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She doesn’t know for sure that the boy living in her house is her son. She birthed him, sure, remembers that as well as anything. But if she hadn’t been there for it, she wouldn’t’ve picked this boy out as hers. He’s not like them. Not like her, not like his father. Not like anyone around the place, really.
When he was a baby, he was always screaming. Shrieking and fussing about some thing or another. And he was ravenous. Always grabbing her breast when he was smaller, never content to leave her be. Once he was old enough to eat solids, he would cram any piece of food he could get his greedy little hands onto into his hungry maw without so much as a by your leave. Like a bottomless pit, he was. And never grateful for any of it, either, the little snot. He stole, too, once he was big enough to reach the counters. How many times had she whacked his wandering hands with a spoon while cooking? Too many to count. And sometimes she’d catch him wolfing down some piece of food out in the alley behind the house she knew he couldn’t have stolen from her kitchen. She’d punish him for it, of course, give him a few good licks and lock him in the house, but he always got back out again eventually.
He was eerie, the boy that was supposed to be her son. Something lurked behind those dark eyes that spooked her. He just watched, watched them all unceasingly. At least when he wasn’t absorbed in one of those books of his. She’d certainly never taught him to read something like that, pages upon pages of dense little text and words near longer than her forearm. She’d taught him proper useful stuff, easy sums and enough reading to get by. He’d taken to it like a fish to water. And he just loved to flaunt it. Doing sums in his head, divisions even, without even counting on his fingers. He’d wait just long enough, long enough for it to be clear that she was struggling, counting on her fingers, before he’d announce the answer in that lackadaisical tone of his. He had no respect, that boy. He’d wormed his way into doing the store’s books and as soon as he had squirmed his way in, he’d started making demands, like he had the right. “Get a different leather supplier, Father” this, and “We haven’t got the money for that this month” that. Insolent boy! What right had he to tell his parents – they who fed him and clothed him and kept a roof over his head – what they ought to do? What would a child even know about money? And no matter how often they told him to shut it, the boy insisted on clinging to the purse strings tight as a miser’s fist.
And he lied, she knew he did. She couldn’t prove it, but she knew. A mother always knows. She’d found some complicated little toy stuffed under his bed, something she knew she certainly hadn’t bought him. She didn’t see the point in such fiddly mechanical bits of junk for children. When she’d confronted him about it, told him he couldn’t be stealing things like that, the boy’d had the very nerve to insist that he’d made it himself. Sometimes a bit of punishment would get him squealing, get him to admitting the nasty things he’d done. But just to spite her, the wretch had refused to admit his lies. He’d curled his stringy body around the thing as though to protect it and not spoken a word, barely even let out a whimper. Even when she’d got her hands on the thing, even then he’d refused to give up the lie. She’d had no choice but to smash it. She couldn’t have something like that in the house where the guard might find it and know it was stolen. Then he’d begged. Then he’d screamed. But even then, he had refused to tell her the truth. He’d had the nerve to fake tears for the dammed piece of junk, as though he’d cared about the damn thing. And when she’d told him to stop with the crocodile tears, he’d had the audacity to pretend to be afraid of her, cowering there with his hands over his head like he’d thought she would beat him. She’d seen the gleam in his eye though. She knew it was all some petty child’s manipulation. The lies never stopped with that whelp.
Her husband had debts, she knew this. She didn’t trust the boy, not at all, and she checked and double checked every bit of work he did on the books. She knew they were deep, deep in the hole and only getting deeper with every month that passed. She also knew that there wasn’t a way out, not for people like them. And then a woman arrived. She arrived at their shop one day, a day when Enver was out of her hair and off on the streets doing things only the gods knew about. She was short, with long, beautiful dark hair, hair like she’d had before her husband and that boy had turned her grey before her time. “I bring the solution to all your problems,” the woman had said without prompting.
And oh, she had. She really, really had.