And that's how the morning will go.
I know this because I know him.
Chapter 20: Tex
I wake up and Stormy is asleep against my side.
His head is on my chest, his arm across my stomach, his breathing slow and deep. He's been sleeping like this every night, wrapped around me as if I'm the only solid thing in the world. Every morning, I wake up with him there and every morning it hits me the same way. He's here. He stayed. He's mine and I'm his.
I slide out of bed. Careful, slow, the way I've learned to move in the mornings so I don't wake him. He stirs, makes a sound, but doesn't open his eyes. I pull the covers up over his shoulder and go downstairs.
I hit the button on the coffee maker. The mugs are already out, sugar next to Stormy's. I reach for the mug and I see it.
A folded stack of papers leaning against the mug. TEX written on the front in block letters. His handwriting, small and careful, the handwriting of someone who learned to take up as little space as possible.
I unfold it, sit down on my stool and start reading.
The coffee maker beeps behind me. I don't move. I sit on my stool and read every word my boy wrote last night while I was sleeping.
Lorraine. His mom's name was Lorraine.
I read about the pancakes. The good days, the gaps between them. The drinking that was just the way things were. I read about a little boy marking good days like holidays and replaying them at night like a movie he could rewind. Mama making pancakes. Mama laughing.
I read about the men.
I read about fucking Gary.
My hands tighten on the paper. The edges crumple under my fingers, and I force myself to loosen my grip because this letter is precious. This letter is the most important thing anyone has ever given me, and I will not damage it with my big fingers.
He was ten. A man named Gary came into his room at night while his mother was passed out on the couch. Sat on the edge of his bed. Put his hands on a ten-year-old boy and told him it was normal, told him it was their secret, told him his mother would send him away if he said anything.
I set the letter down, and put my hands flat on the counter. I breathe through my nose, in and out, because if I don't breathe, I'm going to put my fist through something. And that would wake Stormy, and Stormy cannot see what's on my face right now.
I pick the letter back up and keep reading.
He started sleeping with a steak knife at ten years old. A steak knife. A child. Under his pillow with his hand on the handle, staring at the door. Waiting for the next man.
He told his mother. She was making pancakes. A good day. She stopped flipping the pancake and she said he was making up stories for attention. She went to her room and she opened a bottle and that was the end of the good days.
I'm crying. I don't know when it started. The tears are running down my face into my beard and landing on the paper. I grab a roll of paper towels and wipe them away quickly because I don't want to smudge his words.
She died when he was fifteen. Liver. She died at three in the morning alone and he was fifteen years old with a duffel bag and fifty dollars and nobody came for him.
I read about the streets. Five years, six years. Shelters and dumpsters. "I can clean" as currency. Twenty bucks here, forty bucks there. A kid teaching himself to survive in a world that never once looked at him and saidlet me help you.
I read about Ron Jackson.
The Waffle House. The salvage yard. The room above the shop. The lock on the door, the clean sheets, the hot water. Two weeks of everything he promised. He called Stormy valuable and it felt good. It was bait.
The fury starts low. Not in my chest. In my stomach. A heat that builds like a pilot light catching, blue and focused and getting hotter with every line I read. The key turning. The big man in the doorway. The hand on the leg. Stormy doing the hard math. This room or the gas station. Him or nothing.
He didn't say no the second time. Not because he was forced. Because he did the math that this man laid out for him and he chose survival the way he's been choosing survival since he was ten years old.
My hands are shaking while the paper trembles in my grip.
The hitting. Ribs, back, stomach, sides. All places a t-shirt covers. Never the face. Smart about it. A deacon. A church-going man. A little league sponsor who beat a kid bloody and told him nobody would believe him.
Oh my God, the food. Why didn't I feed him more? How many times has he gone hungry since he got here? In my house where there's enough food to feed an army? Is he lying there awake at night waiting for me to wake up and give him breakfast?
