talk to Padraig as much as he wanted the beer.
“It was about my mother.”
“Okay.” Padraig frowned, looking concerned. His compassion—something the entire Collins family seemed to have in spades—went a long way toward soothing the burn of the scab Aaron had just ripped off. “What about her?”
From Padraig’s dark tone, it was apparent the bartender was ready to step in as the first line of defense if Gavin asked.
“She’s out.” It was just two words, but damn if they didn’t cut through Gavin sharper than any knife could.
“Fuck,” Padraig muttered.
“Yeah.”
Gavin took another sip of beer and stretched his neck muscles, trying to loosen the knots in his shoulders that tightened the second Aaron had told him his mother had been released from the state mental hospital that morning.
Jesus.
Five minutes after getting the news and he was wound up tighter than a spring.
While Aaron didn’t know as much about Gavin’s childhood as Oliver and Padraig, he’d known the reason why Gavin had been placed with Sean, Lauren, and Chad. Cops tended to know all the details when one of their own was hurt.
“You think she’ll try to contact you?”
Gavin shrugged. “I have no idea what she’ll do. I haven’t seen or spoken to my mother since I was fifteen.”
Not that he hadn’t tried to contact her during his first year with the Collins family. He’d escaped his bedroom countless times, sometimes hitching rides, sometimes stealing money from his foster family to pay cab fare to the hospital. He was turned away every single time, and then Sean, Lauren, or Chad—after a call from the security guard—would come pick him up and bring him back home.
The last time he’d seen his mom, he had come home to find the shitty apartment he shared with her filled with cops and EMTs and, unsurprisingly, his social worker, Margie.
He’d run out of the house an hour or so earlier—chased out was probably more accurate—when he had come home from school to discover his mother in the midst of one of her rages.
She’d pulled a knife on him, something she had never done before. Even now, Gavin could recall the guilt he’d felt for month afterwards, blaming himself for her use of a weapon.
After all, he’d been the one who’d thought the fact he’d grown several inches taller and put on some serious muscle weight, thanks to his strength-training class at school, should serve as a deterrent to her beatings. So the last time she’d backhanded him, a few months prior to that night, he’d gotten cocky and told her that was the last time she threw a punch that he didn’t return.
In her rage, she’d decided to prove to him she would always be top dog—hence the weapon. He’d walked in after school and she’d launched into one of her tirades, his attention drawn to the empty bottle of gin laying on the floor. She’d screamed at him, called him a piece of shit and a bastard and a whole host of other things he’d heard a million times before when she was deep in the grips of the alcohol or her depressed rages.
Then she’d picked up a knife he hadn’t noticed, from the end table, and gotten one good slice in his shoulder before he managed to swing his bookbag at her, knocking the weapon out of her hands. While she’d lunged to grab it, he’d run out of the apartment, deciding to make himself scarce until she passed out. He’d only managed to stay away an hour or so because the wound on his arm wouldn’t stop bleeding and he had needed proper bandages.
His world had been blown to bits when he’d arrived home to discover the shit had hit the fan. Margie pulled him aside to say one of the neighbors had called the police about their fight. Two cops came to check out the disturbance, and his mother had stabbed one of them in the arm several times before his partner could pull her off.