Chapter 12
Kara heard Zach's bedroom door open and checked her watch. She had never seen him sleep in so late before. Was this really the same boy who had awakened earlier than Craig those first two mornings with them? Even after the fireworks show, after staying up until midnight, he had gotten up earlier than this. Had that really been a whole month ago? It still baffled her, this sequence of events that, since May, had turned her and Craig's life together on its head—in a good way.
" 'Morning, sleepyhead," she greeted him as he shuffled into the kitchen. He grunted something unintelligible in return and, rubbing his eyes, took a seat on one of the stools at the stand-alone counter. "What would you like for lunch?"
"Lunch?" he asked dully.
Kara grinned. "Just teasing. It's not quite that late. Oatmeal, cereal, toast, scrambled eggs?"
"Where's Dad?" he inquired.
"He left for work over an hour ago. And he stayed late, too, hoping to see you before he took off."
"Oh."
Kara set both hands flat on the counter directly in front of Zach and bent across it to look him in the eye. "For breakfast?"
He turned away from her. "I'm not hungry."
"Yes, you are," she insisted. "You're a growing boy. You need to eat something."
He heaved a sigh. "Fine. Oatmeal. With raisins."
"That's my boy," Kara encouraged him. "Excellent choice." She pulled a bowl out for him and poured it full of oatmeal, sprinkling the raisins on top. "We should have just stuck with the oatmeal test. Could've skipped the DNA test, huh? It would've saved us a lot of money."
Zach didn't respond. He just sat on his stool and stared straight ahead.
"Why don't you go feed Paws while I'm warming this up? He's been waiting all morning to see you."
The boy slid off the stool and trudged to the side door and outside. Not excited to see Paws? Kara thought, wrinkling her forehead. He must still be half asleep. He usually made a big deal of greeting Paws first thing in the morning.
She had his oatmeal warm and waiting for him alongside a glass of orange juice when he returned. He reclaimed his seat and began to eat, slowly lifting the spoon to his mouth. Kara, sitting across the counter from him, tried to scan the newspaper ads before her, but found herself looking up every few seconds to check on him. He kept eating, but silently; that was odd.
"When you're done," she broke the silence after a couple of minutes, "we need to run to the store and get you some new shoes. You've about outgrown those shoes you came here with, and school starts in three weeks."
"Do we have to?" he mumbled through another bite of oatmeal.
Kara cocked her head. "Do we have to? What kind of question is that? You love going to the store."
"We go all the time now," he groaned.
Kara frowned at him. What was wrong with him this morning? "So, what—you suddenly don't like going to the store anymore?"
"I just don't want to."
Kara returned to searching through the ads. "Well, we've got to get you new shoes sometime, and today's the day."
He just glared into his bowl still half full of oatmeal.
"Zach, are you feeling okay?" she asked, concerned. "You're not acting like yourself."
He shrugged in reply.
She walked around the counter to him. "Hold still." She reached out a hand.
"What are you doing?" he protested, pulling back from her a little.
"I'm checking to see if you have a fever." She placed the hand flat across his forehead.
He jerked his arm up to push her hand away, knocking the oatmeal bowl askew. It clattered to the floor; warm mush flew in every direction.
"Zechariah!" she scolded, jumping back. Some of the oatmeal had splattered against her leg; it was a good thing she was wearing shorts.
He stared at her in shock—whether more for her tone or for his having spilled his oatmeal, she could not tell. Then he dropped his gaze to the mush on the floor. "I'll clean it up," he droned. He began to scoot off the stool.
"No, sir," she ordered, holding him in place, "you sit right there and keep still." This time she succeeded in checking his forehead. "Well, you don't feel hot. But," she continued, tilting his head back so she could see his face better, "you don't look right, either. Your eyes are all red. Did you sleep last night?"
"Yeah."
Kara could feel his tension beneath her touch as he worked not to pull away again. She withdrew her hand. "Okay, clean that up and give it to Paws. I'll warm up some more for you."
"I don't want any more," he groaned, sliding off the stool.
She stepped to the other counter to get the paper towels for him. "Are you sure you're not sick, Zach?"
He didn't answer.
Kara shook her head, handed him the paper towels, and let him be. She went to her own bathroom to wipe the oatmeal from her leg, then took her time putting her hair in a ponytail and gazing out the window. Zach needed a minute by himself. Clearly, if the boy wasn't ill, he had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed.
Kara wasn't sure she had given Zach enough alone time when they left the house, and his mood did not improve as they reached the store. He was only grudgingly cooperative in selecting his new shoes; most of his responses about their style and fit were little more than a grunt or a shrug. When he finally gave her a halfhearted, "Those might be okay," she figured he liked them as well as any and chose that pair for him. For the rest of their time at the store, Kara did her own shopping. Zach dragged his feet behind her.
"I'm hungry," he complained as she picked out some new gardening gloves.
"Hmm, why do you think that is?" she asked with mock-curiosity, throwing a sidelong glance his way. He shrugged. "Maybe because you only ate half of your breakfast?"
"I wasn't hungry then," he argued. "Can I buy a snack?"
Settling on the gloves she liked best, she turned and gave him a stern look. "No. You can wait until we get home. Then you can have lunch."
Zach slumped his shoulders. He followed her to the front of the store and sulked as she paid for their goods. On the way out to the car, he spoke again. "Can we go to the waterfront and ride the huge wheel-thing, Mom?"
"The Great Wheel? Today? No."
"Why not?"
"Because we're not going downtown," she answered. "We have things we need to do at home."
The boy let out an exasperated sigh. "We never get to do fun things anymore. We used to go places, but now all we do is stay home. It's boring."
"It's boring when you go over to Cayden's house, or when he comes over and plays soccer with you in the back yard? It's boring when we take Paws to the park? Is home really so dull now?"
"I'm just saying," he whined, "we used to do things that were really cool. Now it's just normal things all the time. Why can't we do special stuff anymore?"
Kara stopped abruptly in the middle of the parking lot and spun to confront the boy, her face growing hot. "Let me tell you why, Zechariah Fleming. We had the best time of our lives, your dad and I, taking you to the zoo and the Space Needle and Mount Rainier and all those other places, but now we owe the credit card company three thousand dollars, plus interest! Clothes, DNA tests, zoo admission, gas for the trips, nonrefundable cabin reservations, French fries—all of that costs money, young man! Oh, and I forgot about toys, soccer balls, baseball glove… Now, if you've got three thousand dollars hidden in a bank account somewhere that you don't mind letting us know about so we can pay our bills, then sure, we can go ride the huge wheel-thing as soon as your chores are done! Any more questions?"
Zach's eyes widened as her finger added exasperated emphasis to each point. He dropped his head and walked on to the car. She stormed after him. He was in a mood today, and he was starting to put her in one, too.
After lunch, it was time to do those chores. "First, I want you to make your bed like I showed you yesterday," she instruct
ed him as she cleared their lunch dishes from the table. "I want you to get in the habit of making it every morning."
"I never had to make my bed before I came here," he grumbled, an obstinate look on his face. She had never seen him wear that expression before, and it made her angry.
She dropped the dishes loudly into the sink and turned to face him with her fists on her hips. "That's because you've never had a real bed before, isn't it? Just a cot, right? Maybe you'd like to go back to having a cot?"
"No," he answered in a low tone, his chin on his own fists, his elbows propped up on the table.
"Then you'll make your bed. When that's done, vacuum your room and weed your row in the garden. It's getting out of hand again."
"I just weeded it last week," he mumbled.
She strode crossly to the table and stared him down.
"Okay, fine, I'll pull the weeds," he said with a petulant roll of his eyes.
Kara gave him a firm nod and turned back to the counter, violently wiping up some crumbs left scattered there. She allowed him several seconds, but when he didn't move from the table, she spun slowly to face him again. He looked idly up at her. This child! Shutting her lips tightly lest she say something unfortunate, she raised her hands and signed to him instead. "Go…make…bed!"
She had taught him enough sign language in the past month that he understood. He sighed and stood up grudgingly. Kara looked away as if not paying attention, but listened to make sure he actually went to his room. When he slammed the bedroom door behind him, she placed her hands over her face and just shook her head. How did parents of three or four children deal with this sort of thing everyday, sometimes from all the kids at once? Of course, they got to start young with their children; she was working with a ten-year-old on only three months' experience.
She focused on her own tasks—a little cleaning, a load of laundry, and her own weeding, the latter of which she did without a word as Zach labored at the opposite end of the garden. He worked slowly but doggedly, with fewer distractions than usual and no breaks for conversation. Maybe there was one advantage to having him do chores while grumpy.
He completed his duties in less than an hour, and she did not object when he took his soccer ball into the back yard to kick it around. She finished her share of the weeding, washed her hands in water from the hose, and went inside to work at the computer. Ten minutes of peace flowed by, and then—
BAM!...BAM!...BAM! The noise of an impact every few seconds came from the side yard, wrecking her tranquility.
Kara marched to the dining room window, fuming. What was Zach doing now? As she looked through the glass, he picked up the soccer ball, tossed it a few feet in front of him, took a running start, and kicked it against the shed. BAM! It rebounded away, and he ran and kicked it again. BAM!
Kara caught herself clenching her fists and forced herself to release them and to breathe—once, twice, three times, the way she had seen Lia do on occasion. Zach was having a bad day; that didn't mean she had to have a bad day, too. And another scolding wasn't going to change his attitude. He deserved one, but a new approach came to mind.
She went to her bedroom and fetched herself a cap and a pair of thick gloves, fluorescent green on the back and white on the front, from the closet. Then she returned to the kitchen and stepped out the side door. "Zechariah!" she commanded.
BAM! The ball rolled away as he looked up at her.
"Come here! Bring the ball."
He retrieved it and came inside, muttering to himself. She locked the side door and pushed him out the front, locking that one, too, behind them.
"What are you doing?" he asked her.
She turned to him with a glare that dared him to ask anymore questions and strode quickly across the lawn, and from there down the street. He hesitated. "Well, come on!" she told him, setting the cap on her head. He jogged to catch up with her.
They walked the two blocks to the school, and she took him across the yard to a soccer goal set up in one corner. "Give me the ball," she ordered. He handed it to her, and she set it down thirty feet in front of the goal. Then she pulled the gloves on over her hands—they felt good there, the old, familiar squish of the padding pleasant as she clapped them together. She lined herself up at the goal, faced the ball, spread her feet and hands, bent her knees, and flexed her fingers. "Okay, Fleming," she told Zach, "kick the ball."
"Mom, what are you doing?" he asked, genuinely curious. Good—for the moment, he had forgotten to be moody.
"Don't talk, Fleming! Just kick the ball!" He walked over to it and kicked it politely to her. She scooped it up and slammed it off the ground, catching it with both hands as it sprung back up at her. "That's embarrassing. Use your whole leg. Kick the ball!" She rolled it back to him.
This time he kicked it harder. She took a step to the side and caught it a foot off the ground. Secretly, she was glad to see that she still could. It had been a long time.
She bounced it back to him. "Not to me, Fleming! Kick it in the goal!"
Zach furrowed his brow at her, then launched a strong kick over the goalpost.
"Go get it!" she instructed him. "You miss the goal, you go get the ball. Run!"
The boy ran. He brought the ball back and kicked it again, and again, and again. She fielded each shot deftly and returned it off to his left or his right, making him run and kick from different angles.
And she yelled at him. "Harder, Fleming! Put some muscle into it! Not with your toes—kick with the top of your foot, this part, where the laces are! What did you kick it straight to me for? You're never going to score that way! Faster! Come on, Fleming! I'm getting old standing here!" She laughed at herself for that line—she was closer to forty than to eighteen, when she had been in her soccer prime.
At first he just stared at her when she yelled at him. Then he got sick of it—he got angry. He kicked the ball still harder; now he was kicking it with all his might—finally. He began to try harder, too, sending the ball toward the corners of the goal, taking risks. After she had stopped perhaps twenty-five kicks and he had chased down a dozen misses, he got the idea to dribble the ball toward her and kick from closer range. She blocked his shot, but only barely, sending it rebounding off her right hand to the grass behind him.
He stopped in front of her and gaped, breathing hard. "How are you doing this, Mom?" he asked, eyes wide with astonishment. "How do you never miss?"
She grinned. "I was first-string goalkeeper on my high school team my senior year." She clapped him on the shoulder once, the way Craig sometimes did. "Let's go again, see if you can get one past me." She thought she might have spotted a combative grin slipping onto his face as he turned to retrieve the ball.
He came after her aggressively this time, dribbling the ball to within ten feet before launching a kick toward the opposite corner. His shot flew beyond the post, but Kara chuckled to herself. Her son had some raw soccer talent to match his baseball skills. Next summer, they would have to see if they could make time for both sports.
Next summer… Will he still be with us next summer? But why shouldn't he?
He reset the ball and kicked again—over her head, and she didn't react quickly enough, but it rebounded off the goalpost and back to him. He kicked again, again, again…
She blocked a shot—an impressive shot for an inexperienced ten-year-old—with her body fully stretched out, her right hand fully extended. She tumbled to the ground as the ball ricocheted straight back to the boy. He looked at her, scrambling to her feet on the right side of the goal, and tapped the ball to her left before she could recover. It rolled well past her reach and into the net.
"I got one!" he yelled, jumping and thrusting his hands into the air.
Grateful—she was getting tired—Kara let herself fall back to the ground and sat there with her legs angled out before her. "It's about time," she panted.
He ran to get the ball, th
en brought it back to her. "I scored one on you, Mom!"
"Yeah," she said, regaining her breath, "you did. You win one-nothing."
He took a seat in front of her. "You're really good, Mom. Does Dad know you can do that?"
"Oh, yeah," she nodded. "We used to play this game sometimes, on this same goal."
She looked at her son—he was smiling for the first time today. It had taken an intense half an hour, but he had finally relaxed. "You feel better, kiddo?"
"Yeah," he replied. He was breathing hard and sweating from his exertion; they both were.
"Not too bored?"
"No," he admitted. "This was good."
She mussed his sweaty hair. "Okay." They rested on the grass a minute and then walked home together, chatting pleasantly on the way.
When Craig got home, Zach was outside with Paws, and Kara tried to explain how the boy had acted most of the day. But not having seen it, Craig could hardly relate. At dinner, though, he caught a glimpse. Zach had eaten nearly all of his food and began to stand to take his dishes to the sink.
"Eat your broccoli first," Kara instructed the boy.
"Do I have to?" he asked in an almost-whiny voice, half-standing.
"You know the rule," she admonished. "If you put it on your plate, you have to eat it."
He gave the broccoli a dirty look. "My nannies never made me eat stuff I didn't want," he informed her.
"Oh, yeah? Well, I am not your nanny," she rebutted. "And you are not starting this grumbling again, Zechariah." She threw Craig a "That's what I was telling you about" look.
He took a deep breath and looked at Zach. "Sorry, pal. You have parents now, whether you like it or not. So you eat the broccoli."
Zach did not complain anymore the entire evening. Instead, he secluded himself in his room after dinner and remained there until Craig finally went to check on him at dusk. Craig returned a minute later, holding one of Zach's library books in his hand. "He was sound asleep on the floor." Craig tapped the book. "I pulled the covers back to put him in bed, and I found this under his pillow."
Kara took it and opened it. "Look at the bookmark, how far he's read—he just checked this out yesterday… Craig, he must have stayed up half the night reading it! No wonder he was grumpy."
"No more books in bed?" Craig asked with a grin.
"Nope," she agreed, shaking her head. One day like this was enough. In three months with him, it was their first bad day—that was pretty incredible, she had to admit. But one was enough, all the same.
*****
The Boy Who Appeared from the Rain Page 71