Michael
Jagger seemed quiet on the drive home from school. That wasn’t what I’d expected. Maybe it was unrealistic, but I’d been hoping he’d have such an amazing time making new friends that it’d be impossible to shut him up.
“How was school?” I asked as we pulled in the driveway. I should’ve walked to pick him up so we could’ve had more time to talk.
“Good.” I looked over my shoulder to the backseat and saw him staring blankly out the window. His chin was propped on his hand and he appeared deep in thought.
“What did you do?” I prodded.
“Stuff.” He was acting more like a sullen teen than my normally jubilant little boy.
That wasn’t normal at all. Something was bothering him, but I had no clue what it could be. He was in kindergarten, for God’s sake, how much drama could there be?
“Did you make any friends?”Please, give me more than one word here, kid.
“Yeah.” He gave me the slightest hint of a smile before unbuckling himself. The moment I turned off the engine, he was out of the car.
I quickly locked the car and crossed the yard to stop him. We sat down side by side on the front steps, both of us staring toward the street, neither of us saying a word.
“Buddy, you know that if something happens at school, you can tell me, right?” It seemed far too soon to be having this type of conversation.
“I know,” he responded and the sadness in his voice nearly crushed me. I needed Dax to get here so I could see if he’d give me any more information than Jagger was. He had to have seen something if the first day of school was this traumatic for my boy. “Can I go play now?”
There was nothing for me to do but let him go. It was obvious he wasn’t going to talk to me, and I didn’t want to push him away by trying to force him to talk about whatever was on his mind. When Dax got there, I’d talk to him.
I left Jagger to his cars in the living room and ran out to the garage to pull some meat out of the deep freezer before lighting the grill so it’d be hot when we were ready to cook. Less than a month ago, I’d have had to run in and check to make sure Jagger wasn’t getting into anything, but since Dax had shown up in our lives, there’d only been the one disappearing act. Seeing as he’d slipped out that day to ask Dax to help me, I wasn’t even sure that counted.
The same confusing feelings I’d been having resurfaced when I saw Dax walking down the sidewalk toward the house. It was as if his presence lifted a weight off my chest and everything was easier because he was there. I knew I needed to sort that out, but seeing as the one person I knew I could talk to about it without him thinking I was crazy was the object of those thoughts, I wasn’t sure how to figure out what was going on.
“Hey, I brought a six-pack, too,” he said as he walked right past me and opened the small fridge in the garage. I didn’t have to tell him where to put anything, he just knew. He had also figured out that I didn’t keep any alcohol in the house. I didn’t drink often because I knew it could easily turn into a crutch. Alcohol didn’t call to me the way it did for a short time when I felt like I was drowning, but I still tried to avoid it. After pulling teeth to try and get my son to talk to me, I would gladly break my self-imposed sobriety and crack one open once Jagger was in bed for the night.
“Rough day today?” I asked, because this was the first time he’d brought beer without asking first. Okay, so it was also a way of trying to see if he’d volunteer any information about what might have Jagger so upset.
“Way harder than I expected,” he admitted. “I figured it wouldn’t be much different from last year when I did my student teaching, but damn, those kids can be a handful. And now, there’s no one I can turn to when I don’t know what in the hell I’m doing. I swear to you, those kids smell fear and feed off of it.”
Hopefullymy kidwasn’t one of the ones he was referring to. “Yeah, I can barely take care of one, I can’t imagine being responsible for twenty of them. I think it might say something about your sanity that you chose this as your profession.”
Dax shrugged. “Well, no one’s ever accused me of being smart.” I knew he was joking, but there was also a tinge of bitterness in his words, and I wondered how much truth there was to his statement.
“Oh please, you’re a miracle worker when it comes to kids,” I scoffed. “I still can’t believe how much more mellow Jagger is than he used to be.”
“That’s no miracle,” Dax protested. “He’s a good kid, he just needed some attention. Kids are like puppies, they don’t understand the difference between good and bad attention, as long as you’re focused on them.”
Dax followed me into the house so I could grab the burgers and get them cooking. I expected him to follow me back outside, but he disappeared into the living room. Was it wrong that I was slightly jealous of the way he gravitated toward Jagger? Rather than ponder that thought for too long, I got to work on dinner, hoping we’d get a chance to talk later.
The two of them were deep in debate over how to construct the best castle to keep the Transformers from attacking each other when I started setting the table. “Hey, dinner’s ready.”
Jagger ran down the hall to wash his hands, giving Dax and me a moment alone. “Did something happen today?” I asked. There was no way I could wait until Jagger was in bed to find out. I wanted to talk to Jagger about it, because I wasn’t going to have him getting picked on to the point he started hating school.
The way Dax averted his eyes and scrubbed at the back of the neck told me everything I needed to know. “Well, there was one issue, but I think we took care of it.”
He didn’t sound so sure. And it pissed me off that I had to pry it out of him. If Jagger was having problems, I expected him to tell me. I’d want that from any teacher, but we were more than just teacher and parent, we were friends.
The water was still running in the bathroom, which would normally lead me to go see what he was doing, but tonight it gave me a few extra seconds to find out what happened. “So, are you going to tell me about it? Because I have to tell you, the boy I picked up from school wasn’t happy about having been there.”
“Shit.” Dax opened the bag of chips and popped the lid off the two pasta salads he’d picked up, one plain for Jagger and one loaded with veggies for us. “Look, if I thought it had upset him that much, I’d have told you right away. I thought about calling you during lunch, but I didn’t want to bug you.”
“Yes, because you would have interrupted a thrilling day of sitting around doing nothing,” I responded sarcastically.
