(29) Pot of Honey

Instead of texting Theo how she imagined, Makennah thought it might be best to call. She hid away in her room for a spare moment while her friends clamored down the stairs.

Theo picked up on the third ring. His voice was a little husky. "Good morning."

"Hi um...do you have a full tank of gas?" She asked weirdly. Not how she imagined this going.

He cleared his throat. "What time is it?" He mumbled. She heard a rustling of sheets. He must still be in bed. "I can have a full tank."

Makennah scratched her head. It was now or never. Open or closed. Tell the truth or shy away. "Can you take me to see my mom? It's kind of a drive."

Theo was suddenly alert. "Of course." There wasn't even a hint of doubt in his voice.

She swallowed roughly. "I'm having Grace drop me off. I'm telling Carolynn that we are going shopping. I'll probably be there in twenty minutes."

"Alright, I'll be ready."

Twenty minutes later, after Makennah lied her butt off to Carolynn about shopping and stuffed a hundred bucks in her back pocket that Carolynn insisted she take, Makennah was climbing out of Grace's car. Penny and Meredith were stuffed in the back with their bags. Luckily they chatted amongst themselves and didn't notice her somber mood.

Theo was waiting for her in his driveway, leaning against his Lexus. He waved two fingers at the girls as they peeled away, yelling sexual jokes out the window like the mature high schoolers they were.

"You ready?" He asked, circling the car to open her door for her. Her face must have conveyed how that was weird for her. "What? Don't look at me like that."

"You've never done this before," she said quietly before she ducked inside.

"As I said last night, I'm showing you what it's like to be my girl." Then he shut the door and Makennah could barely breathe. His romanticism and her nervousness did not pair well together. She kind of felt like throwing up. "So where are we going?"

Makennah's mouth watered like she might actually vomit. She swallowed intensely. "Prison."

That didn't even phase him. "What's the address?" He held out his phone like that was all he really cared about. "You're shaking."

Makennah breathed deeply and accepted the phone to punch in the address. "I'm fine." She was shaking. Badly. Her hands trembled so much that she could barely type.

"Kennah." Theo took his phone and then captured her hand. Try as she might, she couldn't stop the shaking even as he tried to soothe her. He lifted her hand to his lips and gently kissed her palm. "It's okay. Nothing that happens today will change my mind about you."

She sighed. At least he recognized that this trip was about to change everything between them. She couldn't take back today and he couldn't unlearn these facts about her life.

"What do you know about me?" Makennah asked quietly as Theo reversed out of the driveway.

"I assume you mean about where you came from?" He asked for clarification purposes.

"Right." She kept her eyes on the road. Maybe if she focused on the facts, she wouldn't be so nervous and shaky.

Theo followed the GPS and merged into traffic on the highway heading north. "I didn't ask and Matt didn't tell."

That was good. That assured her somehow. Makennah could tell him the full first-person truth as the girl who lived to tell it. "I'm a foster child. The Sinclair's are my foster parents. This is my eleventh foster care family. I've also lived in three different girl's homes."

For a long moment, Theo sat in silence, steering the Lexus into the farthest left lane to speed up to a cruising mileage. "How old were you when you entered the foster care system?"

"It's all kind of a blur. I think eight. But then there was a two year gap when I lived with my grandma. Then I was sent back into the system." Two years of hell. Perhaps even worse than the system itself and living with fake families who pretended to care about her.

"And you've been in it ever since?" He asked.

"No, sometimes my mom would get her life together but mostly she didn't. I would try to keep her together so I didn't have to go live with another family and risk uprooting my whole life, losing all my friends, transferring to another school. I would befriend the social workers and convince them that I was fine and my mom was fine. When they would do home visits and she wasn't home, I'd tell them she was working or helping a friend but really I probably hadn't seen her for five to seven days."

Theo ran his fingers through his hair. He avoided looking at her but his voice was steady and calm. "How'd you do that at such a young age?"

Makennah huffed quietly. She shook her head, recalling all of the messed up memories she repressed. "My mom had this friend who lived with us for a year. I was seven when she moved in. She was a functioning alcoholic and started getting into heavy drugs when my mom convinced her. It's hard to stay out of that lifestyle when you're living with it and surrounded by it all the time. She taught me how to take care of my mom, how to make sure she didn't die, and how to pay bills. She hated me, but she loved my mom. So she made sure I knew how to keep her alive."

"What happened to her?"

Makennah stared out the window, seeing flashing red and blue lights in her peripherals as if it happened currently. "She died. Took some drugs my mom left lying around. It was laced with rat poison and all this other stuff. I found her on the bathroom floor and knew she wasn't okay thanks to her own tips and tricks. Called the police...took her to the hospital. She was brain dead. Died of an infection three days later. That instance is what put me in the system. My mom showed up to the hospital tripping on who knows what. Police were in the house obviously and saw how I was living."

Theo made this sound like it was a lot to take in.

"I'm sorry," Makennah said. "It's a lot, I know. I didn't mean to pile it all on you at once."

"No, no!" Reaching across the gearshift, Theo laid his hand on her knee. "You lived it. The least I can do is listen." Even though he assured her, he kept his hand on her knee.

She stared down at his hand and realized just how far she was plunging in with Theo. All of the words that spilled out couldn't be taken back. Still, she understood that Theo lived in a fairy world of wealthy people who didn't deal with things like Makennah did. He probably didn't even think they really existed other than in the movies or extreme scenarios. So she knew that he needed more comforting than she did. "Don't worry...I didn't like her. Never did. Don't get me wrong; I didn't want her to die. But her death was virtually meaningless to me." Or so she told herself. She left out the part where she had nightmares about her mom's friend coming back to life for three months after the funeral.

Theo's thumbs grazed her kneecap. "So...what about your dad?"

Most kids Makennah's age who had gone through things similar to her breathed hate for their fathers like a fire breathing dragon. She was one in a million who didn't. "Don't have one."

"What's that mean?"

"Don't know him. Never met him. Don't know his name. My mom isn't even sure who he is. Could be any number of people but she doesn't know who is. Couldn't pick him out of a line up." She shrugged. A simple fact of her life. She had seven million other things more pressing to worry about.

"Does that bother you?"

She shook her head. "No, it's supposed to. Most people assume it does. But if he's anything like my mom, why would I want to know him?"

"If you don't mind my asking, why is your mom in prison?" Thankfully, he let the sad thing die. It wasn't a topic she was fond of. There was no changing anything so why discuss it?

Makennah snorted. "Grand theft auto. Aggravated assault of an officer. Possession of drug paraphernalia."

"Jeez, grand theft auto?"

"Sounds worse than it is. She only got six months for that. According to my mom, it was her friends car. Either that's the truth and her friend sold her down the river or she was so high that she thought it was her friend's car." Unfortunately, this wasn't the first time that she had gone to prison for GTA.

"So how long is she in prison?" Theo asked as he exited the highway.

"One and a half years. Another six months for aggravated assault because this is her third offense and then another six months for the drug stuff which is ridiculous because she's been to jail several dozen times for drugs before. Six months is nothing. She won't even notice." Makennah propped up her elbow on the door and rested her head in her hand. Theo's thumb tracing lazy circled kept her grounded in the present.

"How many times has she been to prison?"

Makennah shrugged. "I lost count after thirty. Well I should clarify. She's been to jail more times than I can count but she's only been in a state penitentiary  three times."

"Dang. Over thirty? How long was she usually in jail?"

"Five to seven days. Long enough to detox then they kicked her out. And they would call me to come pick her up." She shook her head. What a messed up world she lived in. She didn't even have her license, yet she would get the call that her mom was being released.

"How did that not alert them of your living situation? Wouldn't they send you to another home then?" Theo asked.

"There's...a lot of ins and outs. I live in a city where the general population is addicted to drugs and the kids start on the same path as their parents around the age of fourteen or fifteen. If you're a good kid, they typically leave you alone. It's pretty easy to lie especially as you get older. Sending me away is more work and effort, not to mention tax dollars that no one claims to have. I would tell the officers that there was a boyfriend at home or something, being my guardian whatever that means."

"And they would believe you?" Theo sounded like that was incredulous.

Makennah laughed. "Oh yeah. I've been lying to cops since I was seven. I lie more than I tell the truth. To them...not to other people," she clarified to him. Didn't want him thinking she was a perpetual liar. His hand squeezed her knee. "It became easier when I turned into a teenager. Sometimes the heat would go off in the winter when we would lose electricity because mom didn't pay the bill. So I'd hang out with the officers at the precinct. Sometimes even sleep there when my mom would be locked up." She laughed. What a life.

"You'd sleep in the precinct?"

"Yep, on a couch or chair somewhere. Kicked back in a cubicle while an officer would be away. They became my friends and generally left me alone. Some of them cried when I got relocated to Braxton."

Theo smiled for the first time but it didn't reach his eyes. "That's sweet, but also very uncomfortable."

She shrugged. "It was that or get hypothermia in the house in the dead of winter."

Theo removed his hand from her knee when his phone spoke with directions. Her leg missed the heat of his fingers immediately. Makennah started to recognize where she was. The prison was close.

"So...if you lived a pretty rough life because of your mom, why are you going to see her?" He asked quietly as he navigated the course to the prison.

"Honestly...to show her how great my life is without her." She smiled brightly like it was the truth. "And to make sure she isn't dead."

"We're here!" Theo announced. He parked the car at the curb outside the gates. "Do you want me to go inside with you?"

Makennah shook her head. "Nope, this ain't the Girl Scouts, sweetie. You're a pot a honey. And inside...those are the bees. They'll destroy you." She grinned and stuffed her phone in the pocket of her jean jacket with the fur collar - her favorite jacket. "Ta-ta."

"Be safe!" Theo shouted before she shut the door. She turned and walked away. She would be fine. These were her people after all.

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Already working on the next chapter!! Stay tuned.

Xoxo

W. Carolina