Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [420]
It didn’t make sense that her mother had suddenly found God. Maggie could count on one hand the times her mother had insisted they attend mass. Her entire childhood, she couldn’t remember her mother doing or saying anything that could remotely be misconstrued as religious.
The only time Maggie remembered her mother mentioning religion was when she was drunk, often times joking that she was a recovering Catholic from which there was no cure. Then she would snort and laugh, telling anyone who would listen that being a little bit Catholic was like being a little bit pregnant.
For Kathleen O’Dell, being a Catholic was something she had held on to simply as a party favor. Which led Maggie to believe that Everett’s Bible-thumping would probably be lost on the woman. In the last several months, she had not heard her mother suddenly start spouting off psalms or scripture. There certainly hadn’t been a miraculous religious conversion. At least not one Maggie could see.
What she did see was the same compulsive, judgmental, addictive woman finally finding someone or something to blame for all her hardships and bad luck. And Reverend Everett provided for her the sinister, evil culprit in the form of the United States government, a faceless entity, an easy target as long as Kathleen O’Dell could reason that her daughter was not a part of that entity.
Now that Maggie thought about it, why would she find it odd that her mother be attracted to Everett’s brand of religion, to Everett’s version of reality? After all, hadn’t Kathleen O’Dell spent years worshipping at the altar of BCD: Beam, Ceurvo and Daniel’s? There had been times in the past when the woman would have sold her soul for a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Just because she was no longer drinking didn’t necessarily mean her soul was no longer for sale. She had handed in one skewed sense of reality for a different one, one addiction for another.
Maggie could understand the seductive lure for her mother, whose version of current events came from the National Enquirer or watching Hard Copy. What a rush it must now be for her to believe that she had the inside scoop on national issues; that she was respected and trusted by someone with the charisma and charm of the good reverend; and that she could have the easy answers to questions so many people spent a lifetime in search of.
She had heard some of those answers, the paranoid delusions that men like Reverend Everett spread. There was power in hate, and control by fear was one of the most successful manipulations. Why had Maggie shrugged off her mother’s comments about chemicals in her drinking water, hidden government cameras in ATM machines and oh, yes, several weeks ago a hysteria about not wanting to talk to Maggie if she was calling on her cellular phone because “they had ways of listening in to those conversations?”
Why hadn’t she seen the danger signs long ago? Or had she seen them but been so relieved to no longer be picking up the shattered pieces her mother left behind that she didn’t care, or that she simply didn’t want to know?
Somewhere Maggie had read that alcohol only emphasized an alcoholic’s personality, bringing out and highlighting characteristics that already existed. It made sense with her mother. The alcohol only seemed to make her more needy, more hungry for attention. Yet, if that was indeed true, Maggie realized the irony in her own drinking habits. She usually drank to forget the empty feeling inside her, and to not feel so alone. If the alcohol only emphasized those very same things, then no wonder she was so fucked up.
Like mother, like daughter.
Maggie shook her head, trying to prevent the memory.
You two could be sisters. I never fucked a mother and daughter before.
Those goddamn crumbling walls. She grabbed the Pepsi can in her cup holder and gulped the warm, flat remainder. Why was it that she could not remember the sound of her father’s voice, but she could still feel this stranger’s breath on her face? With little effort, she could smell the sour odor of whiskey and feel the scrape of