“I was young. I’ve made my mistakes. But that doesn’t mean their boy doesn’t deserve love,” Bev said.

“Mom, we try,” LeDeya said. “He moans when he hugs us.”

“Remember he visited last year with cameras to get us on a show about broken homes?” Janae said.

“And so what? There was ten thousand in cash in that show. Janae, all you had to do was that bikini shot and—”

“What about when he made you a cosigner of his first car without even asking you? You found out five years later.”

“Yes, after he paid it off. Have any of you ever paid a car off?” Bev asked. “Look, the boy’s not going to win any popularity contest, but he’s as good as family and I expect you”—she eyed Liza—“to treat him as such.”

“Why are you looking at me?” Liza huffed.

“Cuz you got a mean streak a half a mile wide,” Maurice said.

“I’m not mean, I’m pissed. Colin’s got all of this money, and he’s still trying to squeeze what he can out of us.”

Liza didn’t say what she wanted to say because it was the nuclear option. Bev was a serial side chick. She had a string of relationships with unavailable men, but jaded was the only thing she got from it, not to mention children who never knew their fathers. It made her hyperaware and focused on the relationship status of her children, but blind to her own secondary status in the lives of men.

The Gruthers had lived next door, and while Mrs. Gruthers struggled through chemotherapy, Bev fell in love with her husband and all but established herself as a housewife in the Gruthers’ apartment. But it was all for nothing. When Mrs. Gruthers died, Mr. Gruthers did not marry Bev like she had hoped. He went to his grave soon after, claiming that Mrs. Gruthers was the only woman he’d ever loved. Colin became a permanent fixture in their home, sullen and obnoxious. But when his ticket out of Longbourne Gardens came, he didn’t do so much as write a note to say goodbye. He had nothing but disdain for the place and a strange sense of entitlement to what he called the Bennett Beauties. It was a weird mix of guilt about his mother’s death and devotion to his father—a man who never acknowledged her—that kept Bev bound to Colin’s whims. Liza would never be so bound up in someone that she would be willing to accept him in small pieces.

“You don’t know what it’s like to lose someone that close to you. The bond between a mother and son—” Bev stopped herself.

“Mom, you can say it.”

“Janae, we weren’t trying to upset you.”