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“Your favorite pastime. Thanks,” I said, accepting the cup.

“So, what’s with the shiner?” she asked, sitting down across from me, pulling the ashtray closer.

I’d completely forgotten about it.

“Car accident,” I said, resisting the urge to reach and touch it.

“Did you get hurt anywhere else?”

“Just some bruises. And whiplash. I was lucky, all things considered.”

I lifted the cup and took a sip. I wasn’t sure if the burn was from the heat or the bitterness as I choked down the liquid.

“How’s Perry?” she asked.

There was no stopping the way my stomach dropped out.

“About that,” I said, exhaling hard, trying to find my nerve to bring it up.

Though, all things said, my mother was the last one who could judge when it came to relationships falling apart. She had more boyfriends in one spring than I’d had my whole life.

It would be alright.

“Yeah, about that.”

That wasn’t my mom speaking.

My heart dropped to my stomach as I looked past her down the hall.

To where Perry was walking out of my childhood bedroom, holding one of my old air-dry clay animals I used to make and scatter all over my room.

“You didn’t,” I said, my stomach sinking as I got to my feet and glared at my mom. “Tell me you didn’t lie to me to get me here so he could ambush me.”

“Well, listen, Georgie, relationships are hard. You can’t just hide from your husband. You two need to have it out, work through it.”

“Your mother is a wise woman, Georgia,” Perry said, moving closer. “You need to come home with me so we can work it out.”

“Work it out how? By beating me again?”

“What?” my mom asked, body stiffening. “What did you say?”

“He left that out, didn’t he?” I asked, glaring at Perry. “I finally left him after years of abuse because he put his hands on me.”

“Don’t be filling your mother’s head with stories,” Perry said, coming around the table toward me.

I had to get away from him.

If he got his hands on me again, I wasn’t sure I would survive. In fact, I was sure of it. Because he wouldn’t have to worry about discovery if I was dead.

“It’s not a story. When I showed up to the motel, I was bloody and bruised enough that two women there promised to keep an eye on my room to make sure my husband didn’t come back to knock me around some more.”

“You hit my daughter?” my mom asked, getting to her feet, the chair scraping across the floor. “My daughter?”

Before even I—who had seen her in action before—could realize what she was doing, she snatched a knife out of the block and started walking toward Perry.

“She’s lying,” Perry said, shooting my mother a disgusted look. Like she was a roach crawling across his shoe. That was always what she was to him. Why he wanted me to distance myself from her. Not because she ‘wasn’t a good influence’ but because, despite all her other faults, she was the kind of mom to pull a knife on the man who hit her kid.

Come to think of it, he’d really started to urge me to stop taking her calls not long after I told him the story about her beating her boyfriend for putting his hands on her. I couldn’t be allowed to have access to a woman who might tell me to fight against his abuse.