"I don't like this one."
He spoke and she waited around the corner, hands twisting as she heard him shuffle around, exchanging the items she had left.
"Isn't it your size?" she prompted, timid, reminded painfully that his size hadn't changed in years and never would. His sizes and preferences were branded into her as the essence of her role as a mother. She could still provide. Privately, and not like she used to, but she could do him this service.
"Keep your voice down. Family's upstairs."
He'd find any excuse to shush her, but she pretended he had a point and continued to twist her hands in silence, turning each ring around its digit. The basement was soundproof, they all knew that. Regretfully soundproof. Sounds had soaked into it for years, filling its capacity to hear anymore. It had heard enough screams and sobs, enough fights between lovers, and it seen enough ends to put a stop to any noise leaking out. The basement kept secrets like all of them did.
Constance wondered how imposing people would think her now, holding the scraps of her motherly dignity in a dimly lit basement. She straightened her posture and cleared her throat. He was still her son by blood and by memory and by God she'd treat him like it.
"I don't have all day, Tate," she started, keeping the waver out of her voice. "Hurry it up."
"Yeah, whatever." The click of a belt buckle on a clasp and another moment's pause, punctuated by a muffled kick. "Here's your pile."
She rounded the corner to see him gone and a pile of clothes on the floor, scattered where he had kicked them just as a nuisance to her. She inhaled deeply and stooped to gather them up, slinging the handful of items over her arm where she could organize them before putting them into a bag she had brought.
She didn't have a teenage son anymore. If anyone peeked in the bag on her way home, she was buying for her- nephews. No, for a friend's son.
Not even a thanks, she thought bitterly, heels clicking with her brisk walk out of the cursed house, bag swaying at her side. The transaction completed, Tate had vanished with his new clothes on and very few words said, and Constance had retreated with his dirty laundry to do one of the few graces she had left for Tate.