When I pull onto the street of my parents’ house in my old blue Toyota, I’ve got a laminated ID badge for the Raker Penitentiary in my handbag. Dorothy gave me an ominous warning about not letting it fall into the wrong hands, but based on my access privileges, I’m pretty sure the only thing somebody could do with it is steal some Band-Aids and use the employee toilet. Still, I’ll guard it with my life.
Despite the sour note on which I left town over a decade ago, I loved growing up in Raker. It’s a beautiful town, with trees on every corner, picturesque old houses, and neighbors who won’t automatically avert their eyes when they pass you on the street like in Queens. And when you look at the sky at night, you can make out the individual constellations, instead of just a few random dots of light that are probably just airplanes.
This is exactly the sort of place where a child should grow up. This is exactly what my little family needed.
I park outside the two-car garage, which is a holdover to the old days, when my parents would park in the garage and I had to park outside or on the street. Old habits die hard. I still think of this as their house, even though it’s not anymore. It’s mine—all mine.
After all, they’re both dead now.
When I unlock the front door, the sound of the TV wafts into the foyer, along with the smell of cooking meat. I close my eyes and for a moment, I let myself fantasize about some alternate universe in which I’m coming home to my family and my partner is in the kitchen, cooking dinner.
But of course, it’s nothing but a fantasy. There’s never been a partner in my life who has been around enough to cook dinner. I’m beginning to wonder if there ever will be. The delicious smell is courtesy of the babysitter, who was kind enough to get dinner started.
“Hello?” I call out. “I’m home!”
I wait for a moment, wondering if Josh will come out to greet me. There was an age when Mommy coming home was followed by the scrambling of little feet and a warm body hurling itself at my knees. Those kinds of greetings are less common now that Josh has turned ten years old. He still loves me, don’t get me wrong, just not quite so emphatically.
Sure enough, a second later, Josh stumbles into the foyer in his bare feet. This is the last week before school starts, and he’s taking advantage of it by spending ninety percent of his time on the sofa. Either watching television or playing Nintendo. I shouldn’t let him do it, but soon enough, there will be school and homework and sports teams. His big thing is Little League, and that doesn’t start till the spring, but when it gets closer, he’ll want me to take him to the park to practice.
“Hi, Mom!”
I hold out my arms, and he falls into them, not entirely reluctantly. “Hey, kiddo. How was your day?”
“Okay.”
“Did you do anything besides sit on the couch?” He grins at me. “Why would I?”
Josh brushes his brown hair out of his eyes. He needs a haircut, which, if history is any indication, will be done in the bathroom over the sink. But he’s definitely getting a haircut before school starts. Every day, the kid looks a bit more like his father, and with his hair shaggy like that, the resemblance is enough to make my chest ache.
A timer goes off in the kitchen, and I head in that direction as the smell of baking chicken intensifies. God, I miss home-cooked meals. My mother used to cook most nights, but I hadn’t lived under her roof for a long time before I moved here for good last month, following her death.
I approach the kitchen just as Margie is pulling a tray out of the oven. Margie is a local grandma who is going to be watching Josh when I am working. He tried to protest that he didn’t need a babysitter, but I’m not comfortable with him being alone for hours while I am forty-five minutes away—at a prison. Besides, Josh is only ten years old. And he’s not exactly a mature ten.
“That smells incredible, Margie,” I say.
Margie beams at me and tucks an errant strand of gray hair behind one ear. “Oh, it’s nothing. Just roast chicken pieces with butter garlic sauce.
And of course, rice and asparagus on the side. You can’t just eat chicken.” Hmm, you can’t? Because I am pretty sure that over the last ten years,
there have been plenty of nights when Josh and I have eaten nothing but chicken. From a bucket with a smiling colonel on the side of it.
But that’s in the past. Things are going to be different now. This is a fresh start for both of us.
Josh takes an overly exaggerated whiff of air. “It smells too saucy.”
I stare at him. “What does that mean? You can’t smell too much sauce.”
Margie winks. “I think he’s smelling the butter garlic.”
He crinkles his nose. “I don’t like garlic. Can’t we just go to McDonald’s?”
I don’t quite understand how you can love somebody so much, yet so frequently want to throttle them.
“First of all,” I say, “there’s no McDonald’s in Raker, so no, we can’t go to McDonald’s. And second, Margie made us a delicious home-cooked meal. If you don’t want it, you can make your own dinner.”
Margie laughs. “You sound like my daughter.”
I’m hoping that’s a compliment. “Thank you so much for coming today, Margie. You’ll be here to meet Josh after school on Monday? The school bus is supposed to be here around three.”
“It’s a date!” she confirms.
I walk Margie to the door, even though she’s got her own key. Just before I bid her goodbye, she hesitates, a groove between her gray eyebrows. “Listen, Brooke…”
If she tells me she’s quitting, I am going to curl up in a ball and cry. She was the only available sitter even remotely in my price range, and I can barely afford her as is. “Yes…?”
“Josh seems really nervous about starting school,” she says. “I know it’s hard being in a new town and all, especially at his age. But he seemed even more anxious than I would expect.”
“Oh…”
“I don’t want to worry you, dear,” she says. “I just wanted to let you know.”
My heart goes out to my ten-year-old son. I can’t blame him for missing McDonald’s. McDonald’s is familiar. Raker is not familiar, and
neither is this house. In his entire life, my parents would never let us visit— they always came out to us in the city, until I told them they couldn’t anymore. This town is home for me, but to Josh, it’s a town full of strangers.
And I can think of a few other reasons why he would be scared about starting school after what happened back in Queens.
“I’ll take care of it,” I say. “Thanks again, Margie.”
I come back into the kitchen, where Josh is sitting at the kitchen table, playing with the salt and pepper shakers. He’s making a little pile of salt and pepper, which I’ve told him repeatedly not to do, but I’m not angry about it right now. I slide into the seat across from him.
“Hey, buddy,” I say. “You okay?”
Josh traces his first initial, J, in the pile of condiments on the table. “Yeah.”
“Feeling nervous about school?”
He lifts one of his skinny shoulders.
“I heard the kids are really nice here,” I say. “It won’t be like back home.”
He lifts his brown eyes. “How could you know that?”
I flinch, experiencing his pain like it’s my own. Last year at school, Josh got bullied. Badly. I didn’t even know that it was happening because he didn’t talk about it at home. He just started getting quieter and quieter. I couldn’t figure out why until the day he came home with a black eye.
Even with the shiner, Josh tried to deny anything was going on. He was so ashamed to tell me why the other kids were bullying him. I had no idea what happened. My son is a little on the quiet side, but there’s nothing about him that stands out—I didn’t have a clue what made him a target. Until I found out the name all the other kids were calling him:
Bastard.
It was a knife in my heart that the other kids were bullying him because of me. Because of my history and the fact that my son never had a father. I had some dark thoughts after that, believe me.
The school had a no-tolerance bullying policy, but apparently, that was just something they said to sound like they were doing the right thing. Nobody seemed to have any compulsion to do anything to help my son. And it didn’t help that the principal had judgment in his eyes when he noted
that the other kids were simply pointing out an unfortunate reality about my
situation.
When you are a single mom who is barely keeping it together as it is, it’s hard to deal with a school that pretends nothing is wrong. And a bunch of other parents twenty years older than you are and who have a lot more money. I even consulted with a lawyer, which wiped out most of my checking account, but the upshot was that they recommended moving Josh to a new school.
So after a car wreck killed both my parents at the end of the school year, I decided not to sell the house where I grew up. This was the fresh start Josh and I needed.
“You are going to make friends,” I say to my son. “Maybe,” he says.
“You will,” I insist. “I promise.”
The problem with your kid getting older is they know there are some things you can’t promise.
Josh doesn’t look up from the little pile of salt and pepper. This time he writes an S in it for his last name. “Mom?”
“Yes, sweetie?”
“Now that we’re living here, am I going to meet my dad?”
I almost choke on my own saliva. Wow, I did not know that thought was going through his head. As much as I have tried my best to be two parents for this kid, there have been times in Josh’s life when he has seemed obsessed with who his father is. When he was five, I couldn’t get him to stop talking about it. Every day he would come home with a new drawing of his father and what he imagined that father would look like. An astronaut. A police officer. A veterinarian. But he hasn’t mentioned his father in a while.
“Josh,” I begin.
“Because he lives here?” He raises his eyes from the table. “Right?”
Every word is like a little tiny dagger in my heart. I should’ve just told him that his father was dead. That would’ve made things so much easier. I could have made up some wonderful story about how his father was a hero who died, I don’t know, trying to save a puppy from a fire. He would’ve been happy with that. Maybe if I told him the puppy fire story, the kids wouldn’t have bullied him last year.
“Honey,” I say, “your dad used to live here, but now he doesn’t. Not anymore.”
I can’t quite read the expression on Josh’s face. The other problem with your kid getting older is that they can tell when you’re lying.
