Naturally

Traffic on the way home was terrible, but I expected nothing less from driving home through the city at rush hour. New York City traffic is usually always bad, and never for the impatient, but I was sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic for ten minutes at a time before I even moved an inch, let alone down a street.

Stuck at my third intersection, when I could be walking home faster than I could be driving, my phone started to ring. Looking down at it in the cup holder, I groaned when I saw the caller was my foster-mother. Begrudgingly, and because I knew that I would get verbally get the shit kicked out of me, I answered on the third ring. "Hello?"

"Where in God's name are you, Alex? Dinner's been on the table for ten minutes, and we were nice enough to wait for you to get home!" my foster-mother screamed through the earpiece.

I sighed as quietly as I could, as I didn't want to endure a secondary verbal barrage from this woman. "Barb, it's rush hour in New York City. I've been stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic for ten minutes at a time. And while it was actually nice of you to wait for me to get home before you have dinner, I know it wasn't something cooked, so just save a plate for me, and I'll heat it up when I do get home, because this traffic does not look like it's letting up for anyone," I told her.

I heard her sigh dramatically. "Whatever. Fine. But you better not wake up your brother and sister when you get home!"

I made my biggest effort not to loudly sigh into the mouthpiece, and I pressed the phone to my ear with my shoulder as traffic finally began to move again. "Yes, Barb," I droned.

She didn't even bid me a farewell before hanging up; I only knew because I heard a click and then silence, rather than the clinking of anxious silverware and the loud whispers of my foster-siblings.

Finally off the phone, I released a loud sigh. I really hated that woman. She was over-dramatic and annoying, not to mention her cutting voice. And while I had just recently turned eighteen -- without so much as a simple "happy birthday" from anyone in my foster-family -- I had nowhere near enough money to move out on my own and finally get away from that hellhole the social workers call a home. It was a house, nothing more. It and my foster-family were also the reason I got a job. I was just lucky that I wasn't under a foster-roof when I turned sixteen, because then I probably would have never learned how to drive. My car was my one escape in this place, even if it was New York City, and I had to sit through horrendous traffic half the time. The traffic was much better than the verbal barrages I would get from my foster-mother when I would have to return after just disappearing. I never thought she cared where I went anyway.

I sighed and tightened my hands on the steering wheel of my car. My foster-mother was the only reason I hated my entire foster-family. She was so overbearing compared to my foster-father or my foster-siblings, and from day one under that roof, I had no idea how her husband (if my foster-father was her husband) or her children dealt with her.

There were a million times that I remember feeling sorry for my foster-father because he fucked something up and consequently got screamed at by my foster-mother. She was just the definition of the word "bitch."

When traffic stopped again, miraculously after driving three blocks, I began to think about the girl at the restaurant, Tanese, and I smiled to myself. Three weeks of staring at her through the kitchen window, and I finally knew her name. Maybe three more weeks would get me a date with her...

This thought had me grinning all the way home, even through sitting through another three traffic blocks before I actually pulled into the driveway. I immediately killed the headlights, because they shone directly in my foster-parents' bedroom, and waking up my foster-siblings was a terrible idea, because they would just go to their mother, who would then verbally attack me. I swear that woman just looked for the smallest reasons to yell at me.

The noise of the car door shutting wasn't something I could really avoid, though, so it didn't surprise me when I unlocked the front door with the key my foster-father gave to me in secret (and then got berated by my foster-mother for it) and my foster-mother was standing right in the doorway, blocking me from entering.

Now, my foster-mother was huge for a woman. She was short and plump, more than spanning the width of the doorway. If it was dark enough, you wouldn't be able to tell where her boundaries were. Physical boundaries, I mean, because she doesn't exactly have emotional ones. She won't hesitate to tell even my foster-siblings that they're twats or something that normal parents would never call their children. But my foster-mother was as close to normal as a schizophrenic in a straitjacket.

"Well, well, well, how nice of you to come home," she said menacingly.

I repressed the urge to sigh. "Barb, it was New York City rush hour traffic. And then I take all these back roads to get here, which have low speed limits."

"Mhmm! Maybe you shouldn't take all the back roads, and you would get here faster!" she retorted, sounding to me like a prissy mother from the 1950s.

"Taking the main roads wouldn't be any faster. They might even be slower."

"Don't you backtalk to me!" she squeaked.

"I don't mean to, I'm just making logical statements. Traffic isn't much better once you get out of the worst of the city traffic, so taking the main roads would probably be just as quick as taking the small back roads that I do," I explained. Trying to diffuse my foster-mother when she was riled was as delicate a process as defusing land mines in the middle of Africa or something.

Unfortunately for me, she didn't speak right away, which meant she was stewing over a particularly nasty response. "Well whatever. I just hate how you make so much noise," she said, and walked away from the door.

I stood there, dumbstruck. My foster-mother never passed up an opportunity to yell at me or say something nasty, but...that's what she just did. I shook my head to clear it. Maybe I'm just tired or something, because that could not have just happened.