David W. Smith - Chase Robinson

Chase Robinson

By David W. Smith

For Pat, who would have loved all of this.

Copyright 2021 David W. Smith All rights reserved

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-9991655-0-5

Cover design by Jeff May.

I Wish She Had Horns

I ts hard to trust someone when you know that theyre killing people. Having said that, whos killing who - and why - are likely relevant questions in the whole trust equation. In my life, its been my mother doing the killing.

That probably makes things worse.

Not that I know for sure, because I dont have a mother who doesnt kill people, so I dont know what thats like.

Its not the sort of calculation I thought Id ever have to make - weigh all the reasons I should trust her, all the risks shes taken for me, all the things shes done for me my whole life against what I can only call a body count.

I had no clue about any of it until three of my friends gave me the bad news. Not about the killing. Worse. Carter, who must have drawn the short straw, told me. Chase, he said gravely, your mom is hot.

What?

It caught me off guard. I have very little insight into how my mother actually appears to other people. To me, she looks like herself.

You know, older than us, but hot, like Cate Blanchett in Thor: Ragnark, Rich explained. When she has hair and not horns.

Yeah, the horns were creepy, Carter agreed. Talk about dark roots.

Their comments came after I had complained loudly and colourfully about the men Mom dates. There seemed to be a lot of them all of a sudden. It was awful.

We were at a decision point during lunch break at school - about to choose between homemade salt and fat to the left and store-bought salt and fat if we kept going straight. My mom and her alleged hotness had come up as I mentioned that her busy social life meant there wasn't much to eat at my place just now.

No - stop it. Amy rolled her eyes. Chases mom is just well-put-together.

I guess thats a better way of saying it even if Im not sure what it means. I just looked at the three of them, probably with an open mouth. They interpreted my silence as emotional turmoil and took me straight to Aladdins Middle-Eastern Caf to fill my gaping maw with hot cheese-stuffed flatbread.

So gimme a break. Of all the barriers I had anticipated to the hassle-free operation of The Plan - thats the plan of my life going forward from, like, NOW - I had not expected this sort of setback. Lack of money, failing grades, a tornado obliterating our home, these things I had considered because they had all happened to other people I knew.

But a mother who is out there? And hot?

Who has one of those?

It was and is weird. Its not like I had any experience to rely on, that Id had a series of mothers who dated men all over the place and I was all cool with it and understood the needs of an empowered twenty-first-century professional woman.

I dont want to know about her needs. Not those ones. I admitted as much to Amy between bites of burning cheese pie and she called me selfish and immature.

Im sure shes right. So hate me on Twitter.

But try to understand there were other issues as well. Because not every hot mom turns out to be a killer. That might make for a lot of killers, given that there appear to be hordes of men out there who dont consider motherhood an immediate turn-off.

To account for the killing, though, there has to be a bunch of things going on, a combination of factors.

Me, my existence, my presence was probably one.

Wait. Not probably.

Definitely.

So it didnt matter that I was not the one piling corpses like firewood. Because whatever was going to happen, however big the stack of bodies became, it would be my fault - just because I was there. Or here, I guess. Being my mother made her into a killer. But being a killer means that I am having a hard time trusting my mother to make good decisions about herself and her life, let alone me and mine.

That sucks, and because I cannot conceive of a universe in which I do not exist, theres nothing I can do about it.

I cannot be unborn.

She cannot unkill people.

And I think maybe she trusts me even less than I trust her.

The Relationship Gap

R esponsibility and fault are different planets, a lot like killing and murder. It is not my fault that I was born. It was not my mothers fault either, although you could argue that it was her responsibility.

And there are many levels to my responsibility that evolved long after my babyhood. Like now, in my late teenagehood. Mom thinks she needs to be with someone. Someone not me. Big surprise, I dont do it for her, being her awkward kind of underdeveloped seventeen-year-old son, with a surname from a father long gone.

I never really considered that Mom wanted to replace He-Who-Ran-Away-From-Us, to fill a relationship gap in her life, and if I had, Id have imagined it differently. My future-focused family might include some rich older dude who would slide in and give Mom all his money just to be his overpaid personal medic. Hed let me drive his collection of classic British sports cars and insist that we accompany him on trips to Thailand and Guadeloupe. Shed look after his gout while I went body-surfing. And there would be no hint, no possibility of anything cringy happening between them.

I told my friends that, and Carter and Rich nodded their heads in understanding. Amy didnt get it at all. Under her carefully beat-up New York Yankees hat, her eyebrows furrowed over her devastating green eyes. She looked at me as if to say, what?

As if I was the one who didnt make sense. She doesnt even like baseball.

Choosing men to date was probably hard for Mom. I suppose she was out of practice. She raised me by herself, rarely socialized, just took care of business. Because we had no relatives in town and we didnt have any money, she had to wait until I was old enough to be left alone, which I had been for years now, so I think it took some time for her decision to, you know, get out there.

And then when she did there seemed to be something wrong with all the guys. I know I sound like a forty-year-old single woman whos been on too many of those dates, but all the good men seem to be taken. All the nice single guys seemed to be gay, and while that solved a problem for me, Mom considered a romantic relationship with a gay man a non-starter.

The guys she did date seemed to be younger or older or weirder than they should have been. And losers. Why were they all losers?

Don't worry - no one was going to get killed just for being a loser. The death toll would be staggering and the power vacuum at the top level of elected government and at Facebook might be difficult to fill.

One of the first losers was Ed Taggart. Real estate is his passion. Thats what it says on all of his signs and thats what he says when you first meet him. Big smiling face on all the bus stop benches. I think he was looking for arm candy to go to open houses with him, show people in, offer them cucumber water. A car-show model to smile and bask in his glow. Mom wasnt keen. But at least the Edster didnt look at us like we were beneath him.

Ralf Griffiths did. Flashy black Acura, skinny suit and tie, manicure to match his toothy smile and a part in his hair that would cut steel. Glanced around our house like it amused him. He was a total dick, into himself as a way of life. Him, I wanted to punch. Not kill, because he needed to live with the fact that a skinny seventeen-year-old could kick his ass.