“You weren’t smoking weed?”
“Yes, we’d smoked some weed. I told you that.”
“Not till after she did.”
“Yes, and I’ve apologized a million times,” Heidi says.
“You understand how it must have looked to her,” Aiden says. “She walks in, finds you with some strange guy…”
“Julia’sgrandson.”
“I don’t care who he is. I don’t want him in my house anymore.”
“You meanherhouse, don’t you?” Heidi says, throwing his earlier words back at him. “You know your mother won’t be happy until she breaks us up.”
“That’s crazy. She’s just looking out for me. I’m her only child….”
“You’re not a child! You’re thirty years old.”
“It’s not about age,” he argues. “Don’t you understand? I’m all she has. She had to be both a mother and father to me after my father left.”
“She didn’t have to be anything of the kind,” Heidi shoots back, tired of trying to be understanding. “That was her choice. She drove the poor man away, then denied him access and turned you against him—”
“Okay, let’s not go there,” Aiden interrupts, his head pounding, the knot in his stomach expanding, threatening to explode. “You don’t know what it was like. You don’t know what she went through when he left.”
“I know your mother! I know her need to control everything and everybody.”
“It’s just hard for her to let go, that’s all.”
“Are you sure it’s your mother who’s having trouble letting go?”
Silence.
Aiden pictures himself back on that deserted country road, feels the mob at his back, the hands ripping at his shirt. His breath escapes his lungs in a series of sharp, painful bursts.
“I just don’t know how much more of this I can take,” Heidi says.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’m tired of coming in second. It means that, at some point, you’re going to have to choose. Your mother or me, Aiden. Who is it going to be?”
Aiden runs an exasperated hand through his hair, glancing from side to side, catching a glimpse of his supervisor watching him from beside another counter. “Look. I have to go. Can you hang in there a little longer? I promise, I’ll make this right.”
She says nothing.
“Heidi?”
“Sure,” she says.
“Sure what?”
“I’ll hang in there a little longer.”