The Mall Read Online Free Page B

you wouldn’t bring him up again.”
    “Now that’s a little unrealistic, wouldn’t you say,” Charlene answered, giving her cigarette two taps into the crystal ashtray beside the lamp.   “After all, he was my only son.”
    Lara rose abruptly.   “I think I should go.”
    “Go?   Go where?” Charlene snapped, crushing the cigarette out with a single sharp twist.   “You obviously don’t have the money to put my children up in a hotel room or you would have never come to me.”
    Lara had begun to feel light-headed, as if a monstrous animal had taken a deep inhalation of breath somewhere in the room and stolen the very oxygen from her lungs.   She had to get out of this woman’s presence.
    Sweeping a pen from the desk, Charlene brandished it before her.   “I’ll take good care of them.   You know I will.   I’ll give them what you could never afford to on a secretary’s salary.   Healthy food.   Warm clothes.   The best schools.   Security.”
    Lara shook her head emphatically, but she couldn’t deny the truth in her words.   She had fallen on lean times.   No, “lean” was too kind a word.   “Destitute” was a more appropriate term.
    The truth of the matter—the fact that she could never expose to this woman for nothing more honorable than simple ego—was that her last boyfriend, an IT cretin for a software company, had committed identity fraud in her name.   He used her debit card to empty out her checking account. And as icing on the cake, he’d cancelled all her credit cards.
    All this in retaliation for rejected intimacy.
    Sex, she thought.   She didn’t want it.   Not yet.   If he needed it so badly, he could find a willing donor at some local bar.   Was it so wrong that she couldn’t give herself over to a man until she fulfilled the needs of her children?   Wasn’t that the definition of selflessness, she wondered?
    Or was it something else?
    An image of Him rose in her mind and she instantly pinched it off like the wick of a candle that stubbornly refused to extinguish.   She could hear his voice, still fresh despite his three year absence.
    Cheer up, Gloria.   Things can’t possibly get much worse.
    Living from paycheck to paycheck for more than two months now, she had been forced to take in a roommate.   Gabby, a college student in her early twenties, had answered an ad that she had posted on a bulletin board at work.   Even after two bounced checks from the girl, it had taken Lara catching her smoking weed in the bathroom late one night to finally kick her out on the street.
    Perhaps this was God’s final irony; the Great Slum Lord on High putting her out on the street.   His idea of high comedy.
    She couldn’t pretend anymore not to see the holes in socks and underwear.   She had been surviving on government assistance for going on six months now and she had been forced to stretch their meals farther and farther each day.
    She found herself looking at that pen held in those exquisitely manicured fingers, when a horrible screech came from down the hallway.
    Lara rushed outside through the living room and into the kitchen.
    Both children were standing wide-eyed, apparently safe, though obviously scared.
    Andy, the tiny white Bishon, was convulsing on the tiled floor at a rate that defied reason.   The sound that came from its body was unnatural.
    Before she could utter a word, Charlene dropped to her knees beside the animal and bellowed, “What have you done?”
    Cora ran to Lara and clutched her leg tightly while Owen just stood immobile watching the dog flopping around on the kitchen rug with a sort of morbid fascination.
    “We were just playing with him,” Cora sobbed.   “Honestly.”
    When Charlene laid her hand on the dog, a blue arc of electricity shot from it.   She screamed and fell back away from it, a look of shock on her face.   The dog yelped one last time, smoke pouring from its open mouth.   From between the tiny jaws, the glistening