“Like about the heat on fake turf?” I shook my head.
“You texted when you thought you’d seen a golden eagle flying, and you had a lot of information about it because a fourth grader had just done a report on raptors. You wrote asking questions about football and my diet.”
“Did I bother you?” I asked, and now he shook his own head.
“No. I was glad when you did. It sounded like you were happy to hear from me and you were happy to write.”
“Both those things were true,” I agreed.
“This is how you’re texting now.” He scrolled and then said, “I asked, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to come to the last preseason game? I can get another ticket.’ And you answered, ‘No thanks.’ That was it. You never write to me unless you’re answering a question, and then it’s only one or two words. What’s happening?”
“Everett Ford?” A little boy stood next to our table. “Hi. I love the Woodsmen.”
“Hello. That’s good.” He nodded and then they stared at each other in silence.
“What do you like best about the team?” I asked the boy, and then he had a lot to say. We talked until the waitress arrived with our food and his parents called him back to his seat.
“That conversation sounded more like you. More like the Zoey from before,” Everett told me.
“I like kids a lot. Most of them,” I amended. “He was sweet.”
“I didn’t really know how to talk to him but you did.” He looked over at their table and smiled when the boy waved. “He’s about same age as Eris’s son.”
“Has anything changed with that?”
“The attorneys are still fighting and she’s trying to prove to everyone that she’s a good mother. Look.” He opened his phone again and showed me some screenshots. They were all of the incredibly gorgeous actress he’d been married to. There was also a beautiful little boy, about four or five, and the woman I’d also seen before, the nanny who had been with them for years.
I scrolled through this new batch of pictures. The mom and son were both striking and perfectly dressed but they also looked…awkward. There was one in a tropical setting, with Eris in a bikini. She was trying to smile but her expression seemed strained, like maybe it felt unfamiliar to her. She was also holding up a piece of fresh coconut to her son’s mouth. I guessed that she was attempting to get him to try it, but he appeared repulsed and also very uncomfortable. In the background, the nanny already held a napkin, which I further guessed was for him to spit that coconut into.
In another picture, he and his mom rode a bicycle together, with her on the main seat and him jammed into a small carrier seat behind her. He was big enough to ride on his own, maybe a push bike? And again, he looked very uncomfortable, which made sense since that seat was meant for a much smaller child. The nanny stood next to him, ducking down but clearly holding on to the bike so that it didn’t fall with him strapped into it.
“You said that Eris and her son never spent much time together,” I noted, and he nodded. “It shows.”
“Like I said, this isn’t real. It’s performative for the family court judge.”
I thought about him asking for information about the schools here to show that he’d be a better guardian, and I thought it wasn’t much different. I flipped to another picture. “I’m still glad to see these.”
“You’re glad that she’s faking it? Why?” he asked me.
“It doesn’t matter why she’s interested in him, whether it’s real or not. I think that it’s better for him to have her around. Wouldn’t you rather have someone pretend to love you, instead of being lonely and sad? It’s really awful for a kid to have a parent who doesn’t care.”
“I know that,” he answered. “My parents never cared about me and I had my grandma, but you’re right. I probably would have liked it if they’d pretended to be interested.”
I’d developed some ideas about his early life, like when he’d discussed his brother and sister getting so much attention and also how he had his own bedroom at his grandmother’s house, as if he’d lived there. Even when he’d talked about why he wanted to get custody of Eris’s son, saying that she was a terrible mother—I still wasn’t sure how much I trusted in his reasoning, but the idea that she was a bad parent had sounded personal to him. “Why was it like that in your family?” I asked.
“I always got the feeling that I was a mistake. They had Jasper and Gwenyth right in a row, and then five years later,I came along. They had just finished building a new house, really modern and big, with a giant suite for themselves and fun rooms for my brother and sister. They didn’t bother with guest areas because they didn’t want other people to visit, so in a ten-thousand square foot house, there were three bedrooms. There was one for my parents and one each for my siblings.”
“What about for you?”
“That’s what I mean about thinking I was a mistake. If they were planning for another kid, they probably would have built a place for him. They turned an office into a room that I shared with the nanny. It was half the size and on another floor from the rest of the family. Then they ditched the nanny so there was no one to watch me, and I ended up with my grandma a lot. Or getting into trouble. I glued the doors in the house closed and I ended up gluing some of my fingers together.” He flexed them on the table. “I had to go to the hospital to get them separated.”
“Geez,” I marveled. “I never did anything like that.”
“I can’t imagine you doing anything bad,” he told me. “Your parents probably thanked their lucky stars to have gotten a daughter like you.”
“No, not at all,” I said immediately. “My mom was very disappointed by me. She’s extremely pretty—well, she used to be, but she smokes and she parties too hard, and that started to show on her face. Also, she’s very angry. That shows, too.”
“Angry at you? And why do you think that she was disappointed?”
