Disclaimer: I don't own Psych or any of its related characters. This is just for my own enjoyment and the potential enjoyment of other Psych-Os like me, and no monetary gain was expected or received.

Rating: T

Spoilers: Through current episodes, particularly strong from Heeeeere's Lassie and Shawn Rescues Darth Vader.

A/N: Althea, in this chapter, is represented by a wonderful lady of my acquaintance, mother of twenty-three, grandmother to eighty-four, great-grandmother to twelve. The briefly-flashed picture of Althea and Lassiter's mother in This Episode Sucks reminded me a little of her, mostly the hairstyle I think, and I felt after a lifetime of THAT sort of hard work (I'll repeat it: TWENTY-THREE KIDS), she deserved some props even if fictionally. I'm really the one who sings out loud in public places, though, which is actually how she and I became friends in the first place. (I'm also the one who says "fucky luckin'," not that you asked.)

Chapter Six: Something Stupid

Lassiter had a key to his mother's duplex apartment but he saw the car in the drive and, once he mounted the steps to the front door, heard the sounds of Frank Sinatra from inside. Althea was home. He rang the bell.

"Just a minute," the woman's robust, perpetually cheerful voice rang out, muffled by the building. The music stopped and the door opened.

"Why Carlton, baby, I wasn't expecting you 'til late. You get off work early?" Althea Foy filled the entire doorframe from top to bottom, a startlingly youthful-looking seventy-odd year old black woman close to half a foot taller than Lassiter and three times as broad. She was probably slightly taller than Buzz McNab, in point of fact, though he didn't care to witness a meeting between the two in order to find out.

"Hello, Al. Yeah, I took off early."

Her eyes widened alarmingly. "You…took off early," she repeated. "You feeling all right, sweetie pie?"

"I'm fine, Al. Mom said there's a leak in the kitchen sink?"

"Come on in, honeybunch," she said, and stepped aside.

He headed for the little kitchenette and opened the cabinet under the sink, where he found the pipe was indeed leaking around the coupler just ahead of the U-bend. Althea brought out the toolbox kept in the broom closet by the refrigerator and he set to work with the pipe wrench. She watched him with her hands fisted on her generous hips.

"How's that little jailbird of yours?" she asked suddenly, and the wrench slipped. Lassiter growled out a mild profanity as he scraped his knuckles on the piping. "Uh huh. Thought so."

He sighed. "She spent her whole life committed to an all-consuming obligation to her brother," he said. "I can't blame her for wanting to cut loose a bit now that her sentence is nearing its end. I…don't cut loose. And she's a beautiful woman, she's got a lot of options open to her. I don't think she ever realized that before."

"She dumped you?"

"On Saturday."

She clucked her tongue sadly. "I know you handed that girl your heart. I'm sorry she was dumb enough to hand it back."

"It's not dumb. She's dating a lawyer now."

"A lawyer? You mean that funny-looking shyster you hired to defend her?" Althea said sharply.

"She thinks he was a public defender. I asked Hornstock not to tell her I paid his retainer."

"But he knows you paid him. And he still stole your lady?"

"I…didn't tell him I had any particular personal interest in Marlowe," he admitted.

"You paid his wages. Man'd have to be ten different kinds of stupid not to realize what that meant."

"I'm not certain Adam Hornstock isn't ten different kinds of stupid, Al. But he's a good guy, for a lawyer. If Marlowe stays with him he'll treat her right. I'm glad of that."

Althea shook her head. "You know, first time I looked into those big blue eyes of yours I thought you were a heartbreaker for sure. I just didn't know then that it was always gonna be your heart that broke."

He finished with the loose coupler and crawled out from under the sink. "Yeah, well, I guess I was just born under a fucky luckin' star."

She held out her arms to him. "Give me some sugar, baby." He stood up and stepped into the hug, only a little uncomfortable with the embrace. His introduction to Althea Foy had not been auspicious, but that was a long time ago. He accepted her now, and her relationship with his mother, and actually liked her quite a lot. In some ways, perhaps, a little bit more than he liked his mom. Irma Lassiter had quite a lot of hypocrite in her personality, Althea Foy had none.

Apparently she was aware both of the run of his thoughts and the relative ease with which he accepted the physical familiarity - never easy for him, in any situation - because she suddenly said, "We come a long way from you telling your Mama and me to Thelma and Louise ourselves into the Pacific, haven't we?"

He winced. "Not my finest hour," he admitted. "I was…in shock."

"I understand that now. At the time I didn't know about your sister and her husband."

His older sister Caroline met and married a half-Latino named Raul Rodriguez five years before Irma Lassiter came to her eldest son's police academy graduation ceremony with her black lesbian lover. Irma had not been nearly as gracious to her daughter as she'd apparently expected her son to be to her. His mother's rabidly prejudiced objections to his sister's still evidently happy marriage had been only the most obvious example of the bigotry she'd displayed throughout his entire life, and her sudden "coming out" had been both shocking and, in light of every hateful message she'd pounded into his head during his childhood, more than a little affronting. He hadn't wanted to have to deal with the idea of his fifty-three year old mother being homosexual, of course, but most of his reaction had stemmed from a belated sense of sticking up for his sister and brother-in-law.

"Mom's…really good at making people really angry," he said at last. "Family trait."

Althea laughed. "Believe me, honey, I know all about it. Now tell me…what else is bothering you? There's something, I can tell. Something apart from that bad tooth you're nursing, instead of going to the dentist like any sensible person."

"Let me guess…you read that in my aura?"

She blinked. "Don't take this the wrong way, baby, but…what've you been smoking?"

"Sorry. I've got some…kooky neighbors."

"Doesn't everybody? I can tell you've got a toothache 'cause your jaw's a little swollen on one side and you look like you're in a lot of pain. As to the other…well, I no more think you'd take half a day off for a toothache than I think you'd take half a day off 'cause your girl left you high and dry at the start of the weekend."

He chuckled, but weakly. "Ever considered taking the DET, Al? You'd make a hell of a detective."

"So spill it, sweetie, or I'll tickle it out of you. What gives?"

He shrugged. "I…kind of got into it with O'Hara this afternoon. I guess she's dealing with her own personal shitstorm right now, although she wouldn't tell me what was going on, and somehow we ended up trading broadsides."

"O'Hara…that's that pretty little blonde girl they've got you partnered up with, right?"

"Er…yeah."

She crossed her massive, well-muscled arms - a hard-working woman, was Althea Foy, from her earliest days as a girl in southern Louisiana to the present day - across her monumental bosom. "I like that one. She's got brains and moxie and good looks. Ever thought about asking her out?"

It was fortunate he wasn't in the process of taking a drink or her words would have caused an immediate spit-take. "Dear Sweet Lady Justice, no."

She cocked a doubtful eyebrow. "Why not? Don't you like her?"

"Well…sure I like her."

"But she's not your type? 'Cause I kind of thought you went for the skinny little blue-eyed blondes."

"Well, not exactly. I mean…"

"You're not her type?"

"Well, no. I'm not. Not even close."

"She tell you that?"

He shrugged. "Not in so many words, no. But I've seen the type she goes for." Short, spastic, slick and slightly greasy. Although before Shawn Spencer and, maybe to a lesser extent, Declan Rand, he hadn't actually seen that she'd gone out for that type of guy at all. In fact, before Rand he would have said her type was tall, authoritative, athletic, maybe a little shy, sometimes even a little bit goofy-looking. One of the guys she'd dated, albeit desultorily at best, had ears even bigger than Lassiter's. And Cameron Luntz had been older…

Althea was shaking her head even as he pondered his own words. "Boy, you can't look at who a lady is dating and say that it means she'd never date you. You got to ask, honeybunch."

"The question is moot, Al. She's seeing someone."

The eyebrow was back up, although now it looked more conniving than quizzical. "Things change, sweetie pie. Things change."

His own eyebrow shot up. "Al, you're not suggesting I attempt to steal another man's girlfriend, are you?"

"All's fair in love and war, baby."

"Even war has rules, Al," Lassiter said. "Maybe a lot of warriors ignore them, but…I'm not that guy."

She shrugged one meaty shoulder. "Maybe you're not, but things still change, baby. Maybe you're not the guy who'd snatch away another man's honey but you can be ready to swoop in the minute he screws up enough to make her reconsider her taste in men."

He laughed out loud. "Al, I'm not much of a swooper, either."

"All right, Mister Negativity, come up with all kinds of reasons why you can't ask the girl on a date. But while you're knocking yourself down, why don't you do me a favor and hit the button on the stereo? I want my Frankie."

He walked over to the sound system and hit the play function. The Chairman of the Board's voice filled the little apartment.

"I know I'd stand in line until you think you have the time to spend an evening with me, and if we go some place to dance, I know that there's a chance you won't be leaving with me. And afterwards we'd drop into a quiet little place and have a drink or two, and then I'd go and spoil it all by saying something stupid, like I love you."

"Dance with me."

"Beg pardon?" Lassiter said.

"You heard me. I love this song, Nancy Sinatra not withstanding. I wanna dance."

"Al, I can't dance."

"Don't lie to me, boy - I know all about them tap lessons you were taking. Even if you couldn't, hell - I can't carry a tune in a bucket but that don't stop me from singing when I feel a song coming on."

This was partly true - Althea actually had rather a nice singing voice, but she did have a rather disconcerting habit of bursting into song in the oddest places, like the produce aisle at Kroger's. Loud song. The woman learned to sing, she claimed, on the driver's seat of a John Deere tractor, and that plus her obviously heroic lungs added up to a voice loud enough to turn heads in the parking lot. It used to embarrass the hell out of Lassiter if he happened to be in her presence when she started in, but eventually he'd learned to take it more or less in stride, along with her preference of introducing him as her son - occasionally, if she was in a Puckish mood, her "really white son." If he spent much more time with her, he suspected, he would be in serious danger of becoming "mellow." She grabbed his hand and pulled him into a waltz, though she did allow him to take the lead once she had him resigned to his fate.

"I can see it in your eyes, that you despise the same old lies you heard the night before, and though it's just a line to you, for me it's true and never seemed so right before. I practice every day to find some clever lines to say to make the meaning come true, but then I think I'll wait until the evening gets late and I'm alone with you. The time is right, your perfume fills my head, the stars get red and oh, the night so blue…and then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid, like I love you. The time is right, your perfume fills my head, the stars get red and oh, the night so blue…and then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid, like I love you. I love you. I love you, I do."

"Did you at least have the sense to apologize to that partner of yours?" Althea asked.

"Er…we called a truce," he said.

"That's not what I asked."

"Well, I guess I didn't…exactly…tell her I apologize. Or say I'm sorry. Which is the same thing, I guess, unless you say it at a funeral."

"Tell her you're sorry," she said severely. "A man that can't apologize after he finally pulls his head out of his ass is one sorry specimen."

"Okay, all right, I'll tell her."

"And get that tooth fixed."

"Yes, Ma'am." He snapped a rigid salute.

"You sassing me, boy?"

"No, Ma'am," he said meekly. Her mock-threatening gaze softened as she chuckled.

"Good boy. That's why you're my favorite. Don't tell your sisters." She glanced out the window to the street out front, vacant of either personal or official vehicle. "Your Mama will be home soon. You need a ride back to your place?"

"I can catch the bus back." She glared at him. "I came here on the bus, Al - it's not a big deal."

"You walked all the way here from the bus stop?"

"It's not that far."

"On a good day, maybe. On a day you got a toothache, a broken heart, and a troubled conscience? Come on, I'll drive you."