Where The Heart Is: Issue 1 (Draft Preview) (Patreon)

Where The Heart Is: Issue I

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Grace Veder

Morning breakfast in the Veder household was something of a longstanding tradition, one that the matriarch of the small family took a great deal of pride in and nearly as much effort into. At one point, it had been a warm affair for the entire family, a time to decompress, talk and simply enjoy each other’s company before heading out to face the rigors of the day.

Over the last three years, though, that same affair had grown somewhat colder as one important member of the family was repeatedly absent from it. found himself dealing with a much busier schedule, the duties of his career pulling him away for longer and longer hours. Those hours soon stretched into entire nights and before long, those absent nights without fail began to stretch into entire days. If that wasn’t bad enough, it didn’t make it easier that during some especially bad periods, those days could even become lengthy weeks at a time.

After several years of continually heading down this predictable path, it had eventually reached the point that the Veder household considered it a matter of celebration whenever every member of the family was together at the same time. It’s just not the same anymore. Not without him. Grace Veder held back the urge to let out a breath at the familiar but unwanted thoughts running through her head as her blue eyes shifted to the single empty seat next to her. Johny…

“Mmppf?”

Without shifting her neutral expression in the slightest, Grace tilted her gaze slightly to stare at her son sitting across from her at the breakfast table.

Many things had changed over the last few years in her home. Her son was especially high on that list, for several reasons.One of the few things that hadn’t changed, Grace was proud to say, was her cooking.

As always, breakfast in the Veder house was a hearty spread.

Eggs, sausage, waffles…

Really, almost anything you could find on the table of any breakfast cereal commercial — minus the actual cereal, of course — was right in front of him. It was enough to feed at least three people but to Greg, it was just the same normal breakfast he had always known, albeit with a slight increase in available portions for him.

And as usual, it all tasted great.

Not that her son noticed, really.

He would have had to slow down somewhat to actually properly notice what he was currently chewing on, the act of savoring one he didn’t seem to understand. Truthfully, everything he could reach was being shoveled down the teenage boy’s mouth, the possibility of choking minimized by his very motivated chewing along with his throat being lubricated by liberal helpings of maple syrup and healthy swallows of an entire pitcher of orange juice.

“I just don’t know where you put it all,” she finally spoke up after several minutes of long silence, the only real noise in the room coming from the utter lack of manners that was her baby boy.

Greg paused, the bottom half of a syrup-heavy Belgian waffle sticking out of his mouth as he glanced up to look at his mother. “Mpfff?”

“Darling, I know you’re late for school but please do mother a favor and slow down just a bit, would you? I do love you very much, pumpkin, but you’re upsetting my poor stomach eating like that.” Grace Veder lowered her gaze as she spoke, a single hand hiding her eyes as she leaned forward dramatically.

“Mpffff.” Grace didn’t need to raise her head or lift her hand to know that the uncouth boy was rolling his beautiful blue eyes at her, the teenager having developed the habit of doing so every time his mother’s posh Mid-Atlantic accent chose to poke its way past through years of Brockton Bay living.

“‘Mmmpf’, says the barbarian to his poor suffering mother who slaved over a hot stove early in the morning just for him,” Grace remarked in a tone that was somehow loving and mocking at the same time. She sat up straight once again, hands clasped over each other as she placed them on the table. “No love for your suffering mother, I see.”

Greg didn’t even bother looking at her this time, face down in a pile of eggs as she continued speaking. “I don’t even know where you get it from, honestly. You eat like a caveman and somehow, you manage to remain as skinny as a rake. The blessings of the body are unappreciated by the teenage boy, I swear.”

“Mpfff mff?”

Grace raised an eyebrow at her son as he continued to pull off his daily interpretation of a starving man at her breakfast table. Both hands clutched a knife and fork tightly as he held on to them like tiny weapons, the two utensils going entirely unused as he worked at a syrup-drenched waffle again with just his teeth. “Young man, be warned that if I find so much as a drop of syrup on your clothes, there will be no video games in the house for a week.”

“Mpf!”

Grace barely held herself back from rolling her eyes at her son’s indignant response, not even going so far as to remove the food from his mouth before speaking. Being a mother is thankless, but oh so rewarding, isn’t it? Thankfully, the rabid animal behavior seemed to isolate itself to breakfast and breakfast alone, something his mother considered a blessing.

It was usually by dinner time that her precious little barbarian boy usually calmed down to something approaching normal human diet habits. Oddly enough, though, a good night’s sleep always seemed to reset him right back to something of a caveman, the boy always completely ravenous by the time he rushed the breakfast table every morning.

Not unusual for her son, appetite and eating habits both. Both had cropped up over the past year or so and considering her boy had gained at least an inch of height in that time, Grace didn’t consider either of those new developments much of anything to worry about.

Truthfully, neither did his father.

Then again, when does he ever really worry about Greg? It’s always smiles and playtime with that one. I’m the one stuck being the party pooper. The thirty-one year old mother simply smiled and rolled her eyes, shaking her head as she silently lamented over the pointless years she had wasted on teaching her bottomless pit of a son table manners. “No, I don’t want one,” she waved off her son’s question, somehow able to understand his words. “Now eat up. I still have to get your little behind to school before the first bell.”

“Mmff-mpff.”

With a slight quirk of her lips, Grace turned around in her seat, her head moving more than the rest of her body. Her piercing gaze came to a stop on their living room TV perched on the wall, the thing itself an oversized beast of a flatscreen that Johnny had gifted to her three years back for their anniversary. At least a decade out from being released to the public, the thing had a whole mess of experimental options and features that there was little, if any, infrastructure for. Grace didn’t really care about any of that, though, as she barely watched television in the first place.

No, she much rather enjoyed the way that the monster of a device never failed to elicit shocked expressions from guests whenever they caught sight of the thing. It was petty, of course, but wasn’t that part of the fun, really?

The only little snag was that she couldn’t exactly be honest about how her husband had gotten it for her, but that was only the slightest inconvenience and not even much of one at all. Really, it had only been just a few months after receiving the gift that Grace managed to nip that problem in the bud rather easily.