Free The Bad Lady (Novel) by John Meany

boyfriend how Nancy had taken advantage of me. If you want to know the truth, that did not sit right with me.
    Not at all.
    The way I saw it, Rudy Knorr did not need to hear everything that went on with me. I understood my mother always needed a man’s opinion about certain things, as well as a man’s approval, or seemed to anyway. However, it definitely soured my feelings when she couldn’t keep some things to herself.
    I kept thinking, Rudy isn‘t even my father, he doesn’t need to be involved in this.
     
     
    PART FIVE
    RUDY
    CHAPTER 11
     
     
     
     
     
     
    No longer content to lie under my blankets and pretend to be asleep, I waited until my mom went outside to have a cigarette on the front porch, before, for the third consecutive time; I snuck out of my bed.
    After parting the curtain, I peeked out the living room window.
    Aside from smoking, my mother sat on the porch sipping a small glass of Tennessee whiskey on the rocks. That’s when I realized she must have been even more upset than I already assumed, because usually the only time she drank hard liquor was when something was bothering her. For the most part the Jack Daniel’s rarely left the liquor cabinet. The same could be said about the bottles of Southern Comfort, Grey Goose vodka, and the Johnnie Walker scotch.
    I watched my mom use a magazine to fan her face. The clammy heat must have been getting to her. The same with the mosquitoes. I saw her swat one on her ankle. We needed a replacement bulb for our bug zapper. I did not know how she could possibly tolerate sitting out there, while constantly being bit.
    My mother’s boyfriend Rudy must have been close by when he had phoned, because it did not take long for him to get to the house. His pick-up truck had a distinct-sounding engine, like the buzz of a lawn mower. I heard him coming down the street, from probably a quarter of a mile away. He parked his maroon Ford truck in the driveway, behind my mother’s car.
    You might be surprised, considering how physically attractive my mom was, by how ordinary her boyfriend looked. Some people, like me, and I guess Mrs. Keller, might even say Rudy was dang garn ugly. He had a dirty blonde mullet, a face full of scraggly beard stubble, and his crooked teeth were the furthest thing from pearly white. In fact, they were as brown as dirt, wrecked by years of heavy smoking. Usually, when Rudy got off from work he did not smell too good either. He stunk of sweaty armpits, a moldy blue cheese odor, and the automotive grease that he got all over his hands and clothing from the garage he worked at.
    When he approached the cement porch and tried to give my mother, a loving kiss on the lips as he normally did when he first came over, she shied away.
    “Hey, what gives?” Rudy asked, disappointed.
    Thrusting a hand through her tousled mocha hair, my mom dragged long and hard on her cigarette. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she says, picking up her alcoholic drink and then jiggling the ice.
    “What’s going on?” Rudy sat down. He put his arm around her. “You said it has something to do with Billy?”
    She nodded, stared straight ahead at the residential street. A car traveled past.
    “Bridgette, what happened?”
    “Billy said she-”
    “What, what is it?”
    “He said she touched him, encouraged him to touch her.”
    Through the living room window, I could tell that Rudy had no idea what she was getting at.
    “Who?” he said. “Bridgette, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
    “The lady who drives the Good Humor truck, Nancy Sutcliffe.”
    “What about her?”
    “Billy said she molested him.”
    Well, that wasn’t exactly how I had put it. My mother made the situation sound a hundred times worse.
    For a few seconds, Rudy looked down, and drifted into a silent coma. Much the same as when my mom had first heard about this, he too seemed to be in complete shock. “Let me see if I‘m understanding this correctly, your son told