Epic by Ginger Voight Page B

much already.”
    “You need to eat,” I pointed out.
    “Sonny will bring me food when he gets off work,” she assured.
    “Who is Sonny?” I asked.
    “My friend,” she answered vaguely. “We met many years ago, when Diego was small. He’s helped me out as my health failed. Without his income, Diego and I would be out in the street. My social security disability payments just won’t cover it.”
    “So he brings you food,” I surmised as I looked at the cluttered coffee table.
    She nodded. “When our food stamps run out at the end of the month, he brings food from the hotel where he works in the kitchen. That’s how we met,” she added. “I worked in housekeeping, and he was part of the kitchen staff.”
    She leaned back in the chair and reaffixed her oxygen tubes. “Unfortunately, Diego has never quite warmed to him. It causes a lot of conflict.”
    For some reason, my thoughts returned to Shane. After my dad died and my mother needed help, Shane moved into our house, seemingly like a knight riding in on his white stallion to save us. Only I knew the nefarious reasons behind his surface altruism, and hated him accordingly. Marianne had always written my reaction off as selfish and bratty behavior. How could I try to drive away the one person ready to bail us out of the trouble we were in?
    I had a damn good reason. And for a split second, I had to wonder if Diego did, too.
    “Where is Diego?” I asked.
    “He’s supposed to be at school,” she answered with a knowing smile. “ This means he’s probably practicing with his band.”
    “Can you tell me about him?” I asked.
    She painfully and slowly retrieved another album from her bookshelf, this time featuring her second child, Joseph Diego Palermo. I choked up when I realized he had been named after my father, further proving to me that Maya had loved him as deeply as I had. He was her ideal lover, where he was my ideal father. In both our lives, he had been a stabilizing and positive influence. This was, in truth, our strongest common bond.
    Pictures of Ronald Diego had been carefully edited out of the photo album, which gave the illusion this child’s upbringing had been happier than it actually had been. I could tell by the increasingly somber expressions on his face as he grew older. By the time he was a teenager, he was openly hostile. “It’s not easy raising boys,” Maya mused as she looked down at her son flipping off the camera. “They definitely have mind s of their own.”
    “So do girls,” I assured her, thinking of how I ditched my mother the very day I turned eighteen. This story she already knew, thanks to Fierce . I didn’t bother indulging any dirty, ugly details beyond that. With all she had suffered through, I couldn’t burden her with any guilt about her choice to let me go. She believed it had been worth the sacrifices she had made. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it hadn’t gone exactly as she had planned.
    “I suppose they do,” she said as she turned the page. Photo after photo showed Diego hunched over a guitar, his long, dark hair covering his face as he played. It reminded me of Yael. The world ceased to exist when he poured out his soul through his fingertips on those magical strings. The more that world sucked, the more he could get lost in the music. “I gave him his first guitar when he turned twelve. I was still working back then, and that was the gift he wanted more than anything. More than a bike. More than a video game. More than any token toy or movie. It was the first birthday that I remember he was very particular about the gift. I suggested the popular video game where he could simulate playing the guitar. Nope. I even told him that if I bought the guitar, I couldn’t afford lessons. Didn’t matter. For the first time in his life, he knew what he wanted. So I had to make that happen. Took me a year to save for the one he wanted. He got it a year late, but he got it.”
    She flipped the