Branded a Scam Builder by My Own Mom

I suppressed my anger.

"Mom! Are you out of your mind? How can you say that my construction work is shoddy just because Marco climbed over the fence, stepped in the still-wet cement, and scraped his knee?"

Marco Knowles, my younger cousin, shrank behind Mom, revealing a knee with a cartoon Band-Aid on it.

"It really had nothing to do with Kevin, Aunt Diana," he said, looking at Mom. "I was just being a little too playful. I saw the soft cement and wanted to step on it. The construction workers couldn't stop me."

Mom immediately pulled Marco into her arms, pointing her finger at me while screaming with her eyes wide open.

"And you still have the nerve to argue with me? What kind of decent construction site would have a cement floor where someone could step on it and fall into a hole?"

The project supervisor, Pete Warner, rushed forward with a thick stack of documents, sweating profusely as he exclaimed, "Mrs. Sanford! That's a new type of slow-setting permeable concrete. It hadn't reached its initial setting time yet. Of course it would still be soft!"

The town mayor, Hugo Larkin, also walked over, his face dark and his tone stern.

"Mrs. Sanford, today is the topping-out ceremony for this state-level public housing project, and all the quality inspection reports are here. The steel reinforcement grades and cement strength have all exceeded the standards required.

"If you keep messing around and creating trouble for us, are you going to bear the losses if the project is halted, even for a day?"

Mom still held her head high and sneered before slapping the report out of Pete's hand. Dozens of construction workers and site supervisors glanced at each other in dismay.

I clenched my fists until the knuckles turned white.

"Mom, this is a state-level award project that I secured after pulling three months' worth of all-nighters and countless revisions of the blueprints! Do you know that just that one phone call of yours will ruin everything?"

Mom just stepped forward and slapped me hard across the face. The crisp sound of the slap echoed across the empty construction site.

"So what? You deserve to have it ruined! I'm not just saving your ass. I'm saving everyone else in town as well!

"I don't care if you're my own son. I will never protect a heartless and unscrupulous businessman like you!"

She then straightened her back, looked around her, and raised her voice even higher.

"To hell with familial ties! I will show the whole world that even my own son must be punished for all his mistakes no matter what he did!"

Dan Knowles, Mom's younger brother, then slowly stepped out from behind her. He feigned concern and grabbed Mom's arm, saying, "You're being too impulsive, Diana. Kevin has finally just made a name for himself, and you're just destroying his future like this?"

His wife, Peggy Hall, also chimed in and said, "He's right, Diana. Although Kevin did use inferior building materials and caused Marco to get hurt, we're all still family. We should have just settled this privately with compensation. Why are you making a fuss all the way to the state office?"

These were my so-called relatives.

Firstly, Marco was a good-for-nothing lazy ass. Meanwhile, Uncle Dan owned a construction company without any of the proper qualifications, and he'd been trying to steal the housing resettlement project from me from the very start.

It was obvious that they had staged everything that happened today for things to end up like this.

I just never imagined that Mom would be so dumb and willing to become their pawn.