Chapter 9
When I get home, Christopher and Gus are on the front steps, and neither of them is as excited about my haircut as I am.
“What happened to your hair?” Gus asks.
“Going for a new summer look,” I say.
“I don’t like it,” Christopher says. Christopher is in so many ways like my kindergarteners. You can count on him for an unfiltered, honest reaction.
“What’s all that stuff?” Gus asks.
“Some clothes I needed.”
He raises his eyebrows at me in the only expression of his father’s that I remember perfectly. It’s time for me to come clean.
“You know what? I’m starving.” I am not starving in the least. I ate my weight in cheese puffs today. “Want to go grab a soft serve at Addie’s?”
There’s a flicker in his eyes. “Sure.” He stands up and stretches. I think he grew since this morning.
“Want to come, buddy?” I ask Christopher like I always do.
He says no like he always does. Getting him to move his body is a lost cause.
He watches over the town from this porch.
It is his domain and his safe place. I squeeze the handles of my shopping bags in gratitude that we get to stay in this house.
Gus gets chocolate and I get vanilla, and then halfway through we trade so we each have a bit of both. We could get swirls, as we always discuss, but we like this methodology better—getting something totally different at the end.
“Time for the plot twist,” he says every time when we switch.
We’re finishing our cones on a bench under the shade of an old sycamore tree in the park across from Addie’s ice cream shop.
This tree is nearly two hundred years old, with craggy roots that reach out over the ground like fingers gripping the earth.
I feel unusually safe sharing ice cream with my son by this tree.
“So I have some weird stuff to talk about.”
“Oh God, Mom.” Gus covers his face with his cone, and suddenly we’re both thinking about sex.
“No, jeez. No,” I say. “I just mean I have another part-time job and it’s a total secret.
I don’t like keeping things from you, but you have to promise to keep it quiet, like, Pop and I had to sign an NDA and Christopher can’t know or the whole town will know.
I wasn’t actually at Hog Tied Thursday night. ”
He turns all the way toward me and tents his fingers in dramatic anticipation. “I’m listening,” he says.
“You know the Whitfields, right? They have the big house and the company that owns a ton of real estate?” He nods, duh.
“Well, the oldest one, Stewart, is my age. I actually struck him out in baseball once. His fiancée dumped him really publicly and he’s trying to get promoted, and he’d be in a better position if he had a girlfriend. ”
“And you’re the girlfriend.”
“Pretend.”
“He couldn’t get someone young?”
I shove him with my shoulder, and he laughs.
“I’m the best he could do. So I have all these new clothes, and the hair, and I’m going to go to some events with him. And he’s going to pay for Pop’s new roof.”
He laughs. “That’s crazy.”
“It’s completely crazy,” I say.
He pops the end of his cone into his mouth and is quiet for a bit.
Finally he says, “I wish I could pretend I played third base for the Red Sox for a while. Tag some guy out. Get him into a hotbox with home plate.” The daydream takes over his face.
It’s still so easy for him to step in and out of his own reality. “It’d be a bummer when it was over.”
“Well, I get to keep the clothes and the roof.”