There’s soup on the stove for us.
Something cracked open in me right there in that kitchen — eight years old, missing my father, watching my mother carry away the one good thing in the house that week to a stranger who lived in a dump.
“Why does he get dessert when we can’t even have decent food?” I screamed it, I think. I don’t remember choosing to scream, only the sudden heat of it in my throat.
Mom’s face filled with a fury so total it actually stopped me crying, mid-breath. “Never say that about Cole again,” she said, low and shaking. “Never make me hear that from you.”
She left with the pie anyway. I stood alone in our kitchen, ashamed, furious, and absolutely certain that Cole had somehow replaced me in whatever love my mother had left to spend.
Certain that Cole had somehow replaced me.
After that, I hated him with the specific, uncomplicated focus only a child really has the capacity for.
Cole tried waving at me sometimes, over the following years, whenever I passed near the dump on my way to school. Once he carved me a small wooden bird, its wings slightly lopsided, and left it on our porch step. I found it, understood exactly who’d made it, and dropped it deliberately in the dirt beside his own worn-out shoes the next time I saw him.
“You don’t have to like me,” he said quietly, not moving to pick it back up. “But your mother worries when you walk near the road traffic after school.”
I ignored him and kept walking, telling myself his concern was just another trick, another way of stealing a little more of my mother’s attention for himself.
As far as I knew, Cole had no parents, no home, no job. Mom never once explained, in all those years, why she seemed to feel personally responsible for a stranger’s teenage son. I stopped asking eventually, the way children stop asking questions they’ve decided will never get a satisfying answer.
I stopped asking eventually.
