“Think about it,” he urged. “A house in a not-so-great neighborhood, just you and him—and most the time you’re workin’, so he isn’t even with you—when every other week he can be with us at our place. A decent pad that’s bigger. A brother and sister he can watch grow up. A mom and dad to look out for him, there all the time.”
He was right. My neighborhood was not so great.
It didn’t suck either.
Most of my neighbors were old folk whose kids were assholes and forgot they existed. Some of them were new couples or new families trying to make a go at life. Good folk, all of them.
But there were a couple of rentals that had renters who were sketchy. However, outside the occasional loud party (which got shut down real quick because my kid needed his sleep and I knew every cop in the department, so I didn’t hesitate to make a call) or a loud fight, they kept to themselves.
But it wasn’t about me feeling defensive about the home I gave my son.
It was his “mom and dad, there all the time” bullshit.
Ethan had a mom.
Me.
In other words, he was no longer pissing me off.
I was there.
“You need to stop,” I warned.
Stupidly, something they didn’t have a program for, so Trent had not in all his years stopped being, he kept pushing. “You think on this, you’ll know it’s the right thing for Ethan.”
It did not sit great with me that he was not letting this go, mostly because it shared how bad Peg wanted it and I didn’t get good vibes from that. She was an okay woman and she was also a woman made to be a mom. Not just because she had a lot of love to give, which I figured she did, but also so she could have as many people in her life that she could boss around as she could get.
I tried one more time.
“Back off, Trent.”
He pointed at the envelope before looking back at me. “We’re tryin’ to take care of you too.”
“Think I’ve proved over the last ten years I been lookin’ out for Ethan on my own that I don’t need someone takin’ care of me,” I pointed out.
He lifted his chin. “We’re doin’ right by you.”
“Woulda helped, you did right by me when I needed it, not shovin’ it down my throat when I don’t.”
I could see right away that pissed him off.
“Knew you’d throw that in my face,” he bit out.
“Trent, for fuck’s sake,” I snapped. “I’m tellin’ you to back off. I told you I’d think about it. And I told you I got shit to do.”
“Nice mouth, Cheryl. You talk like that to our son?”
That was when I lost it, and, honest to God, it was a wonder I’d held on for so long.
Leaning toward him, I hissed, “I can talk any way I want to my son because I earned that privilege by bein’ there for him every day his whole fucking life.”
“So you do,” he returned.
I leaned back, shaking my head. “Of course I don’t, you moron.”
“Name calling. Nice,” he clipped. “You teach our son that too?”
“I’ll ask again, can we not do this now?” I requested sharply.
His face changed. It was not a good change.
It was a stubborn, nasty change.
That part of Trent I knew.
“I didn’t want it to get to this, but I think it’s fair that you know, you don’t do what’s best for Ethan, Peggy and me are prepared to take you to court. And, just a heads up, she feels Ethan should be with his dad full-time. The shared custody idea was what I talked her into. You push it, she’s gonna get pissed and we’re gonna go for it all.”
At the barest thought of losing my son, I stood in my kitchen while the world collapsed all around me. At the edge of my vision, the walls and cabinets and counters and houses and the town beyond all crumbled to the earth, a cloud of dust rising, obliterating everything but me and Trent staring at each other.
He must have read that on my face because he quieted his voice when he said, “And you know that won’t go too good for you, Cheryl.”
It happened to me then, and I got it. I got how normal folk got pushed into corners, their loved ones threatened, and the urge came to them, overwhelming them, turning them from humans to animals focused solely on their need to protect. I got how they lost control and lost their minds and viciously attacked their attackers with nothing but annihilation in mind to void the threat.
I got it because that happened to me.
But I’d been kicked when I was down so often, I had just enough in me that morning to hold it in check.
“It won’t?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. “It won’t go too good for me?”