Read Online Mothers and Other Liars by Amy Bourret - Free Book Online

are?”
    “But if you tell…what happens?”
    Ruby sits up taller, crosses her legs. “I’ve already told.” She watches Lark’s eyes flash from milk chocolate to fancy dark Swiss. “I talked to a lawyer. And he’s talking with another lawyer down in Albuquerque, trying to work things out. But I might be in a lot of trouble.”
    “No.” Lark tosses the last of the angel kisses aside. “Tell him you made a mistake, made it up.” Her face darkens in shadow. “I’m sorry I looked in your purse. I promise, I promise I’ll keep the secret.”
    Ruby scootches Lark over to her, pulls her into a stiff embrace. “Oh, baby bird. No. This is so not about you knowing the secret. It’s just, before, I didn’t know. And now that I do, I have to do what’s right.”
    When Ruby pauses to take a breath, Lark turns her head away, presses her chin into Ruby’s ribs. “The charges are pretty serious, baby. The judge could make me go to jail.”
    Lark flings out an arm, wraps it around Clyde. “But you saved me. You loved me.” Her voice catches on her anxiety. “You didn’t know….”
    “Love.” Ruby cups Lark’s chin in her palm, raises her head until Lark’s eyes meet hers. “I love you. That won’t ever change. But what I did, it was still wrong.”
    The ramifications sink into Lark’s face like water on a thirsty garden. “If you go to jail? Will I, and my sister, will we live with the Ms? Or with Chaz?”
    The baby. Ruby can’t even think about what will happen to her right now. First she has to do this, the hard part. She would climb into the trunk of this noble tree and pull Lark in with her if she could, and stay there, protected, forever. She looks up at the cross, which memorializes some priests who were slaughtered in a pueblo revolt four hundred years ago, prays for the strength to massacre her daughter’s heart. Again. “Your other parents, they will want you to go live with them.”
    Lark crosses her arms, hugs her chest. “I won’t go.” Ruby can feel Lark’s voice digging its heels into the ground. “I’ll just say no.”
    “It’s not that easy,” Ruby says. “I wish, I so wish it were.” She holds Lark tightly beside her. “The judge, he can make you go.”
    “It’s not fair,” Lark wails. “I didn’t do anything wrong. Don’t let them take me away.” She crumples like a tissue into Ruby’s lap, her tears washing over Ruby’s bare legs. Ruby’s own tears soak her collar as Clyde stands, moans, licks and licks and licks at his humans.
    Lark’s body feels boneless, a puddle of hurt in Ruby’s lap. The fissure in her own heart is jagged, like a lightning scar in an old-growth tree.

TWENTY-FOUR
    Antoinette looks like an old-church Madonna painting when she cries. All she needs is a fat Baby Jesus in her lap.
    “I’m sorry,” Ruby says. “I’m so sorry. I couldn’t tell you Saturday. I had to tell Lark first, if I was going to tell anyone at all.”
    Antoinette swipes her nose with her sleeve in a very un-Madonnalike move. “I’m not crying because you lied to me. I understand that. I’m crying because the whole thing is so…so royally fucked-up.”
    Well, that totally blows the Madonna thing, Ruby thinks. She’s heard her friend use the naughty F word, as Antoinette calls it, only a handful of times, usually occasions involving extreme bodily pain. Ruby walks past Lark’s closed bedroom door to the bathroom, returns with a box of tissues. “Here. I thought I saw a booger, but it’s snot, as Lark would say.”
    “How can you joke. How can you even…” Antoinette pauses to blow her nose.
    “Talk? Walk?”
    “Breathe. How can you even breathe?”
    Ruby sits down on the sofa beside her. “I don’t know. I don’t know how I’m going to do any of it. But in a weird way, I’m breathing easier now, now that I made up my mind, now that I’ve told all of you.”
    “He’s good, your lawyer.” Antoinette combs back her hair with both hands, loops it into