“Your sister didn’t have leprosy, though,” he said.
“No, but all her old friends dropped her just like Boyd did. That was why I was glad when I heard that she’d gone out tonight, but not with him. He’ll only mistreat her again.”
“I grew up a lot,” Everett said. “I’m not the same person that I was in high school, which my grandma was probably very glad about. I really was an asshole.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“To girls?” He thought. “I didn’t text when I was supposed to, I didn’t pay enough attention, I didn’t give good compliments, I didn’t stick with one person when they wanted me to be exclusive. I did other crap, too, just general assholery.” He told me about stealing a cart at a golf course, except in his story, he and his friends were only “borrowing” it. They played pranks on each other, they played pranks on teachers. He had never paid attention in class, he had mouthed off to everyone. He had been the passenger in a car when another friend had driven it onto someone’s roof.
“How?” I wondered, and he explained that they had built a ramp.
“It took a while. We spent so long doing it and got into so much shit over it. I would definitely say that it wasn’t worth the effort.”
I tried to imagine acting that way myself, or what I would have done in response to those jokes. He and his friends had organized everyone into letting loose a collective scream in the middle of class, which would have scared me out of my mind. They had also convinced the other students to sit in total silence, and then he and one other buddy had been the only people tospeak and they had been awfully rude when they did. What if I had been his teacher, or his neighbor with the accessible roof? It wasn’t really a concern, since I didn’t have my own classroom or my own house, either, but still…
“I don’t think that stuff is very funny,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s what I meant. People can grow up.”
Had he really done that? He was the same person who’d gotten married to a woman after not dating her for very long. He was also the person trying to get custody of a kid he hardly knew, and now that I thought about it…
It was strange. Very.
“So you matured,” I said conversationally. He nodded and leaned toward the wheel, watching the road ahead of us. “That’s good. And you’re ready to be a father.”
“What?” Everett jolted upright, like he’d been poked by something very sharp. “Are you saying that you’re pregnant?” he asked loudly.
“What?” I burst out at an equal volume. “Me? No! And if I was, you wouldn’t be involved because we’ve never…”
“That’s right,” he said, relaxing.
“What’s going on?” Willow asked sleepily, and I told her it was fine, nothing.
I waited until I thought that she had conked out again before I continued the conversation in the front seat. “I meant that you’re going to be a father because you want your stepson to live with you,” I explained in a whisper. “You must believe thatyou’ve really grown and improved, since you’re ready to take on parenthood.”
“Parenthood? No, I’m not sure that I’m ready for that, not at all.”
“Then…is there something really weird going on here? Like you’re trying to get this child for some criminal thing?”
“Like what?” he asked me.
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “I dream up a lot of stuff, but none of it’s about breaking laws. Except I do think about ways to hurt Boyd. Just severely maiming him so that he’s miserable and in pain, but I don’t want to kill him.”
“I don’t want to kill anyone either, and I’m not a criminal! No matter what kind of an asshole I used to be, I wouldn’t drag a little kid into it. Damn. Jesus.”
“Can you tell me why you want him to live with you, then?”
“I don’t want Eris to have him,” he told me.
Oh. It was just what his ex and her lawyer had claimed: Everett was fighting over her child to try to maintain a hold over her. He didn’t really care about the poor kid and in my opinion, that was as bad as trying to get custody for the purposes of crime. And I had thought of one of those: maybe bank robbers could use a child as a distraction by having him cry and scream as the criminals snuck into the vault.
“She’s a really bad parent,” he told me, “and I’m not just saying that because she cheated on me and sent me pictures of herself having sex with someone else.”
“Naked?”
He ignored that. “Do you remember that woman who was in the movie about the trees?” he asked. “The trees that were dog-phobic because they held the spirits of an ancient cult of cat worshipers, and then she became queen of the forest and united all animals in peace? It came out about six years ago.”
“I didn’t see it,” I said, “but it sounds familiar. Did she win a bunch of awards?”
