Hope Entangles: A New Adult Romantic Comedy (Book 2 of 3) (15 page)

I didn’t know what car she was driving
anymore, but she’d always had a thing for white Buicks.

I bit my lower lip and closed my
eyes.

Not now, please god, not
right now.

I already had two unstable lunatics
from the bitch dimension having it out on my front porch—and god
help me when they realized again that they were here to terrorize
and torture me and not each other, I’d be in for it.

I certainly didn’t need—

The white Buick stopped right in front
of my house, and the tinted window on the driver’s side door wound
down a few inches. I saw wisps of platinum blond hair swept up into
a meticulously tidy hairdo.

Oh sweet Jesus… what do you
want me to give up to make this go away?

Sex?

Men?

Chocolate?

What!?!?

The tinted window slid back up into
place and the Buick’s engine died. The driver’s side door opened
and a lithe, fragile looking woman without a line on her face, but
possessing the bearing of a woman in her sixties, stepped out of
the car. Every inch of the woman was prim and proper, and groomed
to an inch of its life.

Nothing on her stood out, it all just
added to the whole. And as she had since I was old enough to
remember her, she wore a tailored blouse with a matching
suit/skirt. Sensible heels adorned her feet and she made not a
sound as she made her way up the walk to my porch.

She didn’t smile—Doris never smiled.
She simply stepped up the steps to the porch and stood, silently
appraising the squabbling mother and daughter, and then she turned
her pretty, emotionless eyes on me.

I suddenly felt like I had been sucked
up into a black hole, frozen and suspended weightlessly as I was
pulled slow and mercilessly toward the hole’s center and certain
oblivion.

Then she spoke: “Hope. I trust I’m not
interrupting anything important.”

Paula and Norma stopped fighting and
both turned toward the meticulously groomed woman.

“
Ms. Jones!” Paula said, and
literally jumped back as if confronted with a rattlesnake. Norma
Leer simply blinked and smiled in that way people do when they’re
only being polite. “Doris. It’s been too long.”

Doris ignored Paula, gave a
straight-faced nod to Norma, and then hit me again with her twin
bi-frost tractor beams.

“
Mother?” My mouth was dry
as church dust, my heart was either beating too fast to count or
had stopped beating all together—and, of course, my hair decided to
come loose and blow into my eyes at just that moment. “W-what are
you doing here?”

Fighting or no, Paula scampered to the
other side of the porch and literally hid behind her
mother.

I didn’t blame her one bit. Paula Troy
was a bully and a bitch. Her mother was the nastiest piece of work
the teaching profession had ever churned out.

But my mother, Doris Mingier-Jones, was
the most terrifying human being to ever walk the earth—and she’d
been the head librarian of the main branch of the San Antonio
Public Library for twenty-five years.

If Paula thought the woman had been
tyrannical at keeping the library a bastion of quiet and
organization, she should have lived with her. I’d heard of her
going door to door, forcing parents to make their children cough up
their overdue books and pay the late fees on the spot. I’d heard
she once called the police to remove a student from the library
that was coughing too much and was “causing a disturbance” with her
cold.

I’d witnessed grown people cross to the
other side of the street to avoid walking past her.

She was evil, she was the devil, and
she was my mother—God help me.

Growing up I’d been expected to get
straight As, to keep my room spotless, to wash the dishes every
night until they shined and to place them in perfectly stacked,
organized rows in the cupboards of the kitchen.

And I’d been expected to be perfectly
silent unless I had been spoken to.

My father wasn’t one to make waves, so
Doris ruled our house with an emotionless passive aggressiveness
that would have made even the most strident social worker back out
of the house with her pen drawn like a knife.

“
I heard you’ve been
consorting with Jacob Troy. That you’ve been seen all over town
with the man.”—Oh shit! She’d heard.—“Why am I the last to hear
about my own daughter having a boyfriend?”

Clenching my eyes shut I wished for a
sinkhole to open up at my feet and suck me in. Death by sinkhole
had to be preferable to this.

“
There’s nothing to tell you
about, mother.”

Paula and Norma’s eyes lit on me with a
heated malevolence.

“
What I mean is… Jake and I
only dated for a few days, and it’s over already.” I dared a glance
at the angry mother/daughter team. “And that was over almost two
weeks ago.”

Paula took a breath to say something,
but Doris beat her to it.

“
Well, that’s a
relief.”

Both mother and daughter turned and
stared open mouthed at my mother.

Doris continued without noticing the
heated glares she was receiving. “I was hoping you’d return to
college and earn a real degree,”—she meant a degree that wasn’t in
the arts—“one that would help you secure a career.”

Here we go. Doris had never approved of
me going to art school. And she approved even less of my current
employment.

Doris’ face almost broke into an
expression when she said, “And I was hoping you’d give me a
grandchild or two before I was too aged to enjoy them.”

My jaw dropped. Doris wanted
grandchildren…

“
B-b-but… Roy’s
engaged!”

A line almost formed in my mother’s
forehead. “They’ve been circling around setting a date for over
three years now. And it seems the only lesson your brother learned
in high school was the use of birth control.”

My knees started shaking. Doris wanted
grandchildren and had already given up on my brother to provide
them for her. That meant…

Oh hell…

That meant she was going to start
focusing on me to give them to her. And that meant…

She was going to start trying to coerce
me to change; to find a new vocation, to settle down with a man she
considered appropriate.

And she’d do it with the same ruthless,
emotionless passive aggressive commitment she’d used in her long
and fearsome career.

A hoard of Mongols would turn tail and
run for the hills if they came across her.

No… no, no, no!

Doris straightening her perfectly
pressed linen skirt, “Though you are running out of
time—”

“
I’m only
twenty-six!”

“—
I’m glad you decided
against getting involved with a blue collar worker.”

I saw a shift in the body language of
both Norma and Paula. Mother had just verbally slapped them both in
the face. Norma had married a mechanic—Paula’s dad.

“
What the hell does that
mean?” Paula barked menacingly. But when Doris turned her head
toward her she fell back behind her mother again.

“
It means I expect more from
my daughter than for her to allow herself to be weighted down by a…
by a mentally inferior, economically stunted man.”

Norma Leer’s back straightened, her
chest puffing up like a badger getting ready to attack on Mutual of
Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. “Now see here, Doris—”

My mother cut her off with an absent
wave of her hand. “I know that was the choice you made with your
life.” She pointedly looked to behind the woman at her daughter.
“And you can see all the good it did. No matter what your education
level, you couldn’t counteract the fact that both your children
fell into the trap of menial labor.”

Norma and Paula looked about to tear my
mother to shreds.

“
Your son followed your
husband into a blue collar dead end, and your daughter married a
man who…” If I didn’t know better, I would have thought my mother
had smiled for a split second. “A man who empties septic tanks for
a living.”

Wow, she really went there.

What happened next was… just
terrifying.

Paula exploded in a litany of curse
words and lunged for my mother. Norma held her back by the arm, but
she was also chewing out Doris in her own, more genteel
way.

Doris stood there nonplused. She didn’t
tense a muscle, not a hint of emotion crossed her face—hell, it
seemed the summer wind that was still blowing my unruly hair into
my eyes wasn’t even touching her.

That was until Norma brought up my
father.

Talk about a sore subject.

“
You have a hell of a lot to
talk about!” Norma roared. “Your husband couldn’t hack medical
school, so he became an optometrist!”

I took a slow, silent step back, trying
to blend into the background.

“
He is a doctor,” my mother
said, her voice flat with anger, her arms crossing over her chest.
It was the most emotion I’d witnessed coming from her in
years.

Norma smiled malignantly. “An eye
doctor who’s screwed up enough exams in this town that he had to
move his practice to Sweet Water.”

I took another step back, and another.
Luckily, by the time I reached my front door all three women had
forgotten all about me and were glaring at each other with pure,
Jerry Springer fueled rage.

As they burst into a cacophony of
screams, bellows and wails, I slipped into my house, gently pressed
the front door shut, and threw all the locks shut: deadbolt and
chain.

I high-tailed it back to my kitchen and
secured the back door. It didn’t have a chain, but the deadbolt
would do.

I plopped my ass down on a stool by my
center island and dropped my face into my hands.

This was bad. This was so much worse
than… well, than anything.

I had three terrifying women having it
out on my front porch. I would drive to Tibet to avoid any one of
them, but together? I wasn’t sure I could live here any
longer.

Maybe I could move?

Something Norma Leer said suddenly
struck me. She didn’t call her son Jake; she called him Jacob—so
had my mother.

Jacob…

Why did that name mean something to
me?

As if it were a battered VHS copy
instead of my own memory, I could almost see a stringy, far too
skinny guy walking side by side with my huge, jock brother. They
both had letterman jackets on, but this guy’s jacket was far too
large for his bird-like frame.

If he’d been taller he would look more
like a basketball player than a member of the football
team.

I could see him, though, over and over
again, helping me pick up my books—I was a klutz in high school,
and was always dropping them.

And he must have helped me pick them up
a hundred times.

I had never really looked at him. No
matter what, he was a jock, like my brother. I’d been looking for a
man with a dangerous, artistic air to him.

Jacob.
Jake…

Had that been him?

I heard footsteps on my dinky back
porch. I lurched up off the stool and fought off the impulse to
grab a sharp, pointy knife from my cutlery drawer.

The unmistakable metallic sound of a
key sliding into a lock made my heart leap up into my throat. No
one had a key to my house.

What the…

The back door came open and Bette
slipped in, pulling it closed behind her and locking it.

I gaped at her as she sashayed into my
kitchen and pulled out two coffee mugs from the
cupboard.

“
What in the world is
happening on your front porch?” she queried.

“
You have a key?” I didn’t
care that I sounded totally pissed off.

She turned and came over to the
floating island, setting down a fresh mug of coffee beside the
stool I’d been sitting on, and waving my question off with a wave
of her hand. “I had one made up ages ago.”

With everything that had happened the
last two weeks, and as much as I knew about Bette’s difficulty with
boundaries, I really couldn’t stay shocked.

“
Of course you
did.”

“
Now,” Bette said eagerly,
“about the women getting ready to
throw
down
on your porch?”

“
You know I’m going straight
to the hardware store for new locks as soon as the coast is
clear.”

Bette opened her eyes in doe-like
innocence. “Why not just go to Wal-Mart?”

I stared at her hard enough to put a
dent in the side of a car.

“
You know exactly why I
can’t go to Wal-Mart!”

Bette cocked her head. “Oh, I meant
another Wal-Mart. There are five others in the San Antonio
area.”