Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (free romance novels .TXT) 📗

see if he was hurt. But he got up laughing, stepped off the egg, and started running toward an equally gigantic waffle covered with plastic syrup and a plastic pat of melting butter. Her assistance not required, Reeny sat back down and marveled at how resilient children could be. Why couldn’t people keep that quality and take it with them into adulthood? It would make getting through life a hell of a lot easier.

She’d intended to take Brian to the park after picking him up from preschool, but the rain had necessitated a change of plan. Instead, she’d brought him to Horizon’s Edge. A silly name for a cheap, tacky place that always smelled like greasy fried food, popcorn, soda, and cotton candy. Unlike some kids, Brian wasn’t tired after school. He was always revved up, so Reeny took him to the park to burn off some of that energy before she took him home. If she didn’t, he’d run around like a little lunatic and drive her crazy while she tried to make dinner. But the weather being what it was, she’d brought Brian to the mall today. More especially, to the play area, not far from the food court. And maybe its proximity to food was why it had been designed in such an unusual way. Instead of standard play equipment to climb on, jump on, or slide down, the area contained giant plastic sculptures of breakfast food: eggs, pancakes, waffles, sausage links, muffins, tall glasses of milk and orange juice, and even a mug of coffee. The drink sculptures were too large for children to climb, so they mostly ignored these, although occasionally some kids would chase each other around them. Running, climbing, and jumping were the primary activities children could engage in here, and while school-age children would tire of the breakfast sculptures quickly, toddlers and preschoolers didn’t need much in the way of outward stimulation in order to make their fun – thank god.

There were maybe a dozen kids playing, a roughly even mix of boys and girls, running around, laughing, and yelling while their tired parents sat on benches positioned around the play area. Some, like her, were watching their children have fun, while most gazed down at their phones. She watched Brian fall into a game of tag with several other children, smiling at the easy way they played together. If only adults could make friends so easily. Brian looked like his father – lean, narrow-faced, thick brown hair – but he didn’t have his father’s athletic grace, not yet anyway. Charles owned and operated a cleaning company called We Got It Maid. But he’d been on both the football and basketball teams in high school, and now he ran several miles each morning and played doubles tennis with her at the weekends. She hoped Brian would inherit his father’s physical abilities. She’d been awkward and clumsy growing up, and she hoped her son could avoid having to deal with other kids teasing him because he wasn’t good at sports. Neither she nor Charles were shallow people, at least she hoped they weren’t. They didn’t judge others by their physical gifts. What was inside a person’s mind and heart was infinitely more important than whether they could do a layup or hit a fastball. But the reality was that the fast, the strong, and the agile had an easier time of it in this world – certainly when they were young – and as a mother, she wanted her child to have the best life he could.

Her thoughts drifted toward Lori then. Her sister had been on her mind ever since their lunch earlier, and she hadn’t been able to concentrate on anything else. She was worried about Lori – deeply worried – and she wondered if she’d made a mistake by not staying with her after their talk at A Taste of Thai. Maybe she should’ve canceled the afternoon’s showings and invited Lori over to her house where they could’ve continued talking. Maybe she should’ve tried to convince Lori to check herself into a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. Lori’s mental health had been good for the last…had it really been seventeen years? But Aashrita’s death during their senior year in high school had hit her hard, and it had taken her some time to recover. Sometimes Reeny thought Lori had only partially recovered. By unspoken agreement, they didn’t talk about Aashrita, but every once in a while one of their parents would bring up the subject, and when that happened, Lori became distant, distracted, almost as if she went into a kind of trance. Reeny didn’t need to be a psychologist to know her sister had unresolved issues regarding Aashrita’s death. She’d tried talking to Lori about it a couple times over the years, but she’d gotten nowhere, had only elicited blank looks and silence, so she’d given up. Now she wished she hadn’t. Maybe if she’d been more persistent, had been able to convince Lori to get help, she wouldn’t be having delusions about being persecuted by some otherworldly secret society.

She’d texted Lori a couple times to see how she was doing, but she’d gotten no response. She’d called and left voicemails too, with the same result. She’d tried calling Get Moving! in case Lori’s phone was dead, but no one answered. She told herself that Lori was there, just so busy helping clients that she hadn’t had time to get back to her. She’d call or text when she got a chance. These thoughts, however, failed to reassure Reeny.

Maybe she should collect Brian and drive over to Get Moving! and see for herself how Lori was doing. If nothing else, it would make her feel better. She started to stand—

—and that’s when she heard the first shot.

Reeny’s head snapped toward the direction of the sound and her eyes searched frantically for its source. Someone screamed – she didn’t see who – and another shot split the air. More screams,