The fact that she can’t even look me in the eyes anymore sours my already darkening mood.
“Ani!” Someone opens the door.
“I’ve got to get going. Merry early Christmas, Rowan.” She offers me a half-assed wave before she escapes the room.
I’m left with an empty feeling I can’t seem to shake, no matter how hard I try.
Silence greets me when I walk into my house. After meeting with Ani, my day went from bad to complete shit. Nothing could keep my mind from drifting to thoughts about Zahra. I even caved and texted her, only to be ignored. It was supposed to be a simple conversation to lessen the building pressure inside of me, but Zahra didn’t even bother answering my message asking how she was feeling.
I change into workout gear and go for a punishing run around the property. My feet slamming against the pavement helps relieve some of the tension from my muscles, but it’s not enough to calm my mind.
By the time I run toward the gravel driveway of my house, my breathing is ragged, bordering on painful.
My eyes land on the forsaken swing. The one I never found the time to take down because I was too busy.
Or too much of a coward.
My molars smash together. I stomp through the house and toward the garage where my grandpa kept some tools and his old drill. I’m on a mission to remove that damn swing.
The same swing my mother read fairy tales to us on. Where she and my father would cuddle together while my brothers and I ran around the front yard. And the place where she took her last breath, with my father clinging to her cancer-riddled body while we all cried together.
I hate that fucking swing more than anything in the world. There’s nothing I want more than to remove the bolts and turn the whole damn thing into a bonfire.
I plug the cord into the wall with an unsteady hand. One test proves that the drill still works, and I grab a chair from inside to give me the height to reach the top bolts.
My hand shakes when I press the drill into the first screw. Every muscle in my arm groans in protest as I press the button. The screw rotates over and over before it drops straight onto the swing bench.
One down, three more to go.
I get off the chair and move it toward the other side. Resuming my position, I align the drill with the next screw. I freeze at the etched letters engraved right into the wood above my head.
My vision clouds as I trace the annotation. It’s jagged like it was done with a sharp knife, but the handwriting is unmistakably my mother’s.
My little knights,
Love with all your heart and show kindness in all your actions.
Mommy
I trace the words with a trembling finger. It’s been years since I heard the phrase, and it hits me like a punch to the gut. My mother lived by her words in every single one of her actions. She spoke them to us every morning before we went off to school and would whisper them to us every evening before bed. The words sink their claws into me, tearing apart whatever justification I had for the decision I’ve made.
Would my mother be proud of the man I am now? Part of me would surely hope so but another part of me knows I’ve done a lot of messed-up things in my life because that’s all I know. I wasn’t raised with the kind of values my mom preached—at least not once she was gone.
I understand I’m not in the business of making everyone happy, but there’s a difference between being business savvy and being unnecessarily cruel. I chose the latter over and over again without feeling a damn thing because it was the easy choice. Cutting back on better health insurance was a shitty ploy to get my father to allow me to sit in during board meetings. He wanted me to earn my stripes before I was given a seat at the table, so I decided to go for the big guns. Just like it was simple to vote against increasing the minimum wage and widen our profit margin. I was willing to think about the company first while proving to my father that I had what it took to develop my own streaming company with Kane money.