Over the Line Read Online Free PDF

still waiting for some sign that her mother loved her.
     
    "Sorry, Mom." This was a mistake. She wished she'd never given in to the impulse to make the call. "I was just... just wondering how you are, was all."
     
    "Tired. That's how I am," Alice grumbled.
     
    Janey closed her eyes as silence settled, then jumped with surprise when her mother spoke again.
     
    "So ... where are you?"
     
    "Florida. West Palm Beach, to be exact. I had a concert here tonight. Two more before we leave on Friday."
     
    More silence.
     
    "Um ... other than tired, how are you, Mom?" Janey prompted. "You've been getting the money I send, right?"
     
    "Every month." Somehow Alice made it sound like a complaint. "I've told you before. You don't need to do that."
     
    "I want to, Mom."
     
    "Yeah, well, I don't need it. I'm getting by."
     
    For as long as Janey could remember, her mother had never worked. There weren't too many job opportunities for a woman who looked at life through the bottom of a bottle of Jim Beam. Janey doubted very much that without the cash she sent her mother would get by at all.
     
    "See you in the papers now and then."
     
    "Yeah," Janey said, feeling a little too much pride, a little too much warmth, knowing that her mother might actually follow her career. "I get my share of press these days."
     
    "Embarrassing, is what it is," Alice groused. "You look like a slut with all that makeup, wearing them short skirts that barely cover your ass."
     
    Janey closed her eyes, deflated.
     
    "So what else did you want?" her mother asked after a protracted drought of words.
     
    What did she want? Good question. Something. Some little something to tell her that her mother was happy to hear from her. That she missed her.
     
    "Nothing," Janey said, grounding herself back in reality. She'd never gotten much from her mother other than the back of her hand. There was no reason to think time and distance would change that. "Look. I'm sorry I bothered you. Go on back to bed. Good-bye, Mom."
     
    "Yeah. Good ... good-bye."
     
    The line went dead.
     
    It was a long time before Janey set the receiver on the cradle and went to sleep.
     
    Alice Perkins, on the other hand, was dead to the world half an hour later.
     
    But first, she stared at the phone. Then she stared across the bedroom to the picture she'd cut out of the paper last week of Janey singing her heart out on a big concert stage.
     
    The girl had become something. In spite of her drunk of a mother, she'd made something of herself. When the first wave of guilt and regret rolled over her, Alice headed for her kitchen and the bottle of Beam.
     
    Her hands were shaking as she poured the first shot. "Hurry, hurry, hurry," she whispered, begging the whiskey to dull the pain of her failures that latched on with a brutal fist and twisted.
     
    She was a joke as a human being. A horror of a mother. She didn't deserve Janey. Never had. And so she pushed her away.
     
    Alice's reflection stared back at her from the window over the sink. Stringy brown hair. Sallow complexion. Old, faded eyes. She'd been pretty once. Not pretty like Janey, but pretty enough.
     
    Now look at her. She was used up and worn-out. A drunk. How had this happened to her? She'd had such big plans. She was going to be something ... someone important. She hadn't meant to be an unwed mother with a baby to feed and bills to pay. She hadn't intended to become a drunk.
     
    And she hadn't intended to survive by the knife of deceit, trickery, and threats.
     
    God, what a mess she'd made. Of everything.
     
    "I'm sorry, Janey," she mumbled. "I'm so, so sorry."
     
    Then as she had almost every night of her adult life, she passed out. This time, instead of at a seedy bar or under a sweaty body that reeked of booze and bad decisions, it was with her head on the kitchen table, her hair wet from the pool of tears she hadn't wanted to shed and that the Beam hadn't been able to stop.
     
     
    The next night, Monday, July