Free The Taking by Kimberly Derting

digital clock on the microwave. It was 8:31.
    After a moment he got up from the table, his chair scraping along the tile floor. He kissed me on the top my head, his beard catching strands of my hair as he did. “I’ll come back later, kiddo. We can talk more then.” My mom came back into the kitchen carrying her new kid, and my dad smiled, but it never really reached his eyes. “Maybe I’ll even bring Nancy so you can meet her.”
    Shopping with my mom and the new kid was less like shopping and more like wrangling an errant steer. The kid had to be herded and restrained at every turn. But I kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want to hear my mom call him “my brother” again.
    She kept saying that. “ Your brother holds a spoon just fine, Kyra. He’s only two.” “Can you hold your brother ’s hand while we cross the street?” “ Your brother has a name; it’s Logan.”
    It was as though, if she said it enough, she’d somehow force some nonexistent bond between us. Make me feel something for him.
    Fine, whatever. He might be my brother by blood, but that didn’t change the fact that he was a virtual stranger.
    Worse, he was the brat who’d stolen my mom.
    By the time we reached Target, which was only our second stop after the cell phone store, my mom managed to secure the mangy little beast into a shopping cart with a strap that was surely meant to contain monkeys. She got him to shut up for five whole minutes with a bag of popcorn that he threw around like it was confetti and the New Year’s Eve ball was dropping in Times Square. He was the most embarrassing thing ever, and I couldn’t believe she thought I’d ever lay claim to him.
    He didn’t start screaming until he realized he couldn’t wiggle out of the shoulder harness he was strapped into.
    After about fifteen minutes of that I covered my ears. “Forget it.” I glanced at what was in the cart: a couple of T-shirts and one pair of jeans I’d already picked out. “I don’t wanna do this anymore.” I glanced meaningfully at the kid writhing in the seat and held out my hand for the keys. “I’m going to the car. Pay for this stuff, or don’t. I could care less.”
    I stayed in my fake bedroom the rest of the afternoon; at least there it was quiet. And away from the kid.
    My mom tried to come talk to me, but everything was so different now—even with her. It was like chatting with a stranger.
    When The Husband came home, which was earlier than I expected, she asked if I wanted to try again with the whole shopping thing. I refused, deciding I’d rather have my fingernails ripped off one by one than suffer through more of her painful attempts at small talk. I worried that letting her go by herself to “bring me back some things” would mean my closet would soon be overflowing with mom jeans and cardigans in every color of the rainbow. I’d be the youngest forty-year-old on the block. But it was worth it since all I wanted to do was scream at her for not being my old mom, the one who could talk to me about anything, and everything, and nothing at all.
    I remembered one time, when I was thirteen and I’d first gotten my period, that my mom and I had stayed up well after midnight watching chick flicks and eating ice cream straight out of the carton while she’d explained to me all the important girl-stuff, like tampons and condoms, and boys and kissing.
    She told me about her first date with my dad, when he’d forgotten his wallet and she’d had to pay for everything. And their second date, when he forgot it again and how he’d had to beg her to give him a third chance, promising that he’d show her his cash when he picked her up, because he didn’t want her to think he was a total loser and was just trying to get free meals out of her.
    She’d wrapped her arms around me then and told me all about the night I was born, and the way my dad cried harder than anyone in the room, including me.
    And here we were, strangers in a strange