Free Reaper's Property by Joanna Wylde

Social visit or something up?
    Me: Just regular, try to go every week
since closer now. Harder when I lived with Gary. Didn’t like me seeing her.
Calls cost too much $ tho, so visiting important.
    Horse: I get it. Got brothers inside.
Hope visit is good
    Me: Thanks
    Horse: Send another pic?
    Me: Um, not dressed up
    Horse: Don’t care. Send it. Want to see
you today
    Me: Okay :)
     
    I hate the
county jail.
    I’ve spent way too many hours in the
waiting room, although I know it’s probably better than visiting a real prison.
The county guys look at me like I’m trash and occasionally they cop a feel
while patting me down.
    That’s the price of seeing my mom.
    They put me in a little room that had a
built-in table, sort of like those tables at McDonald’s where you can’t move
the chairs. But here the chairs are just stools and the whole thing is white.
After a few minutes the door opened and Mom came in. She was wearing an orange
jumpsuit, and even though it had to be the ugliest piece of clothing on earth,
Mom looked fantastic. Seriously. My mom is hot, always has been, something that
drove me crazy during high school. But from the way she walked, I could tell
that her back was hurting worse than usual. She had a bunch of ruptured discs
and no health insurance to fix them. The doctors wanted her to have surgery,
but the county didn’t want to pay for it, so she was stuck in limbo.
    I stood and hugged her.
    “Hey, Mama,” I whispered into her hair,
which looked fantastic even though she didn’t have any styling stuff or
anything. How did her hair look better in jail than mine did after two hours
fixing it? Just another part of the mystery that was my crazy, loving,
incredibly-difficult-at-times mother.
    “Hey, baby,” she replied, holding me tight.
She smelled a little like cigarettes, which I know a lot of people find
disgusting but I find strangely comforting—so long as it’s not totally filling
our trailer with smoke. It made me think of when she’d come home late at night
after work when we were little. She’d walk into the bedroom I shared with Jeff
and kiss us both good night. That little hint of smoke was the smell of comfort
and safety.
    We separated and took seats.
    “So how’s it going with you?” she asked.
I’d put on lots of foundation to cover my bruises but her eyes flickered across
them. “Gary?”
    “Yeah,” I said, flushing. “I was stupid,
went back there alone to get some stuff. He was drunk.”
    Her mouth tightened, eyes filling with
tears of anger or frustration, I couldn’t tell which.
    “I wish I was out of here,” she said. “I’d
kill that bastard.”
    “Mom! Don’t talk like that, they’re probably
listening—they’ll think you mean it.”
    She cocked an eyebrow at me and I knew she
meant every word. Mom had a temper, no question. That’s what got her here in
the first place. But I loved the fact that she always protected her chicks,
back when we were little and now too. My mom wasn’t perfect, but the woman
could be an avenging angel when she needed to be, something more than one
school bully had learned the hard way.
    “He won’t be bothering me again,” I said
quickly. “A friend of mine had some words with him.”
    “Friend?” she asked.
    “Um, actually a friend of Jeff’s. He’s a
biker.”
    “I see,” Mom said. “Since when does Jeff
hang out with bikers? Gamers are more his speed, I’d think.”
    “Ever since I moved back to the trailer,” I
replied, shrugging. “He’s doing some kind of work for them. I don’t know the
details.”
    “They good bikers or bad bikers?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You know what I mean.”
    I laughed nervously.
    “Um, they’re good to me. Kind of rough and
they can get scary, but I’m okay with them.”
    Her eyes narrowed, studying me. I shifted
nervously, blushing again. Mom always saw right through me.
    “Just ‘getting along’ or something more?”
she asked. I shrugged again and she