The Inmate (4)

“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.