Omission

Family

Sharon opted out of eating dinner with the family that evening. With more people than not at the table angry with her, the awkwardness simply wasn't worth it for her. Besides, even hours later, she was still cooling down from what she could comfortably say was the worst argument she'd ever had with Riley. And she was including the time the plates broke as well.

Sharon feared that any one ill-perceived word from her mother or father would send her careening back into the dark, gutter-like place where she was awful to her son because he wasn't acting exactly according to how she determined he should.

She also lacked the courage to see the aftermath of their blowout playing out on Riley's face. Was he as distraught and irritated like she was? Was he relieved that she wasn't there for dinner? Or was he still blank-faced and despondent as he'd been at the end of their argument?

None of those were anything she particularly wanted to witness right now, so she'd just told Brad to order pizza for everyone and that she needed some time to herself.

Sitting outside in the frigid conditions, each breath appearing as a puff of fog, and huddled under her warmest coat and a heavy picnic blanket, Sharon just watched. She didn't watch the sky, unremarkable as it was, clouds holding over from the afternoon's storm. She didn't watch the sparkles reflecting off the snow cover from the surveillance light in the backyard.

With blank, far away eyes, Sharon was watching every single fight she'd ever had with Riley, parsing out the important details, and dissecting how and why things kept going so god-awfully wrong.

The commonality among all the instances, Sharon realized with an unpleasant clench of her stomach, was that she always turned on her son wherever the going got tough.

Why? Why did she do that? None of it made any sense when she looked at it through a rational lens. Logically, she knew that Riley was especially fragile given their muddied history and the decade of hell he'd endured. So why was it then, that during their arguments, when Sharon got uncomfortable, that she fought dirty and went for his jugular?

Was it some sort of twisted holdover from when she convinced herself that anything related to Riley was also directly related to her abusive ex-fiancé?

That was not at all how she treated her other children when they had disagreements. Even her worst argument with Audrey about whether or not she could quit the clarinet, had involved more talking in circles, more exasperated and annoyed than anything else. Even if she was angry, she'd never spat venom at Audrey like she did at Riley. She'd never threatened Audrey with anything other than a grounding or a canceled sleepover. She'd never pocketed her daughter's weakest points to use against her in the midst of a heated argument.

So why Riley? Did she not hold his emotions in as high esteem as she did Audrey, Matt, and Andy? Why was her fuse so dreadfully short when it came to him?

There were just so many (too many) times that Sharon found herself in the position of owing a massive apology to Riley, regretting the horrific things she'd said to her son in the heat of the moment.

It was like the cycle Riley had told her about concerning his father.

"I've done this before. You know, being treated really shitty, and then the apologies come, and then it just happens again and again, until the apologies, they just- stop. And then I'm just left getting treated like shit."

When would her own cycle of apologies grow thin and tired? Would she one day find the task of apologizing to Riley, of repairing their relationship too exacerbating? Not worth the work to patch something back up that would just get mutilated again?