Back at his desk, he found a flurry of missed calls and text messages, two from Grant, one from Cooper, and six from Wyatt. His pulse immediately picked up when he saw Wyatt’s name repeated down his screen. Even though Wyatt was his only child, they’d never hadthatkind of close familial relationship with each other. Navigating how to parent an adult child when you’d been absent for most of their formative years had been a lot of work, but he’d put in the effort to much reward. Adam didn’t have a basis for comparison about what grown parent and child relationships were meant to be like, but he was happy with how things had finally turned out with Wyatt, and Wyatt seemed happy, too.
The text message from his son asked Adam to call, and the five missed calls did enough to demonstrate the urgency. He threw himself back into his chair and dialed Wyatt from the speakerphone on his desk.
Wyatt answered immediately, with a sniffle and a wet sounding, “Hello?”
“Are you okay?” Adam asked.
“Things are just…”
Adam scrubbed a hand down his face and waited for Wyatt to formulate the thought. He didn’t imagine things were going well. He knew that Wyatt had tried his best to put on a brave face through the divorce, but he was almost ambivalent about the whole process and Adam had the feeling that wouldn’t hold forever. It appeared Wyatt’s walls had finally cracked.
“This sucks,” Wyatt said with a sigh.
“I know, kiddo. Are you sure you don’t want to come visit for a while? Just to get out of the city a bit?”
“I moved out,” Wyatt continued undeterred, “into a shitty and overpriced studio.”
“Not that you would want it, but is he not paying you spousal support?”
“I didn’t petition for it,” Wyatt answered. “It’s easier to just…be done with the whole thing.”
“The point of spousal support is to make the being done a little easier,” he said.
“Don’t want it,” Wyatt said again.
“You’re stubborn.”
“Wonder where I got that from.” Wyatt snorted, but it was wet from his crying and made the tightness in Adam’s chest worse. He hated that Wyatt was going through a divorce. He would have given anything to protect his son from the hardships of life, but he knew that wasn’t the way things would ever be between them, and he also knew that even if hecould, Wyatt wouldn’t have wanted that.
Wyatt was the best parts of Eileen and the worst parts of him. Clearly, he was intelligent and focused, but Wyatt was also stubborn beyond belief. If there was something Wyatt wanted, he didn’t stop until he had it. Adam admired his son’s tenacity, but wished Wyatt could temper it sometimes to save himself in the long run.
“It’s a flaw,” he said.
“Not always.”
“Pretty much always.” He laughed.
On the other end of the line, Wyatt chuckled, then sniffled. It sounded to Adam like the worst of the crying was over and Wyatt just needed someone to talk to.
“Tell me about your new place,” he said.
Wyatt made a derisive noise in the back of his throat. “It’s a shoe box.”
“Tiny?”
“A few hundred square feet. The kitchen is non-existent and the shower can’t be more than three by three.”
“Do all of your things fit?”
Wyatt made another sound. “I have a storage unit outside of the city.”
“That’s a no.”
“Of course it’s a no. My bed didn’t even fit. I had to get a new one,” Wyatt said.
“Maybe when things settle, you’ll feel better.” Adam thought about Grant and how happy he’d become in North Edgewood after leaving New York. Grant had originally moved because his dad needed help, but Grant’s dad had been moved to assisted living years earlier, and passed away seven years back. It had been hard on Grant, but Adam knew he didn’t regret coming back to town after being away.
“I doubt that.”
