Disclaimer: I don't own TBD...I just love them madly.
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Helen knows she is not a kind woman. She doesn't have the energy for kindness. Not any more. Not since Bobby died in a pool of blood on a diner floor and left her to raise four boys. No, five boys since she hasn't been able to get Joey out of her house since he first toddled in, a three-year-old with dirty feet and a diaper in dire need of changing. Funny, how she'd been the one to potty train him (and it wasn't like she didn't have enough to do with Sean still nursing) since that no-good harpy mother of his was always drunk before noon.
When Joey's father left her and she moved to cheaper housing, Helen had thought that would be the end of Joey, but he just kept coming back, like that stray cat Kevin adopted and managed to hide in his room for two days before she found it and threw it back on the street where it belonged. Damn thing had used the laundry basket as a litter box.
Helen knows she is not a happy woman. She just hasn't managed to find reason to be happy since her Bobby died. Every blessing their family receives, it seems, comes tainted. Yes, Tommy—beautiful, talented Tommy who she can hardly bear to look at because he's so much like his father—getting into art school with that scholarship from the union should have been cause for celebration. So, she baked a yellow cake and frosted it with white icing and sprinkles, but she also cried into the batter because she knew the scholarship was pity money. Was Huey trying to assuage his guilt over his part in Bobby's death.
She cried, and then she got angry (she was always good at anger) because Huey might be Catholic enough for guilt, but he was also a thinker and plotter and sending Tommy to art school—Tommy who is so much like Bobby that sometimes she forgets they're not the same man—is a good way to get him out of the neighborhood. Helen cut the cake into sixths and wondered if Huey had nightmares of Tommy holding a gun on him.