Aurielo sits at the edge of the windowsill and sits up straighter when I enter.
“Hey, Ash. How was school?” I ask, embracing him in a tight hug.
“Hard,” Ashton says. He scrunches his nose. “They’re making us do math. It’s so confusing.”
I ruffle his hair and kiss his cheek.
“Mom,” he whines and wipes away my kiss.
I laugh under my breath and roll my eyes. At five and he’s already acting like a teenager. Is this what I get to look forward to when he gets older?
“How was work?” Aurielo asks, pushing himself off the windowsill as he stands, arms folded across his chest.
His posture is defensive.
“Better than yesterday,” I say.
I realize I didn’t tell him about Cora and losing her. Now isn’t the time, with Ashton in the room. While he knows that I’m a nurse, I try to shield him from the grief and emotional difficulties of my job.
Aurielo’s brow furrows, but he doesn’t say anything.
“Were you helping him with his schoolwork?” I ask.
“He was checking my answers. But he won’t give me the right ones,” Ashton whines.
Aurielo glances down at Ashton. “You won’t learn if you can’t do it on your own. I won’t be in class with you tomorrow to feed you the answers.”
“You’re mean,” Ashton says. He squeezes me tighter in his embrace.
Aurielo is mean. Not because of how he’s trying to teach Ashton, but because of the other things that he’s done. The atrocities that Ashton is too young to understand.
“How about I help you with your homework?” I suggest. “Maybe we can try to figure out how to come to the answer together.”
He untangles from my embrace and takes my hand, leading me to his new desk. Did Aurielo order that for him?
I bend down, and he shows me his math problems. It’s a multiplication table.
He was doing addition and subtraction at his previous school, and it seems he hasn’t grasped multiplication is different from addition based on every answer on his sheet of paper.
“Have you looked these over yet?” I ask, glancing up at Aurielo.
“Twice,” he says.
* * *
After spending the next hour helping Ashton learn multiplication and then double-checking the answers that he came up with again, he puts away his homework.
Aurielo has already vanished out of the bedroom. I’m not sure if he’s busy interrogating a suspect, making us dinner, or doing some other mobster task that I’m not to know about.
“Do you want to go downstairs and head outside for a bit?” I ask Ashton.
He’s going to say yes.
The garden is the perfect excuse for me to see how much trouble we’ll get into for wandering around the house again.
No one said we had to stay in the bedroom for the rest of the day. If I avoid the basement, I assume I’ll be okay.
That had to be why Alessandro, yesterday, whisked us upstairs.