Free A Catered Mother's Day by Isis Crawford Page B

came out wrong.” She handed Ethan another muffin to atone for her faux pas.
    â€œDid your dad say anything at that time?” Sean asked.
    Matt answered. “Yeah. He told us to go to our rooms and not come out until he said to.”
    â€œAnd did you?” Libby asked as she held out the plate of cinnamon rolls. Ryan and Matt each took one. Libby couldn’t imagine what it would take to feed these guys everyday as she watched the rolls disappearing into the boys’ mouths.
    â€œWell, yeah,” Ryan said.
    â€œCould you hear what they were saying?” Sean asked.
    The three boys looked at each other and shook their heads.
    â€œI was listening to my music,” Ryan explained.
    â€œMe too,” Matt agreed.
    Sean looked at Ethan.
    â€œThe same. I was playing Halo.”
    Sean frowned. “Halo?” he asked. “What’s that?” The kid certainly didn’t look angelic.
    â€œIt’s a video game,” Ethan explained, surprised. Even his mom and dad knew what Halo was.
    â€œWeren’t you curious about what happened?” Bernie asked. She knew that in a similar situation she and Libby would have had their ears pressed up against the door.
    Ethan shrugged. “I figured it was just the usual.”
    Bernie wrinkled up her forehead. “The usual?”
    â€œFighting,” Ryan said. “We always put our headphones on when they fight,” he added by way of explanation.
    â€œThey do that a lot?” Sean asked.
    â€œYes,” the three boys said together.
    â€œDefinitely,” Matt amplified. “Especially since Mom started her dog biscuit business. They’re always fighting about that.”
    Bernie leaned forward. “What are the fights about?”
    Matt looked glum. “About the way the house looks and how the laundry’s not done. You know, stuff like that.”
    â€œAnd then we heard them later too,” Ryan added.
    â€œLater?” Sean asked.
    â€œLike three in the morning,” Ryan explained. “Or two. Something like that.” He looked at his brothers for confirmation and they nodded. “They were yelling at one another. I mean really loudly.”
    â€œThey woke me up,” Ethan said.
    â€œWhich is saying a lot,” Ryan said, “because Ethan can sleep through anything. He once slept through the firemen putting a fire out in our garage.”
    â€œDid not.”
    â€œYou so did.”
    As Sean finished off the last of his muffin, he reflected that if he stopped eating his daughter’s baking he’d probably lose twenty pounds. “What were they saying, Ryan?”
    â€œDad was screaming that this was the stupidest stunt my mom had pulled in a long line of stupid stunts, and that it was time she faced the music, and they didn’t have money to mount a reasonable defense, and that if she ended up in court she’d have to go with a court-appointed one, and whatever happened to her was fine with him because he was tired of her nonsense, and Mom was crying and saying she knew she shouldn’t have done what she did, but she was desperate. Then she said that she didn’t have anything to do with what happened in the motel and Dad said he didn’t believe her. It was really, really bad.” Ryan looked down at his hands and stopped talking.
    Matt took up the tale. “So I went into the living room and asked what was going on, and Dad screamed at me to go to sleep and Mom told me again to talk to you guys like soon, and then she ran into the bathroom and slammed the door.”
    â€œSo what happened at the Riverview?” Ryan asked. He reached up and began to twirl a strand of blond hair around one of his fingers.
    â€œYou don’t know?” Sean said.
    â€œNot really,” Matt answered. “Was there like a dead body? There was, wasn’t there?” he said, looking at Sean’s, Bernie’s, and Libby’s faces.
    â€œYeah, there