"We were," Staas answered simply. "My mom was quite a character," he expounded with a smile. "In Amsterdam we lived with Omi and Opa, my grandparents, and they really took care of both of us. Mom was always such a child at heart. Opa died first, then Omi, and we moved to LA. Mom was going to get discovered and live the Hollywood dream." He chuckled fondly. Even though the times had been rough, the sheer naivety and whimsical nature of the move had been his mother's personality through and through.
"She had to grow up kind of fast then. Overdue, maybe, but all at once. For a while, we were all each other had. And then even when I found someone else to lean on and be a kid with, I was still all she had. And sometimes she'd slip back into her flights of fancy and I had to be the one to pay the phone bill, or go grocery shopping, or remind her that Mr. Investment Banker was probably Mr. Bank Clerk at Wells Fargo, and even if he wasn't, he probably didn't know Steven Spielberg and even if he did, he didn't know him well enough to get her into a movie. Nor was he likely to marry her and move us into his house on the hill, which was probably already occupied by his wife and three-point-four kids."
He shrugged. "She needed those fantasies though. She was working two jobs to support us, and her only child was turning into a little punk before her very eyes, and spending a lot of her heard-earned cash on drugs and musical instruments and tattoos. When I left LA to get clean, I went back a lot, to check in on her. She did all right without me there, thank god, though I think she got her heart broken a lot more often." Staas' knee twitched up and down a couple times. "I offered to come back once. She said I needed to stay out of LA, and stay clean. It was better to have her heart broken by men she didn't really care about than by her son.
"She died when as she was leaving work. Got caught as an innocent bystander in a gang drive-by. Two bullets. She bled out before they could get her on the ambulance." He had to stop then, force a swallow in his throat. After a tense twenty seconds in which he fought down his emotions, he added, "They never caught the guys. You know how that shit goes. Nobody saw anything, nobody knew anything, and nobody was talking."
It was annoying, and he wanted justice, but he'd known the odds of that when he'd first found out. He certainly wasn't holding his breath now. He shrugged again and drained his tea. "It doesn't matter now," he said as he stretched to put his mug down on the coffee table. "They're probably already in jail for something else, or dead. Getting them for killing her won't bring her back."
That was enough talking for him, for a while though. He didn't mind sharing, not at all. But he needed a moment or two to rest and to compose his thoughts and emotions, so he grinned at Ira and stretched a leg out, reaching it over Lady's head and poking at Ira's leg with his toes. "Your turn to share. Tit for tat, Bosko. Deep dark secret," he said with an insouciant grin, which surely hinted that it didn't have to be the man's deepest and darkest. Just a little piece of the inner workings of Ira Bosko would be nice. "Go."