The boots stopped thumping against the carpet.
The air smelled of him.
Still, I didn’t look up.
“Where are you going?” he demanded. And that’s what it was. He didn’t ask questions, he demanded answers.
I brushed crumbs off Nathan’s shirt. Somehow, even though I’d cleaned his hands immediately after his breakfast, he had managed to get oatmeal on his shorts. I didn’t worry about it, you could barely notice, we didn’t have time to change, and he was a kid, they were always gonna get dirty. Messy. Trying to get his clothes clean was a losing battle.
His hair was combed, his teeth were brushed, he didn’t have anything sticky on his face. That was winning.
“To church,” I replied, squeezing Nathan’s cheek and winking at him.
He grinned back and my heart skipped. My child was grinning with no shadows behind his eyes. Maybe those twenty-four hours wouldn’t haunt him.
They would haunt me. For every day of my life.
But I could be okay with haunting memories if my child was unscathed from them. Gladly I’d take them.
Granted, he was holding his stuffed bunny, Feebo, in his right hand, by the ear so he dangled almost to the floor. I couldn’t separate him from it. I’d explained to Hannah, who was kind and understanding. Perhaps because she felt bad about giving him to his father in the first place.
But it wasn’t her fault.
I hadn’t told her to watch out for him, hadn’t thought I’d needed to. He had proof, a badge, a friendly face. They were fooled, just like the rest of the world.
I wondered how long the friendly face had stayed with my son, the lack of shadows told me most of the time, but the clutching of the bunny worried me.
I didn’t let the worry show—no parent did—and I let him take the bunny wherever he wanted.
It was his way of dealing with complex emotions and situations that no child should have to process.
“Church?” Lance repeated.
I focused on him. He was standing in the middle of the living room, still looking absolutely comical amongst all of my things.
“Yes,” I replied, snatching my purse from the coffee table and putting it over my shoulder. “You’re most welcome to come.”
His eyes widened only slightly on his granite face, communicating a nonverbal ‘no way in hell’ response to me without cursing in front of Nathan.
I noticed that he was very careful with his words in front of my son. He still didn’t speak much, I was sure he had some kind of daily quota of words he couldn’t go past or something, but the words he did speak were at least seventy percent curse words.
When you had a kid, and slammed your finger in the door and let out one muttered “shit, bastard, motherfucker,” under your breath and then had to deal with your three-year-old singing it like his new favorite tune for the next week straight, you learned to curse only in your head. Most of the time.
That and my parents had cursed and spewed vile, bigoted views out, regardless of whether I was in the room or not. Granted, they barely actually noticed when I was in the room.
But my son would never be exposed to that.
He could curse when he was old enough to know what the words meant and didn’t do it in unacceptable places.
I did not expect Lance, the big, bad, scary man who seemed to command violence just by breathing to watch his Ps and Qs around my son, but he did.
He didn’t change much else about himself but I got the idea that this was not a man to bend or even flex a little for anyone, so what he was doing for Nathan was big.
I appreciated it in a way I couldn’t explain.
“You should come with us, Captain,” Nathan piped in. “It’s pretty boring but we always go out for pancakes afterward. I am even allowed chocolate chips in mine,” he whispered as if it were the secret to a great treasure. “And maple syrup,” he added with a wink.
My face stretched from smiling so wide. Nathan had taken to winking at people when he communicated important things. He had a way of soaking up little gestures and expressions adults did that usually went unnoticed by children. Not only that, he used them correctly.
And it was some of the most adorable and heartwarming things to watch.
I was surely biased.
But Lance’s reaction told me that even though he seemed to be hardened to most things, he was not immune to a wink about pancakes from an adorable five-year-old. His hard edges softened, only slightly, but a slight change in such a granite face seemed huge.
The corners of his eyes crinkled slightly in what I was learning was his version of a smile. They only did that when they were focused on my son.