Read Guilt for Free Online Page B

stuck.
    The front door opened after a few seconds. Lil stood on the other side of the threshold in all of her haughty glory. "Well, if it isn't the prodigal daughter, gracing us with her presence."
    "Bite me, Lil." I wasn't in the mood, so I pushed past her with my suite case in tow. She let me by. She didn't dare stop me when my parents were in the house.
    Mom came into the entry room from the kitchen. "Clairabell?" I hated that nickname. "Oh, sweetheart, there you are. What took you so long? We expected you at least two hours ago."
    "Hi, Mom." We hugged. "I just took it easy on the drive from the airport." She didn't need to know that I got sidetracked. She'd just be disappointed that I let something else take precedence over my family. Even if it
had
been unintentional.
    Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a young boy lounging on the couch in the living room. That must have been Jacob, Lil's nine-year old son. I hadn't seen him since he was two. Boy, he looked a lot like his mother.
    "Jacob," Mom called to him. "Come say hello to your aunt."
    He didn't move from the couch. I could see earphones in his ears, and his foot beat time to some song that no one else could hear.
    "Oh, well," Mom turned back to me. "Don't mind him. He's at that age."
    "The pain-in-the-ass age?" Lil asked, apparently fed up with her son. What'd she expect with the role model he had?
    "Oh, Lil. Don't talk that way about your own child," Mom defended. "Jake's a good boy. He kind of takes after his Aunt Clairabell. I swear he's more likely to be your son than Lil's, Clairebie."
    "Yeah, that would be impossible," Lil jumped on the opportunity to insult me. "You have to have sex in order to reproduce."
    That set me off. "Not all of us are pathological sex fiends,
Lil
."
    "Yeah, some of us choose to be heartless bitches." She bit back.
    "By the way, have you even discovered who the father of your son is yet?" Now I started to hit beneath the belt.
    "Oh, go get laid you frigid nun." Lil curled up her lip and narrowed her eyes at me.
    "OK, Lil – " Mom tried to interrupt but I wasn't about to concede yet.
    "Maybe I could if there was a man left in the world that hasn't already screwed you." That wasn't a very good come back. I never had been very good at offhanded remarks.
    "And maybe you wouldn't have been raped if you weren't such a stuck-up prude," Lil battled back again. Well, she wasted no time in broaching
that
subject. Her jeer let me know that people hadn't forgotten my ordeal from seven years ago. That realization stung me a lot more than her cruel words did.
    Mom sucked in a breath of shock. "Lil. Good God, don't say such things," she admonished.
    While she scolded my sister for her remark, it didn't seem like she completely disagreed with her. I could tell from the glance they exchanged that this was a subject they had discussed before. What kind of an attitude was that for a woman who had made her daughters go to church every Sunday as we grew up, and wouldn't let us date at all in high school (though Lil found ways around that one, and I didn't want to date anyway)? Did my own mother feel that I was a prude?
    "Lil, why don't you go home now?" Mom tried to diffuse the situation, just like she always did. "Jake can stay here tonight and help me with the turkey in the morning. Doesn't that sound like a good idea, Jake?" He didn't hear her.
    Lil huffed, but listened to our mother. She went over and kissed Jacob on the forehead. It had to be the most sentimental thing I'd ever seen Lil do, but he just ignored her. After grabbing her purse from the side table, she headed for the door, giving me a snarling frown on her way out.
    Mom declared that she needed to return to the kitchen to resume her traditional holiday eve pie baking, so she directed me towards my father. Dad was holed up in the garage, his usual hide-out.
    I walked through the door in the hallway between the entrance room and the kitchen, and out to the frigid workshop in the garage.