30. Ashton
Ashton
Ten days. That’s how long it’s been since I stood in that boardroom and told Imogen I love her in front of every suit who’d pay to watch me go down. Ten days, and not one word from her, which is exactly the deal I signed up for when I put it in her hands.
I count them the same way I used to count quarters.
Day one I wanted to get in the car, except I don’t even know where she’s sleeping these days, her own place or Bex’s spare room, and not knowing is its own kind of punishment.
Day three I wrote out a text and deleted it before the second line.
Day six I caught myself figuring out which florist in this city she’d hate the least, then I shut the laptop, because flowers are just a man trying to buy back a call that was never his to make.
The big move’s done. I said it out loud where I can’t take it back, and now it’s hers to sit with.
The hardest thing I’m learning at forty-one is how to leave a thing in someone else’s hands and not grab for it every hour.
So I do the one thing that’s actually mine to do. I show up for my kid.
The new therapist doesn’t try to sell me a fix, which is how I know she’s worth the money.
She gets down on the floor of her office with Luke and a bin of plastic animals and lets him build whatever it is he’s building.
Today it’s a fort made out of two sharks, a giraffe, and what I’m pretty sure is a hippo.
“The giraffe is the guard,” Luke tells her. “He has the longest neck so he sees stuff before it gets here. Even bad stuff. The bad stuff is the most important to see.”
“Smart giraffe,” she says.
“He has to. If he doesn’t watch, then nobody does.”
I sit dead still on a chair built for someone half my size and keep my mouth shut, because she gave me one job in these sessions and it’s the hardest one anybody’s ever handed me.
Wait. Don’t fill the quiet. Don’t fix it.
I’ve spent my whole life getting to the answer before anyone else could, and now I’m paying by the hour to learn how to sit in a room and let my kid find the end of his own sentence.
The therapist catches me by the elevator after.
“You did well in there,” she says.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“That was the well part.”
“That was the well part.” She walks me toward the elevator. “And there’s no shortcut on this, before you ask. A kid doesn’t rebuild trust in one big afternoon. He rebuilds it in a thousand boring ones.”
“I’m not good at boring.”
“I’ve noticed.” She smiles. “But you keep showing up to them, and that’s the only part that was ever going to matter.”
We get burgers after, because she said routines help and I decided Tuesdays are burgers. Luke loves it and eats his in the same strict order every time, bun first, then the whole patty, then the lettuce on its own at the end like a punishment he picked out for himself.
“Dad.”
“Luke.”
“Did you know if a shark stops swimming it drowns? But what if it just gets tired? What’s it supposed to do then?”
“I don’t know, bud. Maybe it finds a quiet bit of water and floats for a while. Even sharks have to get a break somewhere.”
“No, they don’t.” He says it with his mouth full, almost pleased to correct me. “If they stop they sink and die. That’s just true. You can’t float it better, Dad.”
“Sounds exhausting.”
“You used to be like that,” he says, dunking a fry. “Always going. On the phone, and then the other phone, and the computer at the same time as the phone.” He doesn’t look up. “You’re not so much like that now.”
I set my burger down. A month ago I’d have hit him with a question to steer him off it. Now I just take it on the chin, because the therapist says these are the moments that actually do the work.
“No,” I tell him. “I’m not as much anymore.”
“Is it because of your work?”
“Part of it, yeah. I stepped away from work for a while, bud. On purpose.”
His head comes up at that, the fry forgotten. “Did you get fired? Johnny from my old school, his dad got fired and then they had to sell their boat and Johnny cried.”
“I didn’t get fired. I chose to step back.
” I watch him decide whether to buy it, so I tell him what I can because he’ll know if I lie to him.
“Some people did want me gone. But I walked before they could push, on my own say-so. And part of why I did it was you, bud. So I’d have more time.
We won’t have to sell any boats, I promise. ”
He chews that over along with the lettuce. “For more time with me.”
“Yeah.”
“But you really like your work,” he says.
“I love you more than my work. It isn’t even close. It was never close.”
He doesn’t say anything back, but his shoulders come down off his ears half an inch, and he steals a fry off my plate to mark the moment.
“Dad,” he says, after a minute.
“Yeah.”
“Imogen told me once that octopuses have to keep moving or they can’t breathe.”
“That’s sharks, bud.”
“Whatever.” He eats the fry. “Maybe stop being an octopus.”
I look at my kid. “I’m trying.”
“Try faster,” he says, and goes back to his food.
Back home after burgers, I’ve got Luke parked in front of the tank he calls TV when my phone goes. I almost let it ring out, then I see the name and step into the next room to take it, because my lawyer doesn’t call to chat, and Luke doesn’t need to hear the next part.
“It’s done,” he says. “Judge tossed Sophia’s emergency motion this morning. The whole thing, out the door.”
“Tossed it how?”
“On the merits. Her side walked in with the gossip column and a hunch and nothing underneath either one. But that’s not the part you’ll want to hear.
” I can hear him almost enjoying himself, which from this man happens about once a year.
“The judge said on the record that the evidence shows a committed father. Pulled his boy out of a school that failed him, set up tutoring, never once walked off the job. Whatever’s going on in the man’s personal life, she said, he hasn’t abandoned this child a single day.
Sophia handed us the proof in her own filing. ”
I put a hand flat on my desk to keep myself standing.
“You there?” he asks.
“I’m here.” It comes out rougher than I want it to. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. It’s what I do.” He hangs up before I can do it again, because he hates being thanked even more than I hate holding still.
I stand there in the next room for a long moment, my hand still on the desk, and I think about a boy in a supply closet at a school with a crest on the blazer, and how far we’ve come from that morning, and I don’t try to hold the rest of it back.
The nightmares have been letting up. Not gone, the wave still gets him some nights, but it comes less often, and when it does he climbs back down off it faster than he used to.
I want to believe it’s the hours, that a boy who’s quit watching the door for his dad to disappear sleeps a little deeper for it.
His therapist says that’s close to right, that the fear of being left runs under all of it, and that what reaches it isn’t some clever trick, it’s just me, there, again and again, until his body stops bracing for me to walk out.
So I’m there. Every bedtime. Every three in the morning when it comes. Back against his mattress, hand open on the blanket where he can reach it, and I don’t try to fix it anymore. I just stay, and I don’t try to talk him out of it the way I used to. That part I learned off Imogen.
Tonight he goes down easy. I’ve got the rabbit in its exact spot, the door cracked to the width he can stand, the dragon book closed on the nightstand, when he rolls over and looks at me in the low light.
“Is Imogen coming over?”
There it is, the question I’ve braced for every night since she went quiet on us, coming out of the one person I’d burn the city down to spare it.
The old me has the answer ready. Soon, bud. I’m handling it. A clean lie that settles a kid tonight and teaches him by morning that the truth is whatever’s easiest. It sits right there in my mouth, but I don’t reach for it.
“I don’t know,” I tell him, and it scrapes on the way out. “That’s not mine to decide. It’s up to her.”
His face dims a notch, the hope pulling back, and it takes everything I have not to chase it with a promise I’ve got no right to make.
“But you want her to,” he says.
“More than almost anything.”
“Then why isn’t she here? You could just call her. You have her number, I’ve seen it.”
“I could call her, but I’m not going to.”
“Why not?” He pushes up on one elbow, genuinely stumped, because in his world if you want a thing and you can reach the thing, you get the thing. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Because I did something that hurt her feelings, and now she’s the one who gets to decide what happens next.
Not me.” I keep my eyes on his. “If I call her and push, that’s me telling her what to do, and me telling people what to do is what got us here.
So I’m letting her take her time, even though I really, really want to pick up that phone. ”
He frowns, working it over like a math problem he doesn’t like the answer to. “That sounds really hard.”
“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
“Harder than your work?”
“Way harder than my work.”
“Okay.” He lies back down and pulls the blanket up to his chin. “But if she comes back, don’t mess it up again.”
“I’m trying very hard not to.”
“You messed it up pretty bad the first time.”
“I know I did.”
“Like, really bad.”
“I know, bud.”
“I’m just making sure you know.”
“I know.”
“I’d want her to come back. If she wanted to. Just so you know. In case that helps you pick.”
“It’s not my decision, bud. That’s the whole thing I’m trying to teach you, and me, both at the same time.”
“I know.” A yawn swallows the end of it, his eyes already losing the fight. “I just wanted you to know how I voted.”
I stay on his floor until his breathing goes deep and slow, and I don’t do a single thing about the vote hanging in the dark over us both.
The quiet is different now than it was two months ago. It still has weight. But it doesn’t feel like a held breath anymore. It feels like a room that’s waiting on something it actually believes is coming.