Cruel Summer | ✓

chapter twenty-eight

Mom answers after the fifth ring. "Hello?"

"Mom? It's me. I have a bunch of missed calls. Is everything okay?"

"Charlie?"

"Yeah?"

"Charlie," she says again, and she sighs. A long, heavy sigh. Like she's about to break my heart.

"Mom, what's going on?" I don't realize how hard I'm clutching my mug until it starts to burn my hand. "Has something happened? Are you okay? Are the boys alright?"

She sighs again. "Hi, baby. I just wanted to know when you're coming home," she says, a slight slur to the words, and the pieces fall into place. She's drunk. Mom's always been a drinker but she's always been able to hold it together. She's a lawyer, after all — she needs to be able to hold it together, to have a clear head. I haven't heard her slur before.

"Rapid City isn't home, Mom. I've never been there."

"I know, I know, god, I know I'm not in Montana anymore. I just thought that now that you've left Austin and you've had your vacation, I thought..." She trails off. I hear the glug of a bottle, the splash of liquid into a glass. "I thought you'd come stay with me."

"I said I'd think about it." I wrap the blanket tighter around myself. "I don't really know what I'm doing yet. Are you okay, Mom? You sound upset."

"I'm fine." She pauses. "I'm fine, really."

She is so not fine.

"Mom..."

"I miss you," she blurts out. "I miss all of you. It's been harder than I thought, since you all grew up and moved out and I didn't think I would end up alone. I just miss you, baby, that's all. But I'm fine."

"You don't sound fine."

She laughs. A soft, quiet, slightly bitter laugh. An agreement. "I was married for thirty years. Now I'm single for the first time since I was, what, god, twenty-four? I'm in a new city, a new state, and I don't know who I am. So no, I'm not fine. Sorry, honey." Another heavy sigh, my gut twisting at the emotion in her voice. I have never heard her like this and it's almost enough to make me cry, hearing my mom break down when she's a thousand miles from me.

"Mom, you shouldn't be alone. Have you got anyone there?"

"Don't worry, Charlie. I didn't mean to worry you. I just wanted to see if you were coming here. I haven't seen you in so long. I haven't seen any of you."

I want to say that she shouldn't have moved so far away. I want to beg her to move back home, to get the hell out of South Dakota and find a place in Montana. That's where she belongs. Home has always been synonymous with Montana and now it's this fractured thing that doesn't even exist anymore. But I don't want to tip her over the edge.

"Well, you have worried me," I say. If she was still in Butte, I could call Grayson, ask him to check up on her. He stayed the closest to home, a hundred miles away in Big Sky. He's still the closest, but now it's more like five hundred miles.

"I'm sorry, baby, I'm so sorry. I know everything's so fucked up right now. I know it's awful. I thought ... I thought there might be a chance you were still thinking of taking some time out, coming here and I just ... it'd be nice. Seeing you. We haven't spent time together in so long and it's my fault, I know."

This isn't my mom. The Mom I know is confident and self-assured; she laughs in the face of adversity and thrives on finding a way. She is the one who reassures me, the one who lets me know everything will be okay. But now she's drunk and crying on the end of the phone at and I'm too fucking far away to do anything.