"Fifteen. Happy birthday to me," she sang bitterly. Mommy dearest. Well, she should feel sorry for the woman, but she just couldn't. How could she feel sorry for someone who refused to take care of herself. Well, at least she could choose what school she went to, who she was friends with. She didn't always choose well, but she had a choice. Most other kids didn't. Their parents cared. Didn't want them to fuck up. Too late for that. Too late to give a damn? Her mother had spent the whole day manic. Manic and angry. Whether or not the woman remembered that it was the fifteenth birthday of her first born child was a mystery. Didn't matter in the end though, did it? Eric was off at a friend's house. Actually, he had been for nearly a week. For the best. Until the worst of the rapid cycling was over. Port. A bottle of port. The only alcohol in the damned house. She didn't care for the taste of wine in large quantities. Didn't care if it was good wine or bad wine. See, the problem was it took an entire bottle to get drunk. Properly shit faced and thrashed. So she drank the whole bottle.
Sat in the tub with a horror novel of some sort. Stephen King was it? Stephen King, bubble bath, and port. Read a paragraph, take a drink. Read a page, take two. A chapter was worth five. And then she forgot about the book. She drained the bottle, then the bath, then went to her room, stumbled to the bed, and nestled between the sheets. "Happy birthday to me," she mumbled.
Three days later, when her brother came home he apologized for missing her birthday. The bottle on the bathroom floor wasn't news. Neither was the fact that Maggie hadn't noticed it. Maggie had run off with her boyfriend. God knows how long this time. "Abby, hey sis?" he pestered at supper, "I threw out your old novel. Sorry. It was in the tub. It was a mess."
"Oh," she said. They talked for a while, and then he cried. Mommy was gone. Would she come back? Didn't the dumb kid get how it was with Mommy? She always went, and she always came back. "It'll be okay."
"Liar."
He was right, she was lying, Maggie would come back, but it would never be okay. She lied to a little kid. She needed a drink.
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