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After Ted leaves, Eve breaks.
In the days that follow, Eve reaches for her phone multiple times with the intent to call her mother. Then she remembers. Then she takes a deep breath around the lump in her throat and slumps back against her headboard, fingers grasping sheets that she should have thrown away instead of just tossing them in the washer on sanitary cycle and assuming that the boiling hot water that actually does clean all of that shit away would also make her feel better about using them again.
They were her favorite sheets. With everything else, Eve hadn’t wanted to get rid of them, too. Hadn’t wanted him to take them, too, just like he’d taken—
It was such a small thing. She should have been allowed to keep her small thing.
But no.
Brendan is eight years old. He understands that his grandmama is dead, as much as he can, but he doesn’t understand why his dad can’t come home. He doesn’t understand why his mom won’t let his dad come home, because whatever his dad did, surely she should be able to forgive him, shouldn’t she? And then when she won’t, he uses this an excuse to be mean and cruel to the other kids at school; if his mom doesn’t have to forgive his dad, then he shouldn’t have to forgive anyone either! He throws rocks and cuts one of the other kids’ foreheads with one, and Eve gets called in to pick him up, and he won’t talk to her.
Ted volunteers to talk some sense into him, but if Eve had her way, Ted wouldn’t ever see Brendan again. Except that…isn’t fair to Brendan. It’s not like he did something wrong. Unfortunately, she can’t punish Ted without punishing Brendan. (The worst of it is feeling like Ted would love to leave Brendan behind, too, and maybe the only reason he isn’t is because he still has to help pay for him, and Ted has never wanted to pay for something he couldn’t see or hold in his hand.)
Eventually, Eve takes him out for ice cream at his favorite shop, just the two of them. Brendan sits on the chair across from her, and she can’t help but say, “You’ve grown so much,” because he has, even if he hasn’t noticed. His feet still dangle above the ground, but they’re close enough that if he points his toes down, he can just brush the tip of his shoes across the floor. He can almost cup the little children’s cup all in one hand now, not that he’d gotten one of those, and when he bites down into his rocky road chocolate chip mix, all she can see is the day he’d gotten one of his baby incisors stuck in the waffle cone.
He’s still her little boy, but he’s not her little boy anymore.
Eight years old and attacking other children with rocks. Not really a little boy move.
Brendan doesn’t say anything to that comment anyway. He just furrows his brow in the confused, annoyed way that children sometimes have, kicks his shoes in the air a few times, and takes another bite of his ice cream cone. The bite is a little too big; ice cream rims his mouth, and Eve wants to reach across and rub it away with her thumb. She won’t, though. He would be embarrassed. She doesn’t want to embarrass him.
It’s not why Eve doesn’t bring it up while he’s eating. There’s nothing embarrassing about talking about things you shouldn’t do, but something tells her that having this discussion while he’s eating ice cream might make it feel like he’s being rewarded. She doesn’t want to reward him; she just wants him not to feel as bad as he does. He has to feel bad. If he didn’t feel bad, he wouldn’t be hurting other kids.
So afterwards, when he’s cold from eating ice cream, they go for a walk in the brisk fall nearing winter air. Thanksgiving is coming up, but Eve doesn’t want to think about that. It doesn’t matter; she thinks about it anyway, thinks about the logistics of it, how Ted’s parents will probably want to see Brendan and throw that big Thanksgiving production they do every year, and Brendan will want to go, want to see his Memaw and Pepaw, and Eve will want nothing more than to say no. It is selfish, really, to want to keep him all to herself when his grandparents hadn’t done anything wrong; it’s selfish and petty, and she won’t lie, part of it is revenge for how Ted treated her, so she won’t do it.
But another, bigger part of it, is that they used to split Thanksgivings – one year with Ted’s parents and one with her mom (as opposed to Christmases, where the day itself would just be the three of them, their little family, and then the week after would be going to both families and celebrating with each of them) – and that this year should have been her mother’s. Would have been her mother’s. And she doesn’t….
She doesn’t want to deal with that alone.
Ted still has his parents and his new…whatever she is and even Brendan, if and when he wants him, but Brendan is all Eve has. She’s his mother. She didn’t do anything wrong. She feels like she’s going to lose him anyway.
This conversation isn’t going to help.
“Brendan, you know you can’t throw rocks at other kids,” Eve starts, hesitating as she says it, forcing herself through the awkwardness anyway. She turns to him, sees how his hands are shoved into his windbreaker’s pockets and pulling them together even closer than the jacket really wants, crumpling it, scowl drawing lines across his young face, and he looks so much like his father in that moment that Eve’s heart pangs both with love for her son and instant hatred for the man who she doesn’t want to see reproduced on or in him. “You hurt someone.”
Brendan just shrugs. “You hurt Dad.”
It isn’t the same. Eve wants to tell him it isn’t the same, and she wants him to understand that it isn’t the same, why it isn’t the same. She takes a deep breath. “I didn’t throw a rock at him.”
“You want to.”
Eve doesn’t deny that. “I didn’t.” That doesn’t really make things better. “I’m not telling you to like the other kids, honey; I’m just telling you not to throw rocks at them.” Then, knowing that Brendan is a child and will try to find loopholes just because she didn’t specify, “Or punch them. Or kick them. Or pull their hair or put gum in their hair or—”
“Fine, Mom, I got it.” Brendan pulls his hands closer together, pulls the jacket pockets closer together, that slight rippling not quite plastic sound of the fabric. The scowl stays on his face.
On instinct, Eve reaches across and tries to smooth his furrowed brow. “Relax. If you keep your face like that, it’ll freeze.”
Brendan’s scowl deepens, brow furrowing further. “Let it.”
“Brendan.” Eve sighs and runs a hand through his fluffy brown hair. It’s about time for a haircut. It’s starting to curl around his ears. She struggles to think of a way to explain things as he pulls away from her gentle touch. “Hey, um, you know your best friend? Wade?”
“What about him?” Brendan asks, eyes widening in shock as he looks up at her. “You’re not going to do anything to him, are you?”
“No, no, no. I would never—” Eve shakes her head quickly. It isn’t a bad example, she doesn’t think, but it requires him understanding that it’s an example and not…not a real thing that’s actually happening. “If…if Wade ever…ever made you really mad and started avoiding you and hanging out with some kid you really hate—”
“Julian,” Brendan spits out in a near hiss, eyes narrowing. Then he glares up at her. “He would never do that.”
“Oh, I know, I know.” Eve wants to look away from the force of his glare, but she doesn’t. “But just…just say he did. How would you feel?”
Brendan looks away, considering. “I’d want to punch him in the face,” he says quietly. “Throw rocks at him. Fight him so he’d quit being a jerk.”
Eve nods slowly. “And if you couldn’t do any of that?”
“I don’t know.” Brendan shrugs. “I’d be really sad. And really mad. I guess I’d have to make new friends. Or a new best friend, if he never wanted to be friends again. I’d want to know what I did. What Julian did to make him suddenly like him so much. Maybe…Maybe I’d try to talk to him.” His scowl drops, but his brow remains furrowed. He repeats, “I don’t know.”
“Would you ever be able to forgive him?”
Brendan considers that, too. “I don’t know.” He looks up at his mom. “Maybe I’d try to make friends with Julian, too, so we could all play together.” His face twists in disgust. “Probably not, though. Julian’s a freak.”
For a moment, Eve gets distracted. She doesn’t know this kid Brendan keeps bringing up – he’s never mentioned him before, not even once – and she doesn’t want to defend him so much as she wants to point out that it isn’t nice to call another kid a freak and maybe, just maybe, there’s something good about this Julian kid! But that isn’t the point of this lesson, and she’s afraid if she goes down that rabbit trail, they’ll never get back to what he actually needs to understand.
“Your dad was my Wade,” Eve says, finally. “More than that, because you and Wade would never—”
“Ew, gross—”
“—but he was my best friend.” Eve doesn’t say that this isn’t entirely true, that she’d had another, better friend before Ted who maybe hadn’t done what Ted did but had…disappeared. Broken her heart and then disappeared. She…shouldn’t be thinking of him right now. “He was my best friend,” she repeats, voice lower, softer, and she feels her throat close up, feels the tears start to well up, but she has to finish this first. “And he decided he wanted a better friend.”
Brendan’s brow furrows. “But he didn’t start avoiding you. You avoided him.”
“If Wade…if he started hanging out with Julian and hanging out with you, how would you feel?”
“I’d make him choose!” Brendan’s voice is dark, angry. Maybe she’s pushed him too far with this analogy. “He can’t be friends with both of us!”
Again, Eve has that feeling that she should correct that – because Wade should definitely be allowed to be friends with both of them – but she presses on anyway. “Your dad didn’t choose me.”
Brendan looks up at her, his eyes wide again. “Can’t you make him change his mind?”
“No.” Eve shakes her head. She doesn’t say that she’s not sure she wants that, not sure that she could get over that hurt even if he asked. Not that he had. Not that he wanted that. In the end, that had made the split easier. She doesn’t have to pretend, doesn’t have to try and smooth anything over. He doesn’t want her anymore. And she doesn’t have to pretend she wants him either.
“He still wants me, doesn’t he?”
Eve stops, then, and even though the ground is cold, she kneels down so that when she cup her son’s face and lies to him, she can stare him in the eye and make sure he believes her. “Of course, he does, Brendan. Your dad loves you. No matter what he does, you are his son, and he will never choose someone else over you.”
Brendan sniffles, pulls one hand out of his pocket, and rubs his nose with its back. “He should’ve picked you,” he says, finally, eyes slightly red. “It’s not fair.”
“No, it’s not.” Eve runs a hand through Brendan’s hair again, pushing it back out of his face, but when she takes her hand back, it just flops forward again. Definitely time for a haircut. “But if I’m not throwing rocks at him, then you shouldn’t—”
Brendan nods. “Okay. I won’t anymore.” He bites his lower lip in an attempt to keep from crying, and then he throws his arms around her. “I’ll choose you, Mom.”
Eve’s breath catches. She doesn’t hesitate, but it takes her a moment before she realizes what’s happening. Then she wraps her arms around Brendan, buries her head in his shoulder, and tries very hard not to let herself cry. She does anyway, drops that will roll off of his windbreaker because it’s made to deflect rain, and her tears are nowhere near as bad as rain. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not or if he changes his mind in the future or not. It’s that he’s said it now, this time, and that means the world to her.
“I love you, Brendan.”
“I love you, too, Mom.”
Later that night, Eve catches Brendan sleeping on his stomach, head curved onto his pillow, one hand holding onto a now tearstained picture of his dad, keeping it half out from under the pillow and half under it. She leans up against the doorframe and tries to smile fondly at him the way she used to do, but she can’t. The aching hole in her heart yells and screams at the familiarity of this moment, at the way Ted should be stopping behind her, leaning down and kissing the top of her head, and saying they’d made a good kid, the way he had a hundred thousand times before this and should be doing a hundred thousand times after.
They had made a good kid.
It was just a shame that he wouldn’t be around to see it.
Eve wipes the tears from the corner of one eye, closes Brendan’s door, and then goes to her room, where she rips her favorite sheets off and replaces them with new sheets, much softer, much higher thread count, much better. Maybe her new favorites, if she likes them enough. Maybe good enough to forget the other ones ever existed.