She grinned bashfully, ducking her head, knowing exactly what he was referring to via his sarcasm. "Spike deserves it," she insisted readily nonetheless. "Alesta might be a Slayer, but she has feelings, too. And she's usually younger than me, so I'm supposed to look out for her." Her expression clouded over for a moment. "Not that it made a difference anyway."
Nodding in reply, Izzy's answer was a nonchalant "Yeah." There was a distinct difference in the man who had raised her and the one sitting across the table, but it lay mostly in the way he interacted with her. She guessed that was one of those things that happened when a person actually became a parent, like he had said on the boards. At least he didn't seem to hate her.
"Tries to please everybody," she answered at last, choosing her words carefully. "Mama...cares a lot. About everything. Even when sometimes nobody does the same thing for her." Show business was a brutal one, from what she gathered from her mother, the cell-phone conversations she overheard. Supposedly, it had been worse when she was still acting, but 'moving on to the other side' provided even more pressure.