Mafia Runner

Chapter Six

6.

I gnawed on the sucker, staring levelly across the table at my mother.

She was typing away on her calculator, completing the bills. Most of the time, she hired a personal accountant to take care of our finances, especially because she was busy with work, but whenever she did them herself, she wasn't in a good mood. She often crunched away at numbers whenever she needed to take her mind off things.

"Is that your Harvard application?" she asked distractedly, her attention still on the bills in front of her yet clearly sensing my attention.

Rather gloomily, I looked down at the application. I was getting pretty far. So far, I had accomplished filling in my name and the date. I could have done it on the computer, like 99.9% of the applications, but my father had requested I complete it by hand. If I didn't know any better, I would assume he would take it and go to the campus to deliver it personally.

"Yeah." I swallowed the hard candy.

Glancing at the clock, I realized an hour had already passed since starting.

Kara nodded as her manicured nails clicked on the table's calculator. She sighed. Again. "Afton." She looked up at me, her dark eyes observing me. The bruise on my face had diminished somewhat, but there were still traces. "Do I disappoint you?"

The question took me off guard.

I placed the sucker stick on the table, the leftover residue sticking to the corner of my application and staining it purple.

"What do you mean?"

As she brushed her bangs to the side, she scrutinized me closely. She had just come home from work twenty minutes ago and had sat down next to me. It didn't happen every day. She was evidently struggling with her own thoughts. "I love you, Afton. You're so special to me. You remind me so much of my mother-in-law..." her lips twitched. "Mama was a spitfire and she always had a temper. When things didn't go her way, she would make them go her way."

My mother hardly ever talked about my deceased grandmother, the one who named me Afton, the very same woman who angered my father enough to give me the middle name of Santino.

I didn't think I was a spitfire like my grandmother.

I was reserved, quiet, and I took my father's fist like a bitch.

"Work is always so busy and stressful. I just think that I disappoint you. As my role as your mother. We truly didn't forget about your birthday this year. The dinner we were holding was for you, but we should have cleared it with you first." She looked down at her botched finances. "You know I love you, right?"

Her hand reached over to touch mine and I stared at it.

"Yeah, Mom, I know that," I replied quietly, only because I loved her, too. She was my mother. I couldn't hate her. The same went for my father. He was an asshole and a jerk, but somewhere, very deep inside me, I still loved him. "I just think you are expecting things of me that I don't want to do. I don't want to go to Harvard. I don't want to be a doctor."

Her hand hesitantly moved off mine and her face carefully rearranged itself.

"You want to be an artist?" It sounded so foreign on her tongue. "But Afton, couldn't you do that on the side? You could become a doctor and do your artwork on the side. You could be so successful."

She didn't understand.

She was trying, I would grant her that, but she didn't realize I didn't want to become a doctor.