9
I’d walked towards Shop Street when I felt a tug on my arm. Turned to face my mother. She is your original martyr and is blessed to have me as her drunkard son. The farther down the toilet I go, the better she appears. My father was a good man, and she treated him like dirt. When he died, she did her grieving on the grand scale.
Leaped into widow’s weeds and spent every hour available at the church or graveyard, publicly displaying her loss. Her type usually has a tame cleric in tow. Fr Malachy, a prize asshole, was her escort for the previous years. I wouldn’t have liked him under the best of circumstances, but as her hostage, I out and out despised him. My last encounter, he’d shouted,
“You’ll be the death of your mother.”
I waited a beat before,
“Can I have that in writing?”
His
