by KL Donn
“Todd, are you hearing yourself? You haven’t even told me who it is yet, and now I’m supposed to throw a party and open up my circle of friends for a potential business relationship. She must suck a really good dick because you’re off in the clouds.”
“Will you stop saying that? It’s too early to be talking about getting my dick sucked,” he leans in, whispering across the butter pats and salt & pepper shakers.
The waitress arrives with our food, serving us each a huge oval plate of eggs, bacon, pancakes and fresh fruit while pouring us more coffee. God, I love this place. I slice into my omelet, letting the steam escape while he crunches on his perfect bacon.
“For the record, it’s Tia. She does PR for names like Justin Saunders, Tito Consuelos, and Amelia Cupp, to name a few. She also successfully rejuvenated the comeback of Bart Starling after his comments regarding the last presidential election.” He gushes about her like he had something to do with her success. He stacks his fork with several cut-up slices of pancake and takes one huge bite.
I watch a drop of syrup roll over the crest of his lip and down his chin as he chews before he swipes at it with a napkin. Neanderthal. Mom would club his head if she were here.
“All right. I’ll throw a party, but I’m not promising I’ll have a whole lot of time to talk to her. It will all be very informal. Got it?”
“Got it.” He nods. He’s smiling like the cat who ate the canary. He’s happy he’s getting what he wants. Which in turn makes me happy.
“Jesus, you’re so fucking easy.” I toss one of my raspberries over onto his plate, and he piles it onto the fork tines along with four more squares of pancake and shovels them all into his mouth. Goofball.
The waitress stops by with some to-go cups and fills them full of coffee. She leaves the check, but Todd scoops it up and holds it away from me. “I’ve got this. You need to save money for your party.”
“Whatever, dude.” I laugh, adding creamer to my coffee.
“You’re going to be impressed. I promise you. She knows her shit. You’ll see.”
He slaps his credit card down on top of the check at the edge of the table, and flips through his wallet for a tip. He pulls out a five-dollar bill and tucks it under his plate.
“I’m thinking we should invite Mom to the party. Just to get her out of the house. What do you think?” I ask, just as one of the children, a little boy, sitting behind Todd a few tables away recognizes me. He stares with big blue eyes. He has a soccer ball on his shirt and looks down at it, then back up at me. He turns around and says something to his mom. She looks directly at me, but then turns her head away and whispers something to her husband. He just continues reading his paper, oblivious to whatever it is she’s saying.
Our waitress comes back with the credit card slips and leaves them with Todd to sign. I look over at the little boy, and he’s still staring at me. I grab a napkin from the holder and the pen the waitress left then scrawl my signature across it. Making sure it’s legible, we get up to leave, and I walk over to their table. They all look up at me.
“Hey, little man. I can’t help but see you’re a soccer fan,” I say, pointing to his shirt. “Do you know who I am?”
He nods then slides down out of his chair to bury his face in his mom’s side.
“Well, I just wanted to say hello to a fellow soccer fan and leave my autograph for you, if that’s okay?” I hold the napkin in my hand and try to hand it to the boy, but he won’t take it. His mother doesn’t reach for it either, so I pull it back into me, confused.
“Mr. Legend. We were fans, but when you beat that man like a savage, we took our loyalty elsewhere. You should be ashamed of yourself. May God judge you well on Rapture Day. Now please leave us alone,” she hisses at me from underneath her breath.
Todd’s fingers wrap around my elbow, and he pulls on me to leave, but I don’t budge. Instead, I feel anger rising up from my chest. I count to three and turn to go, but I take one step and spin back around. I just can’t let her have the last word.
“Ma’am, I can respect your decision to ask me to leave. I can even respect your decision to follow another team, but what I can’t understand is your condoning a man to beat a woman. I’m not saying what I did was right. I was wrong to take my anger that far, but I will never ‘turn the other cheek’ as you think I should when I see a man hitting a woman. I hope your beautiful daughter never knows the sting of a man’s hand on her delicate skin.”
I look at the little girl, and her soft, brown eyes fill up with tears. I’m scaring her. No more words come to my mind, so I finally turn and follow Todd out the door. Why didn’t I just leave well enough alone?
10
Neenah
I wonder what Ian is doing to skirt the media. He hasn’t been shortcutting through my backyard the last few nights, and heaven knows the horde of media is still camped out front.
Dane and I are roasting marshmallows over the fire pit to make s’mores when my phone rings. I hand my stick to Dane to answer it, not recognizing the number. It’s local.
“Hello.”
“Hi. This is Mindy calling from the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Chicago. May I speak with Neenah Wells?”
“Yes, this is she. May I help you,” I reply.
“This is a courtesy reminder that the Legendary Soccer Camp hosted by Ian Legend himself starts tomorrow. Dane is confirmed as a registrant. Please bring a full water bottle and make sure he dresses comfortably. As a bonus for the parents, you’ll be given a guided tour of the facilities while you wait for your child. So please park and come inside. You don’t want to miss the tour. Do you have any questions?” She reads the words swiftly and efficiently like she’s made this call a hundred times tonight.
“No. I don’t have any questions. Oh wait, where do I park?”
“The main lot will be open for you, free of charge,” Mindy replies sweetly.
“Thank you for calling.” I press the end call button.
I look over at Dane. He’s blowing the flame from his marshmallow while letting mine smolder in the smoke above. I take it from him and hold it closer to the glowing embers. “Dane that was the soccer camp. It starts in the morning. Are you excited?”
He glances at me and shakes his head slowly. The worry in his eyes is evident. I know my son. He’s thinking he doesn’t know anyone. He won’t make any friends. They’ll yell at him for being too aggressive with the ball or other players. These are all issues we’ve dealt with the past. I sigh loudly for him. It’s frustrating to feel so much anxiety at his age.
I give him a side hug that lasts about five seconds before he shoulders away from me.
“I know it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be any fun, but I promise you that you’ll have a great time. You’re going to meet friends who enjoy soccer as much as you do, and hopefully they’ll go to the same school,” I say, watching him slide his hot marshmallow onto the chocolate using the graham cracker. “Plus, I have a surprise for you.”
He glances at me sideways, looking down at my hands. “No, it’s not that kind of surprise, but you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out.”
An evil look crosses his face, and before I know it, he leans over and bites me. His teeth clench into the tender skin of my shoulder, ripping it open. His jaws are locked tight, and I can’t unhinge them. “Dane, let go. Dane, stop. That hurts. Owwww, Dane!” I shriek as we spiral sideways on the lounger.
He grips my skin with his teeth even tighter. I’m finally able to push him off me with my foot on his hips.
Tears well up in my eyes as the sting of an open wound sets in. Blood drips down my arm and onto the patio. When I look up at Dane, his lips and chin are also covered with a mix of my blood and his saliva. He starts spitting my skin from his mouth down onto the ground. Little splatters of blood rain down onto his shirt and the flagstone below.
I have no words.
My first inclination is to slap him, but violence doesn’t fix violence. If I lea
rned anything from my time with his father and my subsequent fourteen months of jail, it’s that lesson. I inspect the wound a little closer. The skin is broken open, but it’s not deep and won’t need stitches. It’s definitely going to leave a bruise.
I take a deep breath, fighting my inclination to yell. He’s already had too much of that in his life with his father, but I’m not going to cry either. I won’t be weak in front of him. I also learned that from his father.
“Please go to your room. Stop first to brush your teeth and wash your face. We’ll discuss this later,” I hiss through clenched jaws at him.
The smirk on his face says it all. He knows he won’t get punished.
I’m at a crossroads with what to do with him. “Now!” I growl, and he shoves his s’mores stick into the pit and takes off running into the house. I grab the food remnants of what was supposed to be some fun and cradle it in my arms before heading into the kitchen. I hear water running through the pipes from upstairs. At least he’s listening to me.
I wash my wound then apply antibiotic ointment to the affected area and place a large bandage over it. Another day, another scar to add to the many others.
How do I go forward from here? How do I unteach seven years of bad parenting quickly? How do I erase the nightmare of his father in his mind? How do I not let Asperger’s steal my child away?
I stretch across the couch in the den and pick up my phone, scrolling to my speed dial and hovering my finger over my mom’s name. I stare at it, questioning my decision. If I call, she’ll only admit to not having any answers for me, calling herself a bad example of a mother. She’ll remind me that I raised myself while she recovered from my dad’s abuse.
Memories flood my mind of the many times I hid in the stacks of the local library barely escaping from one of the monstrous fights they’d wage. I’d vowed to never let my child grow up in a situation like that. Where did I go wrong?
Never mind, I know. Justin Wells and his damn broken nose.
He’d come to school with a broken nose. His face was just starting to bruise all around it. I didn’t know who he was since I was two years younger, but the rumors running rampant around the school cafeteria made him out to be a hero. The girls were all fawning over him, offering to carry his books and take notes for him.
Justin Wells went from a nobody to a somebody with that broken nose, and when I bumped into him in the cafeteria, spilling his tray all over the both of us, all I could do was run away and cry. He found me two days later in the school library.
“Hey, there you are. I’ve been looking for you.” He dumped his backpack heavily on the table and took a seat next to me.
“Me? What are you looking for me for?”
“I wanted to apologize for bumping into you the other day. I couldn’t find you afterwards. Were you able to get the ketchup out of your shirt?” His messy hair and dark eyes were ruggedly handsome and made my palms sweat. He was a senior. And there he was talking to me. I melted then and there.
Somehow, after that day in the weird mechanics of how high school and young love worked, I became his girlfriend. Then through an even more twisted mire of fate, I hopelessly fell into a spiral that I’d only climb out of thirteen years later with a gun and three bullets.
I snap out of my walk down memory lane. The light in the upstairs corner room of Ian’s house comes on, shining into the den where I sit. I roll over and look up into the room. I can’t see anything but a shadow crossing around the room as the light changes with his movements.
Just get him out of your mind, Neenah. You need to stay away from men and focus on raising your son to be a good man. It’s just the lure of having a celebrity next door. I continue the lies circling around in my head until the morning light trickles into the room, wakening me.
I stretch my arms above my head and feel a sharp pain shoot through my left arm. My arm feels heavy and sore when I roll it sideways and unpeel the bandage. It’s swollen and ugly. The indentation of Dane’s small, round mouth is visible through my bruising skin. I know I need to talk to him today about this; I can’t put it off any longer than today.
My mom and dad used to punish me in the heat of the moment. That was also Justin’s style. I told myself I wouldn’t discipline in that manner.
I sit up on the couch and rub the sleep from my eyes, remembering soccer camp. The sudden use of my arm sends little pricks of needle pain shooting up it again. I need a shower to loosen up my muscles.
The smell of coffee brewing through the Keurig gets me up and moving. Thank God for automatic timers. I add some creamer and take my mug upstairs to the bathroom. The hot water hitting my body feels so good, especially after sleeping on the couch last night. I don’t remember falling asleep, but I do remember lying there thinking about Ian.
He’s a man I need to stay far away from. I feel strangely connected to him though, and the way he keeps staring at the freckles across the bridge of my nose is unnerving. Or at least that’s what I think he’s looking at.
I wish I could scrub them off. I tried once when I was a teenager. I read in a magazine that salt on a lemon could be used to loosen dead skin and make freckles fade. Yeah, that didn’t work. Youth makes you do some pretty stupid things. My ‘angel kisses’ are still there some fifteen years later.
I step out of the shower and wrap my hair in a towel. I slide on my robe and wipe through the fog on the mirror to look at my face more closely. Yeah, it hasn’t changed much since high school. It’s just older and less bright, but the little orange dots connecting my cheeks remain.
After I brush my teeth, I peek in on Dane. For once, he’s lying straight on his bed. He even changed into his pajamas without me telling him to. And his room is clean. Wow, what happened up here last night?
I turn on his light and sit on his bed in the curve of his body, gently pushing his bangs from his eyes. “Dane, it’s time to wake up and get ready for soccer camp.” One eyelid opens and closes quickly. His face scrunches from the glare of the light, and he buries his face in his pillow.
“I’m going to go get dressed now. How about I meet you downstairs in thirty minutes? I’ll make some bacon.” I get up and leave, allowing him to wake up naturally on his own.
I have bacon straining on paper towels and some pancakes bubbling on the griddle when I hear his feet on the steps. By the time he rounds the corner and enters the kitchen, the pancakes are flipped and almost ready. He takes a seat at the island and sips his milk.
I place his silver dollar blueberry pancakes onto a plate and smear some butter and syrup across them. “Can we eat in the dining room?” he asks in a small voice.
“Sure. I thought you’d want to eat in the den and watch SpongeBob, but okay. The dining room it is.”
He climbs down off the saddle bench and runs to the back door opening it wide, before going to the dining room and sitting in his chair—the one he picked out the very first night we ate in there. I think he likes this room because it has sailboats on the water in a picture, and they probably remind him of Minnesota. Sometimes he looks at them and gets lost in his own thoughts, but who knows.
I set his plate down on the table in front of him and head back into the kitchen for his milk and bacon. I put it all on a tray with my food and carry it in, taking my seat next to him.
He digs into his pancakes but keeps trying to peer around me and the corner. “Is everything okay, Dane?”
He nods and chomps into his bacon.
“Are you excited for today?”
He swallows hard and gulps his milk without a response. After a few more bites of his pancake, he climbs off his chair and runs to the wall, looking around the corner.
“Dane, what are you doing?”
“Nothing,” he says, shrugging his shoulders when he takes his seat again.
“Are you expecting someone?” I ask anxiously. From the deepest shadows of my heart, I worry that he somehow answered my phone when Julia called and gave our location away. I made him memor
ize our address the first week we arrived in case he ever got lost or separated from me. Suddenly, I’m sick with worry.
His dark eyes look directly into mine, and he shakes his head slowly. I can’t tell if he’s lying or just hiding a secret. I can’t stand it anymore. I get up from my seat and go to shut and lock the back door. I don’t like surprises, and people at my back door are surprises.
I re-enter the dining room and take my seat, releasing a deep breath. “Dane, we need to talk.”
He sets his milk down and looks at me with curious but sad eyes. His perfect lips are turned down into a frown, and my heart fractures, knowing none of this is his fault.
“I know you miss your friends and probably your aunts, uncles, and cousins too, but they want to take you away from me. They don’t understand how our life was back in Minnesota with Daddy. They think I hurt Daddy on purpose, and I didn’t. They have no idea what happened to us every night behind our closed doors,” I explain, my voice shaking, hoping I’m using the right words for him to understand. I take a deep breath.
A tear rolls down his cheek, and he dives into my arms, burying his head in the crook of my neck.
“We ran away. There’s no other nice way to put it. We’re never going back there. Do you understand?”
I feel him nod as he smears more tears on my shoulder. He wraps his arms around me and squeezes harder, causing me to hiss as he squeezes where he bit me. I shake him loose and swivel him to the other side of my body. He lifts his head and sees the big bandage on my arm.
“I hope your arm heals,” he mumbles.
“Can you tell me why you bit me?” I wipe the snot and tears from his eyes with some napkins.
“I don’t want to make new friends. I want my old ones, but . . .” He buries his head against my chest.
“But what, Dane? Talk to me. We’re all we have. It’s just you and me, kiddo. We have to start talking to each other. I’m hurt too. I miss my friends, not that I had many because…well, that doesn’t matter anymore.”