“Joey, leave him, please!” begged Casey, and Joey grinned at her. “Sure thing Sis, for you, anything!” He ambled back to the porch, slapping Robbie on the arm as he passed.
“Teach him some manners, bro!” he grinned, before rejoining Karen and Sarah on the porch.
Steve staggered to his feet and stood to glare at Robbie,
“This isn’t over, you fucking sick little bastard, you and that little whore are fucking doomed, you hear me? Angie, get in the car, we’re leaving!”
Angie stayed where she was.
“When were you going to tell me, Steve? When were you going to tell me about you and Sarah, about your… son, all of it? It must have happened just before we got married; you were playing even then? I always forgave your… indiscretions, but you had a child, right here in town, and you hid it from me…!”
Steve’s face worked as he tried to say too many things at once, and he came to a decision. Lurching over to Angie, he grabbed her by her upper arm and hauled her upright, ignoring her cry of pain. Suddenly Robbie was there. He clamped his hand on Steve’s forearm with crushing force, making Steve cry out in pain himself, and forcing him to let go of Angie.
Steve swung his free hand at Robbie, and Robbie leaned away, caught his arm and twisted it, making Steve cry out again.
“I promised you once I’d break your arm if you ever tried to hit me again. Back off now, Steve, I’m warning you!” stated Robbie, his face calm, no a trace of anger, just possibly, a tinge of regret that nothing had changed in his father, nothing at all.
Robbie marched his father back to his car, and gave him a push that sent him sprawling against it again.
“Go away, Steve, you’re done here, please don’t make me do this!” he stated, watching the intent rise again in Steve’s eyes. Robbie sighed; did this man never learn?
Steve lurched upright and stared at Robbie.
“I’m still your father, you little prick, and you’ll do as I tell you. Lay off your sister, or I’ll kill you!” he gritted, his face flushing as Robbie shook his head.
“Get lost, Steve, go away and stay away, we’re done here. You’re not my father, and you’ll get hurt if you keep attacking me. Just go.” stated Robbie, and the anger flared up large in Steve, overriding any common sense he might have still possessed.
With an inarticulate bellow, he swung a punch with everything he had, all his anger and frustration packed inside it, and once again, as so long ago, his fist smacked into Robbie’s outstretched hand. Robbie closed his hand and twisted sharply, there was a sickening crackling noise and Steve screamed as his wrist snapped and his arm fractured at the elbow.
Robbie turned to Angie.
“Get him out of here, please; he’s going to need help to get to the Emergency Room, and no-one else here feels like taking him.”
Angie looked at Casey, who was holding Joey’s arm throughout this, noting the vivid red mark under her left eye, right on her cheekbone, where Steve had backhanded her, and also saw the look of undisguised loathing on her face when she looked at her father; loathing, and… relief?
In a sudden flash of insight, unusual for her, Angie saw how Steven Dolan had so comprehensively alienated all his children, including the one he’d never acknowledged or admitted to. She looked over at Steve, slumped back against his car, sweat beading his face as his arm hung uselessly by his side, his hand hanging limply to one side, and marvelled that Robbie had done that with so little effort, with one hand. Angie couldn’t help but feel a small bloom of pride that her son had managed and manhandled Steve so effortlessly.
“Mom,” said Robbie, and Angie’s head snapped round to look at him; something inside her tore when she realised he was talking to Sarah.
“Could you look at Casey’s eye, please, mom, maybe get her an icepack of something?” Sarah nodded and went back inside.
“I’m your mom….!” whispered Angie, tearing a little more inside when Robbie shook his head.
“No, you’re not, my mom’s over there. Now please, just take him to the ER, he can’t stay like that much longer.”
Robbie walked away, Angie watching him while her head whirled, wanting to call out to him but not knowing what to say. Sarah came back out with the icepack and handed it to Joey, all the while watching Angie, and again feeling a pang of sympathy for her, understanding how she must be feeling, but more concerned for Robbie after what had just happened.
Angie looked up at Sarah, her mouth twisting as she tried not to cry. “You took my son away, Sarah!” she whispered, and Sarah shook her head.
“No Angie, you broke him and you threw him away; all I did was pick up the pieces and try to glue him back together. You did so much harm to that boy, for so long, for so little reason it beggars belief; one tiny little defect was enough to damn him, in your eyes, and so you left him out, you and Mr. Wonderful over there. Did you really expect him to embrace you with a shout of joy? The first time you sideline your child because you can’t be bothered with him, that’s the instant you lose all rights to that child’s love.”
“Robbie stopped being your son over twenty years ago; that’s the crop you sowed, now you get to harvest it in full, and I feel sorry for you, but I can’t help you reap it; you have to do that yourself. I asked you a question once; I asked you if you could come up with a good reason for doing what you and that man did to that poor boy; have you ever thought about answering that question, even to yourself?”
“But what am I to do now?” moaned Angie, and Sarah leaned forward.
“I don’t know, Angie, really, I wish I did. Casey gave you one last chance, a golden opportunity, I heard her, so did you; you chose not to take it. But then you had a chance every day of Robbie’s life, and you never took it once; instead, you took every opportunity to cheap-shot him, to mock him, to play nasty, malicious, cruel little party-tricks on him. He waited and waited for his mom, and she never came; it was only ever you, and you hurt him more with every passing day. He forgot how to smile, and, because he had no-one to love, he forgot how to do that as well. You have no-one to blame but yourself for the fact that your son has absolutely no connection to you. He was born entitled to only one thing, his mother’s unconditional love, and you wouldn’t even give him that.”
Sarah paused, to glance over at Robbie, gently dabbing Casey’s cheekbone with the ice pack, with Angie’s eyes following her glance, her eyes widening as she finally understood what was happening between the two of them.
Sarah spoke softly to Angie, indicating the two of them.
“The things you did to that boy, you and Steve, and Casey, the mess you made of him, the place you left him in, by rights he should be institutionalized; but the biggest wonder to me in all this mess is that it took Casey to finish putting him back together. She pulled him back from a place he should never have been in the first place, a place you left him, and that’s why they’re together.”
Sarah sighed and sat down on the step next to Angie.
“I wish I could help you find him again, Angie, truly, but I wouldn’t know where to start; he doesn’t need you anymore, you see; you wouldn’t let him have any part of you, and so you stopped meaning anything to him. That part of him that needed you is long gone now; you don’t exist anymore, there’s no pattern in his brain anywhere that says ‘Angie = Mom’. The only thing he needs now is Casey.”
Sarah sighed again, not relishing what she was saying, but knowing Angie needed to hear it.
“When he was small you never touched him, or picked him up and carried him, or spoke to him, or cuddled him; hell, when he was young, I couldn’t even touch him, because he firmly believed that he wasn’t supposed to be touched; no-one in his house ever touched him, or hugged him, or played with him, or even said hello to him; you just left him to one side while the three of you got on with your happy, perfect, American-Dream lives.”
She stopped to draw breath, watching the horror mount in Angie’s eyes as the truth’s she was hearing finally began to hit home.
“Robbie’s going home tomorrow, and I don’t know if he’ll ever come back. He came here for a very specific reason, and now he’s done what he had to do, I don’t think he’ll ever want to come back here again. I told you before, he has no good memories of this place, or of you and Steve; even now, when you saw him, after more than four years, your first impulse was to attack him, and you heard what your husband, his father, called him. So tell me, why should he come back?”
Angie was almost in tears now.
“Sarah, how do I get him back, what do I do to tell him I’m sorry? Please, help me!”
Sarah looked at her pityingly, finally moved by her sincerity.
“Well Angie, I think you could try needing him. You should need him the way a mother needs her child; when you know all the way through, from all the way down inside you, from deep in the blood and the bone, that you can’t rest until you’ve moved heaven and earth for your baby, maybe that’s the time you’ve earned the right to his love. There are people I could mention who would go down fighting for Robbie, who’d stand over him on bloody stumps and defend him to the last, who’d face down the glare of Hell for him; when you can feel like that about him, you can try talking to him again. And now I think you’d better take Father of The Year over there to the ER before he collapses.”
Angie opened the car door and waited for Steve to climb in as best he could; she was in no mood to help him. When they arrived at the ER, the Triage Intern took one look at his arm and sent him to an examination room. The doctor poked and prodded his arm and his wrist, gave him something for the pain, and then sent Steve down for an X-Ray. When they brought him back up, the doctor examined the plates, and then returned to the examination room.