I’m here to work, not babysit,” she said, wondering where the words were coming from. Surprised by the ease with which they slid off her tongue. The battered women hadn’t been such a leap for her, but she was still a bit stiff with the kids. Until she pretended they were all little Tatums. Or until they got going on their collages and then she got so engrossed in reading their picture messages, in helping them compose those messages, express themselves, that she forgot to worry about anything else.
But this was...a ten-year-old boy who just happened to have shared her belly for nine months.
Oh, God. She was going to throw up again.
“What, you brought papers to grade?” he asked, his nose scrunched as he glanced at her bag again and then frowned at her.
He wasn’t rejecting her presence beside him. Didn’t seem to dislike her being there.
“No,” she said, reaching down to her bag, thinking about putting her head between her knees while she was at it.
There was a trash can not far off. There if she needed it.
She wasn’t going to need it.
“We’re going to do an art project,” she said instead, and pulled out the stack of magazines. A motorcycle and car one. Travel. Surfing. Boating. Sports—but not the famous one with pictures of girls. Home and Garden. Tatum had laughed at that one, but Talia would bet a week’s groceries that Kent would use it. Maybe he’d home in on some brownies on a plate or a basketball hoop in a backyard display...
“What about my math and sentences for English?” There was no sign of the tough guy as Kent glanced down into her open satchel to see colored papers, markers, glue and a couple of plastic containers of assorted embellishments. She had his attention.
“What you don’t finish at school today you have to do as homework,” she told him.
“Cool.” Closing his book, he turned to her with eagerness in his smile. And Talia had the strangest urge to give him a hug.
* * *
MONDAY’S DINNER PRETTY much summed up Sherman’s day.
He’d had errands to run—a case of flyers to drop off at a candidate’s office, shirts and pants to pick up from the cleaners, and they were out of toothpaste—after picking Kent up from school and was still in his creased gray pants, white button-down and gray-and-white silk tie as his son dropped into his seat at the kitchen table and announced that he was starving.
“You never did tell me how school went today,” Sherman said as he dumped salad from a bag, tossed it with the chicken nuggets he’d just pulled from the oven, added some dressing and put it on plates for him and Kent.
“You never asked.”
The boy had dropped his book bag by the door and sat in his pants, button-down shirt and sweater vest, his hand supporting his head, looking grumpy.
“Yes, I did. When you got in the car.” And his phone had rung. He’d taken the call and...
“Fine. School was fine. Okay?”
His son’s first day of in-school suspension and all he had to say was fine?
“What did you do?”
“Sat.”
“Did you go to the cafeteria to eat your lunch?” Sherman, as he’d been instructed, had packed sandwiches. He’d added celery sticks and a couple of Kent’s favorite cookies, too.
“No.”
He frowned. “What about your juice?”
“Someone got it for me.”
He nodded. Okay. So maybe this was good. Kent was seeing that if he misbehaved, he’d be taken out of society. Such as it was.
Brooke wouldn’t be happy with their son missing lunch with his friends. Hell, he wasn’t happy about it. Kent had been alienated enough from the regular kids, as he called them now, when his mother was killed.
Before the accident, Kent had been such a great kid. That person was still there inside him. Sherman knew it. And the counselor Kent was seeing seemed to think so, too. Somehow they just had to get through the anger stage of the grief process.
“Did Mrs. Barbour have anything special for you to do?” He put a plate of salad in front of his son.
“Nope.”
“Did your teachers come in and give you assignments?” Retrieving foil-wrapped bread from the oven, he dropped it on the table along with some peanut butter and a knife.
“Nope.”
He sat. Opened his napkin on his lap. Picked up his fork. “You just sat there all day and did nothing?”
Not at all what he’d envisioned when he’d asked for his son to spend the week in the principal’s office.
“No.” Kent was attacking his salad as if it was a banana split.
“You did schoolwork, then?”
“Duh, Dad, it’s school.”
The disrespect hurt as much as it irritated. He let it slide. Took a bite of salad. Missing the days when Brooke used to make it with fresh lettuce, cutting up cucumber and onion and celery and broccoli while he grilled fresh chicken for the top.
“So how’d you know what to do?” he asked, chewing.
Kent pushed salad onto his fork with his thumb. “Mrs. Barbour gave me a list.”
Sherman picked up a piece of bread he didn’t want, touching his son’s wrist and motioning with the bread, then used it to push food onto his fork. “You just said she didn’t have anything for you to do,” he said.
“I said she didn’t have anything special for me to do. It’s all just regular stuff that we always do.” The boy picked up a piece of lettuce with his fingers and popped it into his mouth.
Biting back the retort that sprang to his tongue, Sherman took a bite of salad and hoped he didn’t get indigestion.
“Did you get it all done?” he asked a moment or two later. Were they at least going to get to skip homework that night and go straight for the basketball game he wanted to watch? Kent loved basketball—or, really, any sport—and so far, they still bonded over their teams.
“No.”
He stopped chewing. “No?”
“No.”
Picking up a piece of bread, Kent used it to shove a huge bite of salad onto his fork the way Sherman always urged him to.
And now Sherman was worried. Why would the boy purposely do something to please him? Why start following the rules at that exact moment?
“Why not?” he asked. If Kent thought he was going to stop doing
