It took about ten minutes for Angela to make appropriate excuses, box up some food for Dack to take home, and head back to Jane's room. Her baby, her eldest, the one who made her a mother in the first place, sprawled across the bed, shoes kicked off, hair spread in a tangle all around her head, splayed limbs claiming far more space than her thinness could have ever justified on its own. "Can I sit?" she asked, but it was just a formality, her pleasantly round weight settling beside Jane's slender body before the question was even fully out of her mouth.
"My life is a mess," Jane groaned as she threw one arm across her face, giving a long, drawn out sigh.
Calloused, nurturing hands swept the hair back from Jane's face as Angela did her best to soothe her daughter. "At least that's not new, huh?" she joked gently, nudging Jane in the side with her knuckles. "Look, I don't want to talk out of school, but I'm guessing this wouldn't be a big deal to you if you really thought that you were just a booty call to Maura, right? So you know you're more than that to her. And she knows damn well she's not just some prancing doll that you like to dress up and show off. If she felt like that for real, she'd never have stuck with you. That one's got self-esteem. She'd never let anybody treat her like that. Seems to me," she went on, speaking louder as she got up to get a cold washcloth from the bathroom for Jane's forehead, "you both know it's way bigger than you two just using each other for sex or an ego boost. Right?"
Jane answered by way of a grunt as she allowed her mother to baby her, closing her eyes against the coolness of the washcloth. "I just want to be with her, Ma, and I don't want to have to worry about what other people think, but she's worried, and, for Maura, that's weird. You know how she is. She doesn't care what other people think. She does what she knows is right, and that's that. So, what is it that's so wrong about me? Or us? Or whatever it is that made her so whatever she is? Is she scared?" Jane gently brushed her mother's hand away, pulling the cloth from her face. "Ashamed? Afraid? Embarrassed? What? She's the only person in my life that I've never been able to completely understand." She closed her eyes against her internal frustration. "What's wrong with me, Ma? What can I do to fix it so she won't feel that way anymore and we can be normal?"
"I don't know, baby girl," Angela sighed as she dabbed away the half-dried traces of crying and lay the cloth over Jane's forehead. "I don't know what's going on with her, but I know a better way to find out than by saying mean things to each other and getting mad. You have to go talk to Maura. Find out what's really eating her. And look, did you tell her you were breaking up? Did you tell her you weren't friends anymore?"
"No," came the murmured response from beneath the washcloth.
"Then for the love of God, don't. Her being so awkward, might be a bit of a blessing right now. She might not know what a breakup looks like if you don't actually say you're breaking up." From the living room, one could hear the sound of the door opening and Frankie's voice calling out to announce chocolate sauce hunting success. "Take a few minutes, then wash your face and let's have dinner. Once you're fed, you'll feel stronger. Then you can go over there and try to patch things up."