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When Jamie burnt his boots in that ritual and talked about wanting to make his mom proud, he hadn’t spoken to her in months.
It isn’t that he doesn’t want to. He does, but things are… complicated. He thought about it after the ritual. Almost sent her a text that night when he was riding the rush of Dani’s tequila. The night felt good, like he was part of the team with a gaffer that really, truly believed he could be a better person, and if he was trying to be better, then his mom was probably a good place to start.
He decided to wait till morning. Then, it turned out that it didn’t really matter what Jamie thought because he was sent back to Manchester City the next day.
It’s almost a year later now. Jamie has been at Man City, left Man City, did a reality TV show, returned to Richmond, and he still hasn’t called his mom.
A lot of mornings these days, while Jamie gets ready and eats his breakfast, he’ll connect his phone with his sound system and play the music that his mom used to. The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, Tina Turner. And he’ll stare at the dark screen of his phone, trying to visualize what it would be like to pick up the phone, open his contacts, and call her.
He doesn’t.
—
Julia Preston—previously Tartt for a short-lived marriage—has always been an iron jaw, leather tough and streetwise. She’s a battler. Even now, when Jamie thinks about her, he thinks about her in the doorway of their shitty flat at night, the hall lamp behind her casting a long shadow, a tired smile on her face, and her grease stained apron still around her waist. He thinks about her hand on the doorknob as she holds a box of leftovers from the restaurant in the other.
She is as tall as gentle giants when she asks, “Hey, Jam Tart, you waiting up for me again?”
—
The lads are high off their winning streak in the FA Cup and pregaming at Isaac’s place. There’s no practice tomorrow, and they’ve all taken that as permission to go out. Bumbercatch is on music. It’s some obscure thing with a bass that thrums through Jamie’s veins.
Somehow they get on the topic of the best thing they’ve ever spent money on.
“My Lambo!” Colin answers immediately.
“My wine cellar,” Richard says. “I had them re-lay all the stones to optimize the temperature regulation.”
Jamie tilts his head back against the coach and rolls his eyes fondly. These boys are all so predictable. He’s had some of Richard’s precious wine, and he’s feeling warm and loose. He couldn’t really taste the difference between any other wine he’s ever had, but maybe the good feeling in his chest comes from that.
“What about you, Jamie?” Dani asks, bumping their shoulders together.
“I bought me mum a house,” Jamie responds.
He’s surrounded by a chorus of cooing, and he briefly freezes. He doesn’t know why he didn’t lie. Say something about a car or his clothes or his own house or some shit.
“In Manchester?” asks Isaac.
“Yeah, nice neighborhood too.” Jamie shrugs. He hadn’t meant to be so honest, but in for a penny, in for a pound, he supposes. He’s been trying out this one of eleven shit that Ted’s got them on. “Not too nice though. Not like posh.”
“Why not? Could you not afford it?” Jan Maas asks.
“Fuck off. I could’ve,” Jamie insists even though at the time he’d only just started out at Man City and realistically could not have bought Julia a great, big house. “Mum grew up in council estates. She would’ve eaten those posh ladies for breakfast.”
A couple of players laugh, and Jamie smiles too, recalling Julia’s face when he’d suggested it.
“But there’s a garden. She’s always wanted to have a garden. She grows like tomatoes and shit.”
Suddenly, he’s in the yard of his mom’s place, basking in the sun while she bitches about the perfectly nice, middle-income ladies in the gardening club. He misses it. He misses her.
“Is your mom not a fan of football?” Sam asks.
“Nah, she is.” Jamie frowns. Doesn’t Sam remember his story about her buying him his first boots? She’d pulled doubles through the holidays to get him good ones. “Why?”
“Well, we’ve never seen her at a game,” Sam says. His eyes dart around the room like he’s looking for back-up. A few of the lads nod in agreement.
Jamie opens his mouth but nothing comes out. It’s like whenever he thinks about calling her. His chest tightens up like a sunken stone, heavy. All the things he needs to say get stuck on their way up.
“She’s just busy,” he says eventually.
Jamie’s saved by the bell. Literally. Isaac had set an alarm on his phone for when they had to leave for the club. He’s become unbearably responsible since taking over as captain.
Jamie has never been the best at making friends. He’s got this natural talent for getting under people’s skin. He thinks he’s finally started getting the hang of it though, so he doesn’t want to have to admit to this team that it’s his fault. It’s his fault that Julia never comes to his games and hasn’t for years.
—
“Jam Tart, where are you taking me?” Julia demanded. She wore a blindfold and refused to get out of the car.
“Mum, please just trust me. We’re almost there,” Jamie pleaded, standing at the passenger side with the door open.
“Better men than you have tried to traffic me.”
Jamie laughed, catching Julia’s hand in his and tugging. “I ain’t trying to traffic you, Mum.”
“Who knows! Maybe your contract ain’t paid you enough and now you gotta sell my kidneys.”
“Fine, sorry for trying to do a surprise. Take off the blindfold then.”
Jamie let go of her and stepped back with a smirk. Ready to witness her reaction to the best surprise in the whole fucking world.
Julia took off the blindfold and blinked wildly in the spring sun. “Where the fuck are we?”
“Come on, Mum. Get out the car now. Come see the house.”
Jamie grabbed her hand and started tugging again. She came along this time.
“The house? What house?”
“Your house.”
“You bought me a house?”
Julia stopped walking, shell-shocked on the sidewalk. It really wasn’t anything fancy. Just a townhouse, connected to the one next to it. But the street was clean and the awnings had been freshly painted white. The door was a pretty, pure kind of green. Jamie had already paid someone to set up the yard with some garden lots, just waiting for Julia to work her magic. She managed to grow herbs in their kitchen sill with windows that didn’t even crack. Who knows what she could do with a whole ass yard?
“Yeah! You gotta come inside though. There’s like three whole rooms and a living room that’s separate from the kitchen. Two bathrooms and a little backyard too.”
Jamie tried to get Julia to go up the walkway again, but she dug her heels in. With all her strength, she yanked him back and into a hug. He had more than a head on her, but she threw her arms around his neck, dragging him down to her level.
“Thank you, baby,” Julia said, sniffling into Jamie’s neck.
He ducked his head down to hide his teary eyes in her hair. “It ain’t much, but it’s yours. If you want it.”
“I do. And I’m moving when you got a day off, so we can set up your bedroom together.”
“Alright, Mum.”
—
After seeing Dr. Fieldstone the first time, Jamie just kind of kept going back. Not regularly, but often enough. Dr. Fieldstone had really encouraged him to return after his first session. Even though Jamie had only talked about the team, something he said must’ve made her think he needed it.
He resented it at first, as if there’s something so broken about him that a professional can tell at first contact. But then he thinks about the stuff his dad does or talking to his mom again or even how he acted the last couple of years, and there’s that heavy stone at his core that just keeps getting tighter and tighter. Talking to Dr. Fieldstone temporarily lightens the pressure.
Today, Dr. Fieldstone starts by asking about his favorite holiday he’s ever taken.
Jamie raises an eyebrow at the introduction of small talk.
“I’m trying something new,” Dr. Fieldstone answers with a mild smile.
Jamie accepts it with a shrug. “Don’t know. Guess the resort we did Lust Conquers All at was nice.”
“That was still work though.”
“I guess so. Yeah, you’re right.” Jamie thinks about it for a long beat and then says, “I went to Amsterdam with me mum a few years ago.”
“What was your favorite thing about it?”
“Well, it’s Amsterdam, ain’t it? Nothing not to love about the place.”
“Was that your first time going to Amsterdam?”
“Nah, went with me dad a couple years before that.”
“Ah, I see,” is all Dr. Fieldstone responds with. They’ve talked around the issue of Jamie’s dad enough at this point for her to get a sense of what that trip was like for him. “Do you feel that the trip with your mum was making up for something?”
“Yeah, yeah, it was. We did all the tours and stuff and ate stroopwafel. Only… well.” Jamie looks away from Dr. Fieldstone, shove his hands into his pockets, and shrugs. “I was a bit of a prick to her.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know. It just felt like me dad was everywhere still, and I’m always worse to her when he’s around.”
Jamie’s surprised by how easily this explanation comes to him. He supposes that the events of the past year have helped him swallow that harsh truth. That his dad makes him a worse person. That he wasn’t the nicest to his mom in recent years.
“What is your relationship with your mum like, Jamie?” Dr. Fieldstone prompts in her no-ripples-in-the-pond, therapist voice.
“We don’t really talk right now, but I send her money every month.”
“Why do you do that if you aren’t speaking?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter anyway. She always tries to send the money back. Can we talk about something else?”
Dr. Fieldstone nods slowly, jotting down some notes on her pad. “What would you like to talk about, Jamie?”
“Don’t know. What was your favorite holiday?”
—
When Jamie was young, before he started at the Academy and James started coming around again, he often felt like he and his mom lived in a world of two. It was them against everyone else, and she was his hero.
Some days they had nothing to eat. Like really nothing. So Julia would order from a local takeaway and sneak up to the rooftop to smoke cigarettes while waiting out the delivery man. Jamie would be tasked with the tough job of acting confused when the guy showed up, swearing up and down that his mom had just gone out to the shops and would be back soon. Without fail, the delivery man would get tired of waiting and just give Jamie the food.
Jamie would go out onto the landing and stand on his tiptoes to see over the railing, watching the delivery guy disappear around the corner. Then, he’d whistle up to the roof, fingers in his mouth and car alarm loud — just like Julia taught him. Julia would pop her head out with a broad grin and two thumbs up. Five minutes later, the two of them would be tucked back in their flat with their haul spread out on the floor.
Julia explained once, “We can’t do this often, you get me? They’ll catch on, but these blokes all got schedules to keep and no one wants to wait around for someone like that. Plus once the food’s out, it’s no good for them anyway. Gotta give it to someone. Might as well be a kid.
“It’s a good thing you’re so damn cute,” she said, pinching the bridge of his nose and making him squeal.
When Jamie went to live at the Academy, he had the security of three square meals a day for the first time, but he often wondered what his mom did on those days when she had nothing to eat. Like really nothing, without him around to trick the delivery man anymore.
Jamie used to lie awake in his bed after a phone call home and swear to himself that when he made it big as a footballer, he’d make her life better. Save her. He doesn’t know when he stopped believing that he could do that.
—
After, well, after. Jamie lets Roy drive him home from Wembley.
They don’t talk much in the car, but Jamie can see the gears turning in Roy’s head as he starts to piece together all the pathetic parts that constitute one, Jamie Tartt. Jamie is too tired to let that bother him.
What does bother him is that, even with Roy’s general constipation towards expressing himself, Jamie can tell the question that he wants to ask. And it’s so asinine, so far from anything Jamie’s ever felt towards Roy that he wouldn’t even know where to begin to address it if Roy ever said it aloud.
Roy might be grumpy and yell-y and threaten to punch people in the dick, but he’s not Jamie’s dad. And even when they did physically rumble, it was just locker room shit. It doesn’t matter. Jamie has seen Roy with Keeley. When she walks into a room, infamous hard man Roy Kent melts like so much candy. Jamie knows the rough kind of way that Roy shows care. He cut his teeth upon it.
Maybe that’s what gives him the courage to finally do it that night. Feeling that kind of care again in Roy’s hug. Finally punching his dad probably also helped. It was definitive.
Jamie goes home that night, sits on the floor of his room with his back against his bed and his phone on the floor. Listens to the dial tone ring out, both hoping for an answer and dreading it.
Click.
“Jamie?”
That fucking stings, Jamie thinks as he hears his actual name. Again, he has no one to blame besides himself.
“Hey, Mum.”
“Jamie.”
He hears a sigh on the other side. It’s late, he suddenly realizes, glancing at his watch. Maybe she was asleep. Maybe this was a bad time but… she still answered.
The silence drags between them. Jamie can imagine it stretching out like powerlines between his house in London and hers in Manchester.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
Another sigh. Then, quiet huffing which means that Julia is crying. They’re both silent criers.
“Me too,” she says.
“I’m done with him. Really. I’m sorry I didn’t listen before.”
“Oh, oh, I’m glad. I’m—oh, it’s alright. I’m just—I’m glad he won’t be around to bother you anymore.”
Jamie starts to cry, as hushed as her. “I’m just sorry.”
“Me too, baby. Me too.”
—
The last time that Jamie saw Julia, she’d been drunk. The thing is, Julia rarely drinks to the point of intoxication, but people tend to fall together by their vices. So it was with James Tartt and Julia Preston.
While James was almost always fucked up in some way, Julia’s benders were far and few inbetween and usually triggered by James or another man who screwed her over. As a kid, Jamie couldn’t decide which one terrified him more. Sure, his dad rampaged, but his mom would stay in bed for days, only getting up long enough to vomit or drink more.
Hell, even as an adult, Jamie isn’t sure which one is worse.
It was after a home match. They’d lost, and Jamie was subbed off the pitch after only a couple of minutes for a fuck up. Jamie knew what was coming, so he lingered back in the locker room, took his sweet ass time in the shower, hoping that his dad would’ve left already. But luck has never been on Jamie’s side, and James was waiting for him in the empty lot. Ready to berate him and swing a mean backhand when Jamie tried to defend himself. Thankfully, no one else saw that, and James could walk off with his mates, laughing all the way.
Jamie went out after that. He was supposed to go back to Julia’s tonight, but he couldn’t bring himself to. So he went out instead and hooked up with some model in the bathroom. By the time he made it to his mom’s place, it was well into the night.
He let himself in with his spare key. The living room was dark, but he could immediately smell cheap vodka.
“Mum?”
“In here.”
Her voice sounded from the kitchen where a distant light glowed. She wasn’t at the doorway, and there were no long shadows. Jamie scrambled to peel off his shoes and sped across the living room. She was sitting at the kitchen island, her bare feet slipping off the bottom rung of the stool. The single light above her washed her out in the contrasting dark. She was haggard and small, a rough hand tugging through her hair as she stared at Jamie with bloodshot eyes.
“What are you doing?” Jamie asked. He was horrified as he spotted the mostly empty vodka bottle on the kitchen counter.
“Waiting for you, Jam Tart,” Julia said, lyrical and cutting at the same time. “You forget about your mum?”
“No, I didn’t. What the fuck, Mum?” Jamie snatched the bottle away from her.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that. Most of it spilled on the floor anyway.” Julia snorted, stumbling onto her feet. She rounded the kitchen counter and looked up at Jamie with sad eyes. She ran a thumb along the apple of his cheek where his dad’s ring had dug in just a little. “I think you forgot about me, and I can guess who you were with.”
Jamie pushed her hand away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Course you don’t. You never do.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I can’t fucking help you if you just act like I’m crazy whenever I bring it up!” Julia shouts.
“Mum, I’m sorry to break it to you, but you are acting crazy right now. Let’s just—fuck, let’s just sit down, alright?” Jamie said, herding her towards her chair.
She twisted free of him and made a laugh more like a sob. “What did I do wrong, Jam Tart? Why do you love him more than me?”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!”
“Really? You don’t?” She crowded into his space again. Her hand on his face was as gentle as anything though. “You gonna tell me how you got this cut then? Or are you gonna lie to me again?”
“I got fouled. It’s no big deal.” Jamie’s heart was beating in his fucking throat.
“Bullshit. I watched your match on the telly. Nobody fucking touched you,” Julia swore.
“I don’t know what you were watching then because it happened on the pitch.”
Julie made that weird laugh-sob noise again and pulled away. With the new distance between them, she looked at him with an expression he’d never seen before.
“You know, I met your dad after I ran away from home. Me own dad used to beat the shit out of me, and I told myself I’d never live like that again. And I did my best not to, but I suppose I’m just a dowsing rod for bad men. Maybe that’s really true, and I’m only good for one type of love, but you were meant to be different. You were gonna be better.
“Now I can’t decide if I’m sorry that I couldn’t get you away from him, or if you are him. You go to him, and you come back bruised, and you won’t tell me why, then you treat me like shit when I try to care. Fuck, sometimes I look at you and all I fucking see is him.”
Julia collapsed back in her chair. Her eyes were glassy, and Jamie didn’t know if she was still seeing him anymore or if she was seeing the years passed over.
“I can’t do it, Jam Tart,” she said. “If you say that he ain’t done nothing to you and you still wanna keep him around, then I can’t. I can’t fucking do it.”
Jamie didn’t have any follow-up questions. He peeled out of there, leaving Julia with the almost empty bottle and all her overlapping nightmares.
That was the last time they spoke.
It was awful and brutal, and sometimes Jamie can’t decide if he should be mad at his dad, his mom, or himself, but when Jamie remembers that day, all he can think about was the fact that she watched his match.
When Jamie was fifteen, Julia stopped coming to his matches. It was after his parents’ second time of trying to make it work, and she couldn’t stand to be around James anymore. Jamie had made it known to her that he’d rather have his dad there, and that was that. He didn’t know that she kept following his matches. They never talked about it—another line item in the list of things they wouldn’t speak about.
—
“Mum, I fucked it,” Jamie groans, stuffing his head into his arms at his dining table.
“What’d you do?” Julia responds. In the background, there’s the sound of a knife on a cutting board.
“Don’t wanna talk about it,” Jamie grumbles. “Tell me what you’re making?”
On their third call together, Julia told him that she’d started learning how to cook. Like properly cook. Julia did wonders with microwavable meals and cheese toasties, but that was about the extent of her cooking ability. Jamie probably spent more time cooking for the two of them than she did between all her jobs. Now, she has access to fresh produce in her garden and enough money to buy all the weird little sauces and spices at the organic grocery store down the street. She claims it’s just something to do in the evenings, but Jamie can hear the pride when she mentions another recipe she managed to get right.
“Zucchini carbonara. It’s tricky ‘cause I gotta get the zucchini sliced real thin,” she responds. “You’re not getting out of this though, Jam Tart. You called for a reason. ‘Sides, talking’s good for you, so spit it out.”
Jamie groans, knowing that she is right. “I told Keeley that I love her.”
“Oh, now why would you go and do that?” Julia’s stopped chopping on her end.
“I don’t know. We were at a funeral and all, and it felt like she should know how much she means to me before either of us kicked it.”
“But she’s in a relationship. She’s probably worried that you want to get back with her.”
“It’s not that!”
“Are you sure?”
“I just—someone had just died. It fucked with my head, and I just thought that she should know how good she is.”
“Alright, then you need to make that clear, baby.”
“Okay, death’s freaky though,” Jamie mumbles, but even just talking to his mom helps him put into perspective all his messy, out-of-order actions.
“Eh, it’s all a part of life, ain’t it?”
“Sure.”
Jamie doesn’t mention that the mere notion of Julie dying any time soon sends electric currents down his spine. He would miss her forever.
“I was thinking, maybe I could come stay with you for a bit once the off-season starts? If you’re good with that.”
Julia doesn’t respond for a long beat. Then, she says quietly, reverently, “You’re coming home, Jam Tart?”
“If you want me to.”
“Yeah, I want you to.”
Jamie is trying so very hard to be a better man. He’s going to apologize to Roy at training soon, and he’s going home. He’s going to see his mom. These things should not be a revelation, but unfortunately for Jamie, they are.
When Jamie said that he loves Keeley, he meant that in the complex map of what love means to him, she was a cornerstone. That her breaking his heart set him on another path of what kind of person he wants to be, that he recognizes that he didn’t love her well enough.
When Jamie says I love you , he means that he appreciates the effort. He means thank you. Jamie learned love like work for it. He means that he learned that he has to work to be loved, but also that he needs the people who love him to work for it or he can’t believe it’s real. Jamie craves love that he can’t have and only knows how to push the edges of the ones he can. He did it to Keeley. He did it to Julia. He’s trying to be better. He’s trying to come home.
—
In Jamie’s teenage years, when he would come home from the Academy during off-season, sometimes he and Julia would have screaming matches so loud that the downstairs neighbor would start banging a broomstick against the ceiling to shut them up. Jamie and Julia would stand on opposite sides of the living room, the floor thumping beneath them with the ire of their neighbor, chests heaving with the effort of their yelling.
When he was sixteen, he came home from spending a weekend with James and his mates and ended up with his first and absolutely inadvisable tattoo, tucked in the corner of his bicep. Julia flipped when she saw it, and the fighting started again.
“After everything I’ve done for you, this is how you pay me back?” Julia yelled. It was her favorite line in their arguments those days.
Truthfully, the guilt of it was enough to chew through Jamie’s stomach lining, but he was too young and too filled with anger to understand why she was so worked up about a dumb tattoo. Jamie hadn’t been popular at the Academy when he started there, a little kid trying to keep up with the big boys. The tattoo made him seem tough, cool. Why couldn’t Julia understand that? Why couldn’t she understand that in a weekend of being shoved around and laughed at by his dad and his mates, the trip to the tattoo shop felt like a blessing of sorts?
“So fucking what? I didn’t ask you to do any of that. If it were so fucking tough, why’d you even have me?” Jamie spat back.
Julia had frozen. Her face crumbled like a sandcastle in a tidal wave. The thumping of the neighbor finally broke her out of it. She turned her back to him and left the room without another word.
Jamie stormed off too, trying to suppress the resurgent guilt roiling in his gut. He grabbed his ball from by the door and sped off down the street and to the park where he was still good.
—
It’s the last game of the season, and Richmond is getting promoted, and Jamie Tartt is on top of the world. Caught in the crush of bodies from this team that is becoming something like a family, Jamie’s heart is beating through his back, and he is a god.
Jamie thinks that every football player worth their salt can pinpoint the first moment they fell in love with the sport, with winning. That first rush of Heisenberg blue. Jamie knows that he remembers his.
It was spring or maybe summer. It was warm. His neck was hot, and he was sweating through his t-shirt. Julia took them to the local church for a food and clothes drive, picking up canned peas and new pants for Jamie. Whenever they went, Jamie would rally with a group of other kids and kick a ball around in the lot.
That day, one of the church volunteers had brought out two “Caution: Wet Floor” signs to mark opposite goals. Jamie was up against an older kid, and following the instinct of his feet, twisted his seven-year-old body into his approximation of a shoulder feint. He whooshed past the other boy and nailed a shot straight at the yellow sign, knocking it over.
Jamie heard a cheer from behind him and raucous laughter. He turned and saw Julia with her arms open, the plastic bag of food and clothes forgotten at her feet.
“That was brilliant, Jam Tart!” she said.
Jamie laughed and rushed straight into her arms. That feeling right there? Lifeblood.
Most top athletes spend their entire careers chasing that. It’s unstoppable, and it’s revelatory, and it’s bordering on religious. It’s coming home and falling in love and all those good feelings.
Richmond getting promoted is definitely one of those moments. Cheering with the team out on the pitch, getting a headbutt and a hug from one Roy Kent. Jamie throws an arm around Dani and twists his body to the stands, and for the first time in nearly a decade, looks into the crowd, expecting—no, hoping—to see Julia.
—
The first day of the off-season, Jamie drives to Manchester. He arrives just in time for lunch, and he sits in his Ashton Martin, staring at the fat tomatoes and the green door.
Eventually, he works up the nerve to get out. He’s pulling his duffle bag from the trunk when the green door swings open.
Julia stands in the frame, one hand on the doorknob. She is as tall as gentle giants when she asks, “Jam Tart, what are you loitering on my curb for?”
Jamie’s feet carry him the rest of the way to her, the trunk of his car gaping like a waiting mouth behind him. When he reaches her, she doesn’t hesitate to hug him. Despite all the time apart, despite all the hurting words between them. He folds in on himself, like he’s been given the permission to love again.
“Was waiting for you,” Jamie confesses into the side of her head.
—
Jamie plans to spend a week with Julia.
Every night he sleeps in a room that had been redecorated to look like his room as a teenager. It’s a bit of a mind-fuck, kinda like time traveling and doubly freaky to look up at a Roy Kent poster now that he knows the real dude is like, a granddad and unbelievably lame. But when Julia had moved into this new place, she’d insisted on transferring everything from his room in the old flat. Jamie hadn’t lived full-time with her since he was fourteen, and the decor of his room reflected that. She thought it was hilarious.
He gardens with her, and they cook together, and it is the most peaceful time that they have had together in years. But Jamie is unsettled. There was always a tension, a chased feeling, that used to follow Julia around like a specter. It’s missing now. She is gentler, softer, and it’s starting to freak him out.
It nears the end of the week. They’re sitting out in the garden on these bright blue lawn chairs. Jamie is wearing swim trunks and an open linen shirt. Julia is matching in a swim top and board shorts. The sprinkler is on, and they bask in the sun with water periodically cooling their legs. Julia grins and waves at anyone passing by on the sidewalk who looks affronted by their audacity.
Jamie has quite literally never seen his mom this content in her life, and it’s stressing him out.
“Mum, you’re good, right?”
“Huh?” Julia moves her sunglasses onto her head, her brows crinkling. “Yeah, I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Don’t know. Never really seen you like this before.”
“Like what?”
“Like relaxed and calm and all.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“Yeah, it is. I guess, just can’t help but wonder why.”
Julia sighs, sitting up straight and twisting to face him completely. “Jamie, I need to apologize.”
“For what?” Jamie splutters.
“For what I said to you. Last time you were here.” Julia holds up a hand to cut off Jamie’s protests. “And for some of the stuff I said and did when you were younger.”
“You don’t have to apologize for that, Mum.” Jamie shifts in his seat, twisting the drawstring of his shorts. “I said and did bad stuff too.”
“Sure, but I was the adult, and I put a lot of stuff on you when you were a kid. It weren’t fair, but I didn’t know any better. I was so young when I had you.”
Julia was only eighteen when she had Jamie. It strikes him hard in the sternum that when she was his age now, Jamie was already seven, playing footie in the church parking lot well enough to draw attention. How did she ever do it?
“I know,” says Jamie.
“Anyway, I don’t think I realized any of this until after we stopped talking. It’s taken me time. One thing I realized is that I was wrong. You aren’t like James at all, but you are like me. And we’re fighters. You ever heard of Don Quixote?”
“No?”
“It’s some old book. One of the girls from the club made us watch a movie of it for a wine night. It was a fucking drag, but there was this part where Don Quixote tried to fight a windmill.”
“What? A windmill?” Jamie was beyond confused. Who the fuck fights a windmill?
“Yeah, it were weird, but then the girls explained to me that it was about like, imaginary enemies. When you’re a fighter, it’s this mode you live in, and you get so used to fighting, that everything and everyone starts to look like an enemy.” Julia leans across the space between them, taking Jamie’s hand in her own. “What I’m saying is, you’re like me. We gotta start learning how to stop fighting.”
Growing up with Julia had been tough sometimes. She's an intense woman. When you're a kid and someone was mean to you at school, you want your mom to hug you and tell you that things are going to be alright. Not threaten to pop the tires on the other boy's bike. Julia did that once, and they were both called into the office at Jamie's school about "appropriate emotional responses." So he gets what she means. They are a pair of fighters, a world of two.
“Okay, Mum,” Jamie says quietly, running a thumb over the back of her hand. “Would you mind if I stayed longer?”
Julia beams at him. They have the same soft hair, the same eyes, the same curve to their cheeks. When she smiles, Jamie remembers where his face comes from.
“Would love that, Jam Tart.”
—
A couple months down the line, Jamie is in front of a windmill in Amsterdam in the middle of the night, and he suddenly remembers Julia’s butchered explanation of Don Quixote and starts laughing.
“The fuck are you laughing about?” Roy demands, bristling like the very grumpy and very harmless house cat that he is.
“Nothing. Don Quixote.”
“You’re so fucking weird.”
Jamie rolls his eyes. A bold claim from a man that yells ‘whistle’ instead of investing in a plastic one. “Whatever, old man. Let’s head back.”
Jamie waits until Roy has gracelessly turned his bike around, gravel crunching on the path, and offers one last look over his shoulder. The windmill stays a windmill.