I groggily greet whoever is at the other end of the line, exhaustion hanging heavy over my body. I woke to the sound of my phone ringing, and the pieces of last night have hardly had time to slot themselves back into place before my ex-wife’s voice bursts into my ear.
“Jesus, Martin, why haven’t you been answering your phone?” Martha demands.
Something is seriously stressing her out, I can tell—whenever she’s worried about something, she starts off the conversation picking holes in what everyone around her is doing, usually to make herself feel better in comparison.
“I was asleep.”
“This late?”
“Yeah. Long night.”
“Well,” she replies, and I can practically picture the way she waves her hand to dismiss me. “I need to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“About yourson.”
The way she says it, it’s as though it should have been obvious. And in a way, I guess it should be.
I pinch my nose between my fingertips, letting out a long sigh. I’d never admit it, but part of the reason I got this house so far from the city was because I didn’t want our son turning up on my doorstep any longer, drunk out of his mind and demanding money or help for one thing or another. Didn’t seem to matter how many times I tried to nudge him toward standing on his own two feet, getting a job of his own, he would always use me or his mother as a fallback.
Eventually, I got sick of it.
“What happened?”
“I just got a call from his building superintendent,” she tells me, her voice laced with concern and confusion. “They had calls from some of his neighbors last night and early into this morning…he went up to check on him, and…”
She pauses, like she’s still trying to make sense of it herself.
“He smashed the place to pieces, Martin. Wrecked it.”
My heart sinks.
This is a new low, even for him. Ever since he was a kid, he had a violent streak—we put him in therapy, tried to find some way to coax it out of him, but nothing worked. He was always getting into trouble at school for causing trouble with the other kids, and he’d sit there, sullen, in the headmaster’s office while we tried to promise it would never happen again.
“The place you were paying for?”
“Yeah…”
She confesses it like she’s ashamed. She knows I cut him off financially a long time ago, but I understand why she doesn’t feel like she can. It’s her son, no matter what he’s done. She can’t just leave him out in the cold, even if that’s what he deserves. He’s well into his twenties now, and he still can’t seem to let go of the immature attitude that left him thinking he deserves the world.
“What did the superintendent say?”
“Said that we would lose the deposit, and then some,” she replies, her voice aching with sadness. Even though it’s been years since we split, I still feel for her. I can’t help it. Just because things didn’t work out with us romantically doesn’t mean that she isn’t my friend, and I hate seeing the people I care about go through this.
“How much?”
“I didn’t call you to ask for money, Martin.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“I just…I don’t know what to do with him at this point,” she continues, her voice rising. “I feel like I’ve done everything I can, and nothing is coming close to being enough. Nothing I do is enough to stop him, and I…he won’t even answer his phone right now. He won’t even tell me what happened to make him act out like this.”
“It’s not acting out when he’s a grown adult,” I remind her.
“It still feels that way to me,” she shoots back. “He’s my son, in case you forgot?—”
“He’s my son too,” I fire back sharply. I know it’s not useful or productive for us to get on at each other like this, but sometimes, I feel like she’s trying to undo that part of him, to pretend that she was the only one who had a hand in this.
