“Maybe,” I tell him.
“When?”
“When what?”
“When can I come and stay with you?” His feet start to swing again.
I look at my mother for help, but she gives me nothing. “Umm…” I scratch my head.
“What about this weekend?” he asks. “After you come to my game, I could come home with you.” He narrows his eyes at me. “You are coming to my game, aren’t you?”
“Well, I hadn’t decided yet.”
He looks at my mother. “You said he was coming.”
She gives me a stern glance. “Oh, he’ll be there. If not, I’m going to ground him.”
Mitchell rolls his eyes. “He’s too big to ground.” He leans toward me. “She grounds me if I forget to unload the dishwasher. She’s mean sometimes.”
“I think the word you’re looking for is firm,” I correct, but I’m struggling not to laugh out loud all the while.
“No,” he replies. “She’s mean when she’s mad. She walks around talking to herself and talking about what I did or didn’t do that made her mad.”
My mom had always done that. She would let me get into trouble, and then she would walk around and have a discussion with herself about why I would do something so stupid. It meant she was really mad.
“I think that’s how she works it all out in her head.”
He rolls his eyes again, and it makes me snort out a laugh. I cover it up with a cough.
“So, I can come and spend the night after the game on Saturday?” He’s tenacious, I have to give him that.
I look at my mother. She just stares at me. Glares is a more appropriate word.
“Sure, why not…” I say slowly. “For one night.”
“Okay,” he says, but he’s grinning.
He gets down on the ground so he can pet Wilbur, and Ma says to me, “Happy birthday.” She leans over and kisses my cheek, hanging on a little too long as she does it. When she sits back, her eyes are wet.
“I’m glad you brought him.” I give her hand a squeeze. “But I’m not sure going to the game is such a great idea.”
“Why not?”
“People are still talking, Ma.”
Abigail sits and quietly listens without saying a word.
Ma scoffs. “Then let them talk.” Her voice softens a little. “They’re just words. And Mitchell already knows everything. He knows how people talk, and he knows what they say. And he knows it’s all lies.”
“It’s not all lies, Ma,” I reply. It’s not. I’d love it if it were. But it’s not.
“You made a mistake, Ethan,” she says. “I refuse to let you torture yourself over it for the rest of your life. Come to the game. It’ll be fine.”
I heave out a breath. “Okay.”
She gestures toward Abigail. “Bring Abigail with you. It’ll be fun. Then you can bring him back with you after, for the night.”
“What are you going to do all by yourself?” I ask her.
She throws up her hands. “What difference does that make? I might take a nice long bubble bath. Or I might go out for dinner with friends. I haven’t done that in a really long time.”
My mom has given up a lot while raising my son. She has tirelessly handled preschool and then elementary school, play dates and illnesses, sports and vaccines, and she has done even more that I don’t know about, I’m sure. And she didn’t have to do any of it. She did it because she loves us, without limits. She could have walked away from me when the rest of the town did, but she didn’t. She could have moved away from the small town of Macon Hills and saved herself from all the judgment, the name-calling, and the torment that some people have continued to give her, even years later. But she didn’t. She stayed. She said this town was important to her and that she wouldn’t be pushed out.
She made it work. And now I have to do the same.
“It’s getting late. We need to get home,” she says. She reaches into her bag and pulls out a card. “You can read it later,” she says as she pushes it into my hands.
“Open mine now,” Mitchell says. He pushes his handmade card into my hands.
I look down at the folded piece of computer paper, and on the outside it says Happy Birthday to the Best Dad Ever.
I open it up and see that he has drawn a picture of a campsite and two people sitting around an open fire.
I swallow past the lump in my throat. “Thank you,” I say, and he launches himself at me. I sweep him up into my arms the way I have wanted to do a million times over the past five years. He holds me almost as tightly as I hold him, and I take in his little-boy scent. His hair tickles the side of my face. Finally, he wiggles so that I let him go.
“We’ll see you Saturday,” Ma says as she comes over and presses a kiss to my cheek. “Right?”
I give her a nod. “I’ll be there.”
I still don’t think it’s a good idea, but I’m going. I said I would, and so I am.
They leave, and Abigail just sits and stares at me. “He looks like you,” she says softly. “And his disposition is like yours.”
“I don’t know how.” I shake my head. “That’s the first time I’ve been around him since he was two.”
Her gaze softens and sharpens all at the same time. “Why haven’t you seen him?”
I flick a bug from my ear and linger there to scratch. “I’ve been away.”
“I know you well enough to know that if you could have avoided being away, you would have. You’d do anything for that boy. I can see it on your face.”
“I’ve never loved anything the way that I love him.” Sometimes, I feel like I’m split open on the inside, just because I love him so hard.
“Explain to me why you haven’t seen him, then,” she prompts. She waits patiently.
“I can’t. I can’t explain it. I don’t know.” I don’t have a good reason for not seeing him since I got out of jail. Except for the fact that I didn’t want to stain him with my sins. I wanted him to stay an innocent little boy a little while longer. I didn’t want him tainted by my brand of bullshit. But now that I’ve seen him, now that I’ve held him in my arms, I could no more stay away than I could cut off one of my own limbs. “I just wasn’t able.”
“But you’re able now.”
I nod. “I’m able now.” I grin at her. “He loved your ugly cake.”
The cake is reduced to nothing more than some crumbs left on the plate now. I scrape what’s left onto the ground so that Wilbur can eat it.
“My cake was not ugly.” She pretends to look offended.
I hold up one finger. “I beg to differ.”
She sniffs. “We’ll just have to agree to disagree.”
“You’re going to the game with me on Saturday,” I announce.
She raises her eyebrows at me and grins. “Oh, I am, am I?”
“Yep. I might need a buffer.”
Her brow furrows. “A buffer from what?”
“A lot of people in town hate my guts.” I draw in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “With good reason.”