Hold On Tight(4)

Not once did she respond.

A few times I’d almost worked up the nerve to call them, but if they weren’t replying to my letters, then they didn’t want to talk to me. They didn’t want Micah. It had hurt even worse than my parents not wanting him. I had hated the Falcos for their desertion. But then I’d learned to let go. Move on. Be happy with my life. With my beautiful little boy.

“Momma? Where are we?” a sleepy little voice asked from the backseat of my twelve-year-old Honda Civic.

“We’re home. Our new home,” I replied, pulling into the driveway of the house that had once been my home and would soon be again.

“Our new house?” he asked with excitement in his voice as he wiggled in his seat to see better.

“Yep, baby. Our new house. Ready to go inside and see it?” I asked him, opening my car door and getting out. It was a two-door, so I had to lean my seat forward to reach him in the backseat. He unbuckled himself, then scrambled out of his seat and jumped out of the car.

“Do other people live in there too?” he asked, staring up at the two-bedroom wood-frame house with wide eyes.

“Just us, kiddo. You’ll have your own bedroom here. Mine is right across the hall from yours.”

“Whoa,” he said, his eyes shining with amazement. Even when we had lived with my aunt Cathy, Micah and I had shared a room. Once we’d moved into an apartment, a studio was all I could afford with day care costs. This house was only twelve hundred square feet, but it was the biggest living space he and I had ever had all to ourselves. The studio apartment had been a third of this size.

“Let’s go see your new room. We might need to paint it. Not sure what color the walls are,” I told him. The last time I’d been in my old bedroom, it had been pink. Micah was determined that pink was for girls and wanted nothing to do with it.

From my purse I pulled out the key that my mother had mailed me along with the letter and the deed to the house. I took a deep breath before unlocking the door. Stepping back, I motioned for Micah to go inside. “Check it out.”

His grin spread across his face as he took off running into the house, whooping as he saw the size of the living room. Then he turned and headed down the short hallway. I paused at the door, unable to ignore the house across the street any longer, and turned around to look at it. I didn’t recognize the truck in the driveway, but then again, it had been six years. I was sure the Falcos were still there. Mother hadn’t mentioned that they’d moved.

I wondered if they would speak to Micah when he played in the yard. Or would they ignore him like they had since his birth? I wouldn’t tell him who they were. I hadn’t told him about my parents. He didn’t know this had once been my home. He didn’t know he had grandparents. In preschool he had been asked to tell the class about his grandparents, and when he’d told them about Aunt Cathy, he had called her Aunt Cathy. The kids in his class had teased him, telling him that his aunt wasn’t his grandparent. He’d come home confused and upset that he didn’t know who his grandparents were.

I had just told him he didn’t have any.

When he’d asked about his father, I had explained that God had wanted his father because he was such an awesome man, so he had brought him to heaven to live there with him before Micah was born.

That had been enough for Micah. He hadn’t asked any more questions. He was happy with the knowledge that his mother loved him unconditionally and that we were a family. It had been hard for him when he saw that other kids had large families, but once he’d understood that each family was different, he was okay with that.

“Momma! Momma!” Micah called out in excitement. “There’s a blue room. It’s a really cool blue room too! It’s even got toys in it already!”

Toys? I closed the front door behind me and headed down the hall. Stepping into the bedroom that had once been mine, I stopped and looked around me in awe. It was blue. A bright, happy blue. It had a full-size bed and a matching wooden dresser. There was a blue quilt on the bed with orange basketballs all over it, and in the center sat a basketball-shaped pillow. A toy box under the window was open, with pirate swords, a baseball bat and glove, a large red fire truck, and what looked like a big bag of Legos sticking out of it. An indoor basketball hoop sat in the opposite corner, with a ball lying on the floor beside it.

Above his bed was painted MICAH.

“Do you think the people who used to live here left it for me? Or do we gotta give it back?” he asked, a hopeful expression on his face. “And look, Momma, my name is already on the wall.”