Sherman had been more willing to go along with the counselor’s recommendation and give Kent some slack on some of the rest of it.
Because Dr. Jordon had recommended a less severe course of action, and because Sherman understood Kent’s anger and had a hard time finding it within himself to be hard on the boy. He’d rather die for him than hurt him.
Kent shrugged. “I got extra to do,” he said. And dunked his bread into his chocolate milk, dripping chocolate on the table as he slurped the mess between his lips.
“WHAT ARE WE going to do with this?” Kent frowned as he studied his partially completed collection of photos and moved a motorcycle up to a corner of the board—farther away from the center of his life, she noted silently.
“Why do we have to do something with it?” Talia prevaricated—something she was really good at. Better than giving direct answers, for sure.
“I dunno.” He shrugged. “Just seems like we should.”
Shoulds and have-tos seemed to carry weight with the boy. If for no other reason than so he could break the rules. And yet...
“I mean, why do all the work if it’s for nothing?”
“Just for fun.”
“You don’t go to school to have fun,” he said, as though she’d never been a student.
Every day for three days he’d been sitting at his desk when she arrived, dressed in pants—sometimes jeans but always a clean and new-looking pair—and a shirt and sweater or sweater vest. She’d never seen him in tennis shoes.
“There’s nothing wrong with enjoying learning,” she said, watching as he swapped the positions of a backyard grill and a video game character. He had an eye for shape and color. And she itched to intervene, to make suggestions, to take part.
But she couldn’t.
This was his story. His expression. The collage was possibly going to be her only insight into the person who was her son.
She was there to facilitate only. Just like giving birth to him. She hadn’t been a participant in his life. Not since Tanner had had her baby’s father arrested and Talia had made the decision to give him up for adoption. Her role was facilitator.
Still, as he bent over his collage, she longed to touch his hair. To smooth the little piece that wanted to curl just above his ear. Was that why his father kept Kent’s hair so short? Because it had a tendency to curl?
Talia’s hair was straight. And blond. Nothing like Kent’s. Kent’s hair came from Rex. The high-school teacher who’d gone to jail for having sex with his student.
“What do you think should go here?” The boy turned to look at her.
He had Tatum’s eyes. A grayer version of Talia’s blue ones.
“I think you should decide,” she told him. “This is your time to make all the decisions. To use whatever pictures you want to use from these magazines.”
She’d already learned to qualify her statements with him. The day before he’d tried to get away with cutting out letters to form swear words for the middle of his collage.
“What if I want to use a picture that isn’t in the magazine?”
For a second she froze. Did ten-year-old boys look at dirty pictures? Was that what he was implying?
“What picture?”
He reached for his notebook, thumbed through some papers in the back of it, fumbled around in a plastic pocket and pulled out a photo.
“This one,” he said.
Oddly, it was a picture of him. Dressed very similar to the way he was now. Obviously a school photo. Maybe a year or two old.
What kid carried around a picture of himself tucked in his notebook?
“Sure, you can use it,” she said, while her mind wrapped itself around the newest piece of the puzzle she so desperately wanted to see complete. To know that it was a good picture. A healthy one. The picture she needed to have with her as she traversed the roads of her solitary life.
He dropped the picture in a space he’d left after she’d made him remove the curse words. “You never said what’s going to happen to this.”
Why did it matter so much?
“What do you want to happen to it?” she asked.
“Doesn’t matter to me.”
She wished she could believe that. Because she wanted to keep it more than just about anything. To hang it in her home. To have it to look at for the rest of her days.
“I’ll need to keep it for a week or two,” she said. Her program trial included written reports from her on every collage made, to show the board of education what she gleaned from the collages and how that information, that insight, could be used to help the kids. “But after that it’s up to you.”
The collages she was having the kids make in class were on sixteen-by-eleven-inch pieces of poster board. Kent’s was on a full-size piece of poster board.
Picking up the scissors, Kent reached for a magazine. “I guess I could take it home. I mean, if we have to do something with it,” he said.
His tough-guy armor had some definite chinks.
“I’ll make sure you get it back, then,” she told him. Wondering if it was against professional ethics if she took a photo of Kent’s finished work to have blown up and framed for her wall.
* * *
SHERMAN TOOK KENT into LA for a basketball game Thursday night. The tickets were a gift from one of his clients, the seats located in a private suite with a full buffet spread. Kent was grinning and talking the entire way there, throwing out statistics and asking Sherman’s opinion on scores and strategies. A banker and his family were supposed to be there, as well. One that Sherman was counting on for a sizable contribution. But when their passes got them on the elevator and then into the suite, it turned out that they were sharing the box with just the banker and his twelve-year-old daughter, who knew absolutely nothing about basketball. And who seemed to think entirely in rapid-fire questions.
Sherman tried to involve Kent in the conversation. To ask his opinion on answers to some of the more thoughtful questions, but his son was having none of it. Five minutes into the game, or the constant chatter depending upon one’s perspective, Kent got up, helped himself to a plate of finger food and reseated himself in the farthest corner of the booth away from the rest of them, planting his face at the glass separating them from the rest of the stadium.
Sherman called out to him a few times. All but once Kent appeared not to hear. And Sherman, who had business to tend to, couldn’t call his son to task. He probably wouldn’t have even if he could. He didn’t blame Kent for being disappointed.
“Quite the game, huh?” he asked as soon as the two of them were
