You Dropped a Blonde on Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

is going on back there?”
    “But there’s a nice breeze coming in from the shore, and that noise is me finally getting that leaky pipe fixed in the guest bathroom. ’Bout time, too. Only took three phone calls and an association meeting to get it done. Though I hear poor Garner’s been backed up since his valve replacement. But he got himself some help this week.” Her mother frowned. “There was something I was supposed to tell you . . . Oh, I know. The Talleywhacker called. Wants to see Connor.”
    The Talleywhacker, aka Finley. Connor’s age didn’t help in trying to keep Finley’s infidelity a secret. Neither had the leak in the society pages. Connor understood far more than she would have liked him to. As a result, he not only got the ugliness that had gone down between his parents, but he was so angry with his father, he refused to see him.
    He’d left his Xbox 360, among other things, behind to prove his point, too. She couldn’t decide whether to beat her chest with pride that she’d managed to instill morals in him or give him a good spanking for being so frickin’ difficult. Maxine sighed, knowing the answer and the sneer that would follow, but asking because it was her job as Connor’s parent to do it. “Did you tell him he’d have to talk to Connor?”
    “I told him I’d have Connor call him back from the pay phone down at the 7-Eleven, seeing as you can’t afford a cell phone for him. I also told him he’d better hope we could take the drunk homeless guy who sleeps on the side of the building, because we’ll have to steal his change to make the call.”
    Sneer on cue. Unbuttoning her jacket, Maxine laughed. “Don’t taunt Finley, Mom. It’ll only result in me maybe losing my kidneys in the next round of this reincarnation of World War Two.”
    “Finley Cambridge can bite my old, wrinkled ass. He’s a deadbeat, and don’t think, unlike you, I’m afraid to say so. If my memory serves me, that’s what I called him just before I threw the phone at the wall.” She tilted her sharp jaw upward. Her hair, fresh from cushioned pink curlers, shook when she gave Maxine a defiant flash of her eyes.
    Maxine slid closer to the wall, fiddling with the rip in the fading flowered wallpaper of her mother’s kitchen. “Ma, there has to come a time when Connor sees his father again. Fin cheating on me doesn’t mean he cheated on Connor.” Sooooo PC. Sooooo much bullshit. Fin may not have fornicated around on Connor, but he’d definitely cheated him.
    Connor should be planning his graduation next year, attending the college he’d dreamed about since he was little, hanging out with his friends. Instead, he was living in a retirement village, driving twenty minutes each way to school five days a week so he could graduate with the same classmates he’d had since kindergarten, and walking little old ladies’ dogs night after night to afford the gas money to do it.
    Her mother grunted, smoothing a hand down the front of her Day-Glo green, nylon sweat suit. “Really? I disagree, Missy. When Fin decided to take his crotch elsewhere, he also took his money, and his son’s home, and left you with nothing. I say that’s cheating his kid out of all the things he deserves just so he can stick it to you. Is Finley going to raise him?” Mona scowled. “Not likely. All the things that boy had before Finley went off and did the humpty-hump with that tramp, and now he has nothing? That’s cheating by proxy, girlie.”
    Technically, that wasn’t totally true. “Fin did give Connor the option to come back and live with him and Lacey.” Maxine cringed. It tore a hole in her heart just thinking of not having Connor with her. Almost as bad, when she said her husband’s new fiancée’s name, even eight months later, it still gouged another hole in her heart—albeit a much smaller one than possibly losing Connor. They weren’t even divorced yet and Fin already had a fiancée.
    Lacey, Lacey, Lacey. The pain