Right where Micah and I were.
“What are you doing here?” It wasn’t my intention for my question to sound like an accusation, but it came out like that anyway.
“I . . . I just . . . I don’t . . . ,” he rambled, but it was more than simply searching for the right words. Something was wrong, and it was making it difficult for him to speak. Serious concern twisted my gut into knots.
“Hey, man,” Brandon greeted Micah, slapping a hand hard on his shoulder. “How’s it hanging?”
“Le . . . leave . . . me the f-f-fuck—”
Unwilling to see and hear him struggle, I cut Micah off. “Brandon, can you handle the end of camp?”
Without waiting for an answer, I grabbed my bag from my desk and lead Micah and Sarge out of the building, walking past the groups of campers horsing around in the hallway leading out to the parking lot. His car was parked a few spots away from mine, in a section of the lot that was pretty much empty. It was crooked, half sticking out of the spot. He had clearly been in a rush to get to me. Since his was further away from the kids, we went there, needing the space to have what was clearly going to be an important conversation.
I went to the passenger side door and opened it for him. Holding the door open, I waited for him to slide into his seat. “No . . . I-I-I can’t,” he stammered, waving his hands in front of his chest as if he was trying to ward off a blow. “Too confined,” he explained, resting his body against the rear door panel. He slid down the hot metal, crumpling into a heap of skin and bones on the ground. As always, Sarge stayed right by his side, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, panting in the blazing sun. I pulled a bottle of water from my bag and poured some into his mouth. It took a few tries, but he quickly got the point. It wasn’t a long-term solution, but it was enough to make me feel less guilty about him becoming dehydrated.
“About this morning—” I began to apologize before he moved his hand up in front of my face, stopping my words entirely.
“I have to go home.” He may as well have run me over with a Mack truck. I bet that would have hurt less.
“Are you kidding?” Knowing he was clearly having some kind of panic attack, I tried my best to keep my wits about me, but I was hurt, and there was no hiding that. “Look, if it’s about this morning, I’m sorry. I’m so—”
Again, he cut me off, a pained look dancing in his eyes as he begged me to stop talking. “I’m sorry, too. So fucking sorry,” he croaked, his voice thick with far too much emotion to be talking about a messy living room and a few unwashed dishes.
“Micah,” I soothed, pulling his hand into mine. I didn’t care about where we were. His well-being was far more important than what anyone else thought at this point. “I’m here for you. What’s the matter? Please,” I begged. “You’re scaring me a little.” I lied; he was scaring me a lot, but I knew I had to be strong for him.
Unlike this morning.
Tugging his hand from mine, he buried his face in his cupped hands. “You’re going to hate me,” he whispered. “I fucked it all up.”
“Never. I could never hate you. Micah, listen to me,” I demanded, pulling his attention back to my face. He needed to see meandhear me to feel the truth of my words. “I love you. Nothing you do could ever make me hate you.”
Letting out a deep sigh, he looked deep into my eyes. His shone with something unnamable, almost as if his stare was challenging the words I’d just spoken. “I have a son.” Exhaling, his shoulders relaxed as if he’d just let down a heavy burden that had weighed him down for too long.
Needing just a minute to process it, I let the silence hang around us. It would be asinine of me to assume he didn’t have a life of his own in the years we’d spent apart. Words from our most intimate moments came floating back to me. He said he’d never been with anyone. I guess that much wasn’t true. Pushing those more trivial details to the backburner, I took a deep breath before taking his hand back into mine.
“What’s his name?”
“Simon. He’s eight.” His face lit up at the mention of the boy, so much so that there was no way I could harbor any anger over him keeping Simon’s existence a secret from me. I smiled, hoping to convey that I wanted to hear more. Just as I’d been about to say that, to tell him I wanted to know everything about his son, about his life as a father, he cut in, adding, “And a wife.”
The blazing heat must have been playing tricks on my ears. Certain I’d just heard something that was most definitely not true, I asked, “What?” sounding very much like an idiot.
Raking his hand through his hair, he made a strangled noise, sounding almost as if he was wounded. “I said I have a wife. I’m married. Her name is Delilah.”
“What?” I seethed, my hands beginning to shake. Sarge perked his ears at the tone of my voice, but there was no controlling the anger rising to the surface. “What did you just say?” I demanded when he didn’t answer right away.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”
Cutting his explanation short, I shot up from the ground. Tiny pebbles bit into my palms and my knees. The physical pain was a welcomed distraction from the emotional wrench I’d just been thrown. “Didn’t tell me sooner?” I asked rhetorically, throwing my hands above my head in utter frustration. “That’s what you’re fucking sorry for?”
I couldn’t look at him. I didn’t want to be anywhere near him. Wringing my hands together, I didn’t know what the hell to do with all my anger. But it had to go somewhere. So I did what any hot-headed man would have done, I punched the side of the car.
And it fucking hurt. “Ah, fuck,” I cursed, shaking my hand as if that would turn the clock back five seconds.
When I turned back around to face Micah, he was standing there, trying to steady his shaking hands. “I have to go home. That’s why I came here. Something happened. I wouldn’t have—”
That was when I lost it. “You wouldn’t have what? You wouldn’t have told me about yourwifeandson?Un-fucking-believable,” I cursed, my voice booming across the parking lot.
That was when I caught sight of Brandon walking toward us. Before I could gather my thoughts and control my actions, he was standing in front of us. “What the hell is going on?” he asked, keeping his voice low enough so the small circle of students just a few steps behind us couldn’t hear him. “Maybe you two ought to take this somewhere else?” he spoke through a clenched jaw, trying not to move his mouth as if they were reading his lips.
