Chapter Thirty-Six
The request came through Roz on Tuesday afternoon in about nine words.
“He wants to see them once. Then he says he’ll step back.”
“Step back meaning what.”
“Meaning nothing enforceable, and I want you to understand that up front. His custody request is withdrawn, but the temporary parenting-time order is still in place and he still has parenting time on paper. What he’s telling Preston is that he intends not to use it.
” Papers. “That’s a promise, not an order. Promises expire.”
“Do I have to let him?”
“No. There’s no order compelling this and if you say no, nothing happens.” She stopped. “And now the part you don’t want.”
“Go ahead.”
“If you say no, you decide it. You. Not him, not Kearns. And then it belongs to you, and in eleven years those two are going to be twenty and seventeen and one of them is going to ask you about it.”
I sat with that for a day.
Then on Wednesday at dinner I put it on the table with the bad leg.
“Your dad’s asked to see you one time. This Saturday, an hour, at the picnic tables behind school, with me there the whole time. He’s told his lawyer that after this he’s going to leave it alone.”
Ruby said, “Okay,” around a fork.
Jonah put his down.
“Do we have to?”
And there it was, the same four words, in the same voice, at the same table, six months later.
“No,” I said.
He looked at me.
“That’s the difference,” I said. “In November I had to say yes because a judge said so and I hated it and I said it anyway. This one’s yours.
Both of you get a vote and there’s no wrong answer, and if you say no I’ll call Roz in the morning and that’s the end of it, and I will never bring it up again as long as I live. ”
He sat with that a while.
“Can I tell you tomorrow?”
“You can tell me Friday.”
He came and found me twice on Wednesday and didn’t say anything either time. Once while I was folding towels and once at nine at night when I was on the couch with a laptop.
Both times he stood in the doorway for about fifteen seconds and then went away, and both times I let him go, because I have learned what happens when you reach for that boy while he is still deciding.
He told me Thursday night, in the bathroom doorway, in his pajamas, the way he does everything.
“Yeah. Once.”
“You sure?”
“I want to say something,” he said.
The picnic tables behind Fenwick are on a slab with a chain-link fence on one side and the kindergarten playground on the other, and on a Saturday in May there is nobody there at all.
I sat on the low wall about forty feet off with a coffee, which is a distance I picked on purpose. Close enough that Jonah could see me without turning his head. Far enough that nothing that happened at that table was going to be something I did.
Roz had said one thing on the phone Friday. “Don’t hover and don’t referee. Whatever he came to say, let him say it, and whatever they come back with is theirs.”
“And if it goes badly?”
“Then it goes badly in a public park in daylight with you sitting right there,” she said. “Which is the best available version of badly.”
He came in the truck at ten and he was in jeans and a T-shirt and he had nothing with him. No bag, no folio, no gift. That was the first thing I noticed and I think it was on purpose.
Ruby went and hugged him, because she is six and because she has never once in her life held anything for longer than a week.
He hugged her back and it took him a second to figure out where to put his arms.
They were out there fifty minutes.
I could hear about a third of it, in pieces, when the wind came the right way.
He asked her about first grade and she told him about a girl named Priscilla at some length. He asked her what she was reading and she told him. He asked Jonah about the science fair and got a real answer, four or five sentences, which for that boy in front of that man was a great deal.
At some point Ruby asked him about the baby.
I could not hear the question. I heard the answer, because his voice carries when he’s making himself be gentle.
“He’s not going to be your brother after all, Roo.”
“Oh,” Ruby said.
And then, after a second: “Is he still a baby though?”
“He’s still a baby.”
“Okay,” she said, and went back to whatever she was doing with the wood chips.
Six years old. That is the entire processing of it and I have thought about it a hundred times since, and I have decided it is not shallowness.
She had never met him. He was a fact about a house she went to twice a month, and the fact changed, and she updated it and moved on, which is a thing adults claim to be able to do.
At about the forty-minute mark he said something to Jonah and I saw my son’s shoulders change, and I got up off that wall and walked about fifteen feet closer and stopped.
I heard the rest of it.
“I’d like to try again,” Wade said. “Not this month. I’m not asking you for anything this month. I’m saying at some point.”
“No.”
“You don’t have to decide that today.”
“I decided in October.”
The wind came across the playground and moved the swings.
“Okay,” Wade said.
And then Jonah said the thing he’d been building since Thursday night in a bathroom doorway.
“You’re not our dad.”
Wade did not say anything for a second.
“Because I’m not your blood,” he said.
“No.”
Jonah was sitting on the picnic table with his feet on the bench, and he did not raise his voice and he did not look away, and there was nothing in his face at all.
“That’s not why.”
“Then tell me why.”
“You said we weren’t real about a hundred times.” My son counted something off on his fingers without seeming to notice he was doing it. “In the hallway. At the table. In the car when we were going to Grandma’s that time. In December.”
“Jonah.”
“And every single time you said it, it was because you wanted something.” He put his hand down.
“Not because you were mad. If you were mad it’d be different.
You were never mad. You said it when you wanted Mom to be quiet, or when you wanted me to be quiet, or when you wanted somebody to do something. ”
Wade stood there in the grass by a picnic table behind an elementary school.
“Blood was just the thing you had,” Jonah said. “If you didn’t have that you’d have used something else.”
Nobody said anything for a while.
I have replayed that a great many times, and the piece I keep is that my son was not making an accusation. There was no heat in it anywhere. He was explaining something to a grown man who had not worked it out, patiently, the way you’d explain a rule of a game.
“Okay,” Wade said.
He said it three times that morning. I counted afterward, because I count.
He got Ruby’s hug at the truck and he put his hand out to Jonah, and Jonah shook it, one shake, the way you’d shake hands with somebody’s uncle.
Then he backed out of that lot and pulled onto Fenwick Avenue, and Ruby waved with both arms over her head until the truck was gone, and then dropped them and asked whether we were getting a slushie.
We got a slushie.
She had blue. It stains everything and it is the only flavor she will consider and I have stopped fighting about it.
In the car, out of nowhere, with her mouth completely blue:
“Mom. Did he keep my picture?”
“Which one, baby.”
“The door one. I gave it to him at the lady’s house with the cat.”
“I saw him put it in his folder.”
She thought about that for most of the length of Fenwick Avenue.
“Good,” she said.
“Why good?”
“Because then he’s got one,” said Ruby.
I drove my daughter home on a Saturday in May with a blue mouth in my back seat and did not trust myself to answer that for about four blocks.
She meant it exactly the way it sounds.
She had drawn a picture with a door in the middle of it and one person on the wrong side, and she had handed it to that person, and she was glad he had it, because in her accounting a man ought to have a picture of his family even if he is standing outside it and even if he is the one who built the door.
There is no adult on this earth who would have thought of that.
The final entry came in on the twenty-eighth of May.