“Yeah,” Parker responds, shoving away from the table and not bothering to push his chair back in. Jack glances at me.
“You coming too?” he asks hopefully.
“No,” Parker responds harshly, the word forceful enough that it feels like a slap on the cheek. He turns and leaves the kitchen, and I feel my own anger start to bubble up as I follow him. I don’t possess infinite patience, and I’ve had about enough of the attitude.
“Leave me alone,” he says, whirling around when he realizes I’ve followed him. “Just leave me alone.”
“Tell me what’s going on, right now,” I prompt, trying very hard to keep my voice even and not betray my own irritation. I don’t want to yell at him.
“I don’t want you,” he says, which is more effective than cutting my throat if his goal is to shut me up. I stare at him, which he takes as an impetus to continue. “You don’t want me, soI don’t want you.”
“What the hell are you on about? Want you? Of course I want you!” Despite all the effort on my part, the words come out louder than intended.
Parker stands at the mouth of the hallway, expression mutinous and hands clenched into fists at his side. He fumes in silence for a minute, before giving in to the explosion.
“You want to go back to Australia!” he shouts. “I saw it on your computer!”
“Bloody hell, Parks, I was?—”
“And you have all these papers with charts and money on them, and Grandma told me you can’t afford a kid becauseyour job sucks.” The words spill from his mouth in a hectic jumble, barely a pause between them before he drops more. “And you don’t even like being here! Younevercame and visited before, and now you have to be here because of me and you hate it and you hate me. I got in trouble at school and you were mad and then a bill came in the mail from your lawyer.”
His voice, which had started so strong, begins to crack. There’s an almost manic air to the way he’s speaking, a jumbled stream of consciousness of all the worries he’s been hoarding. I don’t interrupt, watching and listening in silence, every word feeling like a knife in the gut. Each one with its own little twist.
“And I heard you on the phone talking about all the mean things Grandma is saying about you, and how she’s trying to take me away and now we have to gofight in court.” His voice cracks harshly, and he sucks in a breath sharp enough to cut. He barely gets another couple of words out before the tears start sliding down his cheeks. “And if we lose, I have to go live with Grandma and Grandpa and I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I want to stay with you and I don’t want you to go back to Australia. I want you to stay here, and I want Mom and Dad to come back.”
Parker’s sobbing now, unable to speak complete sentences around the violent heaving. My own eyes burn, and it’s hard to breathe around the fist clamped around my throat as I move toward him. He doesn’t even attempt to fight me when I touch him, shoulders quaking as he curls into me and presses his face to my shirt. I cup the back of his head with one hand, holding him with the other, and just let him cry. His fingers twist into the fabric of my shirt, not as though he’s reciprocating the hug, but as if he’strying to cling on to something he’s afraid he’ll lose if he lets go.
“Breathe,” I whisper to him, rubbing his back when he struggles to gasp around the sobbing.
He’s barely standing on his own, slumped against me, face pushed hard enough into my stomach that I can feel the dampness of tears and snot. This isn’t a pretty sort of crying—it’s utter and complete devastation. It’s an outpouring of emotion, born from the death of his parents, and bottled up in an effort to be strong. I swallow down my own emotions, blinking rapidly and hoping the way I’m rubbing his back can soothe me as well as him. His curls catch on my fingers as I brush through them.
It feels like it takes hours for his tears to dry up, time warped and fuzzy. Parker is the only solid thing in the universe, bony shoulders and knobby spine feeling heartbreakingly fragile. Ten, right now, feels very, very young.
He keeps his cheek pressed against me as his breathing calms, hiding his face as he sniffles. His hands drop limply to his sides, but he doesn’t yet move. I don’t either, not quite sure what the next step is in the pre-teen, hormonal meltdown.
“Sorry,” he whispers, voice muffled and weak and a little bit frightened. I brush my hand down the back of his head again, the damp strands catching on my fingers.
“Let’s go sit in your room.”
He nods, stepping back and immediately turning his face away, trying to hide his splotchy, tearstained cheeks. Shoulders slumped, he leads the way to his room, rubbing his nose with the back of his hand. I close the door behind us, leaving him to sit on his bed while I step into the bathroom to bring him a handful of tissue.
“Thanks,” he mumbles to his knees when I hand them to him. He sounds exhausted. Not an ounce of anger remains, like he’s a wet towel that was wrung dry. Grabbing his desk chair, I scoot it in so I can sit directly in front of him.
“Buddy,” I start, and his eyes flash upward to mine, wide and fearful, “I need you to pay attention and listen to me for a second, okay?”
He nods, face pale beneath the red tearstains.
“Idowant you, okay? I don’t care if you believe a single other thing that comes out of my mouth, but I need you to believe that. I want you. That’s not ever going to change, regardless of where we live, or how much money things cost, or anything. Nothing changes the fact that I love you and want you. Ever.”
He swallows and looks away from me, knee bouncing until I put a hand out and stop it. I wait for his swollen, red-rimmed brown eyes to come back to mine before I continue.
“I was looking at flights to Australia because I wanted to price them out for the pair of us to visit. Idolove it there, Parks, and I won’t lie and say I don’t miss it. I do. But Australia is a place, little buddy, and as much as I love it, I love you more. We could live on the surface of the moon for all I care.”
“That would be kind of cool,” he mutters around a watery laugh.
“As for everything else… You have to stop worrying about money, okay? All those papers you saw—which, by the way, you shouldn’t have been looking at—was me trying to come up with a budget. My job, bills, all of that nonsense is for me to deal with, not you.”
“What about Grandma?” he asks softly, eyes on mine.Grandma is a crazy fucking bitch,I think, quoting something I heard my sister say a dozen times.
