“Sounds perfect.”
The more time I spend with her, the more time I want to spend with her. It’s crazy that we spent months living together and I never bothered to get to know her.
It’s because you were too busy fucking anything with a vagina to get over your ex-wife…
And now that I’m thinking about it, since the day Georgia and I started hanging out, I haven’t even thought about hooking up with any women, nor have I dwelled on my divorce. For the first time it feels like I’m actually moving forward. I’m no longer bitter toward the way things ended, or the years I felt were wasted. With Georgia, I’m enjoying myself again. And not in the fake way I do when I stick my dick into some woman I don’t know, but in a real way. Georgia and I laugh together, talk about shit. It’s nice having someone to connect with.
I’m cleaning up my room, when my phone rings. “Hello,” I answer without looking to see who’s on the other end.
“Chase, I need you.”
I close my eyes, listening to her slurred words. It’s my mom, and she’s drunk. Which makes no sense because the only time she ever gets drunk is… Shit! I pull the calendar up on my phone and the realization of what today is has sharp pains shooting through my chest. How could I forget?
“I’ll be right there,” I tell her before hanging up, grabbing my keys, and flying out the door. My mom and I aren’t as close as I wish we were, but she’s still my mom, and I love her and would do anything for her.
About fifteen minutes later, I arrive at my childhood home. It’s located in a rougher part of LA, where the movies and television shows don’t show because people would realize that the majority of LA isn’t really all that glamorous.
Parking my vehicle in her driveway, I run up to the front door, and without knocking, go inside. I find my mom lying in her room with a bottle of vodka in her hands. The room is dark and smells like sex and alcohol. I gag a couple times, then open the windows, letting the light and air in.
Ignoring the fact that her sheets are probably full of sex as well, I edge onto the bed and pull her into my arms. There are only two days a year my mom gets drunk: the day my sister was born, and the day she died.
“Chase,” she slurs. “You came.”
“Of course I came,” I tell her, cursing myself for forgetting the date. I always make it a point to visit my mom the night before and spend the night so she doesn’t get like this. If I’m not here to stop her, she’ll drink until she’s sick and has to be hospitalized—it’s happened more than once.
“I miss her so much,” she cries. Her shoulders begin to shake, and when I push her hair out of her face, tears are racing down her cheeks. I don’t bother to wipe them away, knowing they won’t stop coming until she falls asleep.
Instead, I hold her close, telling her how much I love her, because that’s all she really needs. To be comforted. The day we lost my sister, we also lost my father. My mom didn’t take her death well, and my father couldn’t handle taking care of my mom. He turned to the bottle and eventually his drunk ass left, leaving me to pick up the pieces. A few years later, he died from kidney failure.
“She would’ve been thirty-one today,” Mom says. “My baby never got to live her life.” I do the math in my head, and she’s right. Audrina overdosed when I was seventeen and she was eighteen. It’s one of the reasons why I decided on my career of choice. I first got my EMT license and then joined the fire academy. I wanted to save people, since I couldn’t save my sister.
While my mom cries into my chest, I hold her, running my fingers through her hair and trying to calm her down. As long as I’m here, she won’t drink, and since she’s still awake, it seems I got here before she drank too much.
I don’t know how long I hold her for, but when my phone vibrates for the millionth time in my pocket, I remember that I was so worried about my mom, I forgot to tell Georgia I was leaving.
Carefully, so I don’t wake my mom, I pull my phone out. The time on the phone says it’s four o’clock. I’ve been holding my mom for several hours. My heart breaks all over again for my mom. Some people rise up after a tragic event, others drown in it. If I weren’t here to hold my mom up, she would drown.