Since “snack” was the only thing he’d asked of me, I wheeled up to a mini-mart and loaded up on everything I knew Alex loved, which was anything with peanut butter in it. With several gallon bags of Reese’s in one sack, two family packs of PB crackers in another, and four liters of Gatorade in a third, I careened out of the store, and with the help of Perdita headed for Burn Lake.
As I pulled into a parking space between two cars with orange Las Cruces Youth Soccer bumper stickers, I had to admit that it was a pretty impressive little sports complex. It took me a good five minutes to discover which soccer field was Alex’s, and when I got there every boy was dressed in the same floppy shorts and baggy T-shirt and plastic guards up to his knees. I only picked mine out when somebody yelled, “Good tackle, Alex!”
That someone was Dan.
I stifled a groan and looked up into the stands, but I saw only a knot of women in visors and sunglasses, most of them on cell phones. When I heard him again, I turned toward the field. Dan was out there running with the kids, wearing a ball cap that said COACH on it.
A fact Alex and Dan had both neglected to mention. Since when did Dan know anything about soccer?
“You must be Alex’s mom.”
I turned and had to look immediately down, at a tiny woman with dark straight hair that was almost as long as she was. She shook back girlish bangs and smiled almost shyly at me.
“I’m Poco Dagosto,” she said. “Felipe’s mom.”
I hoped I looked like I knew who Felipe was. “Nice to meet you. I’m Ryan.” I tried to put out a hand to shake hers, but I was too encumbered with grocery bags.
Her deep-black eyes lit up. “Alex said you were bringing snacks. He promised me he gave you more than two minutes’ notice. Well, here, let me take some of that.”
She tried to extricate two of the sacks from my arms, and one of them tumbled to the ground and spilled out the Reese’s peanut butter cups, just in time for two more women to join us. One of them leaned over to retrieve them and was instantly lost in a blonde tangle of her own hair. The other one lowered her sunglasses and stared.
“You brought candy?” she said.
“I hope it’s for us.” Poco giggled like a nervous twelve-year-old. “We could always use the chocolate.”
“No, seriously.” Anti-candy Woman took the shades completely off and surveyed me with cool blue eyes the shape of apostrophes. Straggles of hair had escaped her ponytail and were wagging in the breeze. They’d once been a mousy brown. Turning gray wasn’t going well.
“I see peanut butter crackers,” the blonde woman said. “That works.”
She had stood up and was peering into the bag I was holding. I still couldn’t see her face for the mass of hair the wind continued to have its way with. All I could tell was that she wore round glasses and had a voice like a yoga teacher.
“Alex probably didn’t give her the memo about what to bring.” Poco gave another random giggle. “We don’t usually like to give them sugar,” she said to me.
“Or preservatives.” Anti-candy looked pointedly at Blondie.
“It’s okay. I’ll run to the store.” Poco tied the top of one bag and started on the second. “You can take these home for later. Oh—you guys, this is Ryan Coe. This is Victoria West.”
Blondie finally managed to get her tresses out of her face and give me a spacey smile before it all went wild again. Had no one ever told this woman about barrettes?
“And this is J.P. Winslow.”
I expected her to add and associates. The name was perfect for the unsmiling woman who was obviously running some kind of assessment on me based on my snack snafu. The blue apostrophe eyes didn’t leave my face.
“Victoria is Bryan’s mom,” Poco was saying, “and J.P. is Cade’s.”
“I hope there isn’t going to be a quiz,” I said.
No one seemed to find that amusing, except Poco, whose response to everything so far was a fretful laugh. I got the distinct impression I had failed some kind of test already.
“Okay, so, I’ll be back,” Poco said, and she took off to get what I was supposed to have procured instead of the ill-gotten booty J.P. Winslow was still giving the death stare to.
Victoria pointed up the bleachers. “You want to join us?”
J.P. didn’t echo the invitation, which was my incentive to say that, yes, I would love to. I followed Victoria’s hair five rows up, where we sat in front of another group of women who nodded and waved.
“What’s Cade doing?” J.P. said, pointing to the field. “How is he ever going to get control of the ball if he can’t keep his balance?”
“Maybe he’s just trying to trap the ball out of the air,” Victoria said on the other side of me.
J.P. shot her a look that assured me I wasn’t the only one flunking out today. I leaned on my knees and tried to find Alex among the scattered ten-year-olds below. Once they started to move, it wasn’t hard. He was smaller than most of them, for starters, and scrawnier. He had both Dan and me to thank for that. Although I had never had a weight problem in my life, I couldn’t claim to have a good figure. Everything about my body was flat. Everything.
Alex’s diminutive size seemed to be working for him at the moment as he skittered down the field after a much bulkier boy who was hogging the ball.
“Tackle him, Alex!” I yelled, standing up. “Take him down!”
I heard some titters behind me.
“Do you even know what ‘tackle’ means in soccer?” J.P. said.
It evidently didn’t mean what it meant everywhere else.
“It means steal the ball, not take him down.” She pulled in her chin. “Sit, before you make a complete fool of yourself in front of your kid.”
I didn’t sit. I wasn’t used to being given orders, and I sure had no intention of taking them from the Soccer Nazi.
“I think I’ll get a little closer,” I said. “Excuse me.”
“She’s not going to be able to tell what’s going on from there,” I heard Victoria say as I trotted down the steps.
“Like that’s going to matter,” was J.P.’s answer.
Welcome to your son’s soccer league, Ryan. We hope you’ll feel right at home—as soon as you get a clue.
I sat on the bottom bench like I knew exactly what I was doing and realized right away what Victoria was talking about. All I could see were the backs of the boys who weren’t currently on the field and, of course, Dan.
He stood on the sidelines among them, long, lean legs hanging out of the adult version of the same baggy shorts the kids were wearing, hands parked on the negligible hips that barely held them up. Beneath the shadow of the ball cap, all I could see of his face was his mouth, lips separated as almost-always in an attitude of surprise. Dan was like a cat. Every day was a new wonder to him, as if he hadn’t seen and done it all before. It was the thing I had fallen in love with, and the thing that had driven me into rage I didn’t even know I was capable of . . .
What was I doing?
I stood up and forced my eyes away from Dan and onto Alex, who now had the ball between his feet. He used them to get it past a boy who seemed determined to get it away from him with his own size nines. That seemed to delight the mothers in the stands as well as his father, who held up a hand to high-five Alex when he scooted by. I was definitely going to have to brush up on my soccer. I didn’t know what was good and what was going to win me a sneer from J.P. Winslow.
Not that I cared.
Except, from the glow on Alex’s face and the confidence that danced his feet down the field, I knew this was a huge part of my son’s life, so it had better be part of mine.
I glanced up at the women above me, the full-time mothers who, ten to one, drove minivans and had something simmering in the Crock-Pot at home and were still married to the fathers of Cade and Bryan and Felipe. I had more hope of fitting in with an Amish community.
Soccer practice ended at five, and I forced myself to observe the snacks Poco supplied for the boys—baby carrots, apples, string cheese, and bottled water. Personally, I would have wanted a Snickers bar after a workout like that, but I slid the information into my mental Mom file and pulled some cash out of my wallet.
“Take this,” I said to Poco when I was sure J.P. was out of earshot.
Her eyebrows knitted together. “For what?”
“For when it’s your turn to bring the snack, since you had to bail me out.”
I didn’t mean for my tone to take on the edge it did, but Poco untangled the eyebrows and moved closer to me. The top of her head was at my chin.
“Don’t let J.P. get to you,” she said, almost without moving her lips. “She’ll warm up once she gets to know you.”
I was about to tell her that it was not my life’s desire for J.P. to get to know me, when I felt something warm and moist beside me.
“Hi, Mom,” Alex said. “Dad said could you drive me home because he has a meeting.”
“Soccer league board,” Poco said.
As if I didn’t know. Which I didn’t—but it seemed to be common knowledge that I was playing catch-up with my family. I mean, gosh, I didn’t even have a bumper sticker.
“I absolutely could,” I said. “Get your stuff.”
“I’m goin’ with Mom, Dad!” he yelled across a dozen kids and, of course, their mothers. “We’ll see you at home!”
I could almost hear the thoughts. What? You told me they were divorced. Somebody find out and get back to me . . .
Alex and I left them to gossip it out for themselves. He was grinning from one earlobe to the other when we climbed into the car, and it dawned on me as I pulled out of the parking lot just what that had been about. I held myself back from saying, “No, son—your father and I are not getting back together, no matter what you do.” I sagged a little. His invitation to come to practice probably had less to do with me seeing him play soccer than with me seeing his father. Why else wouldn’t he have informed me that Dan was the coach?
But going to Dan’s right now played into my plan to talk to Jake as soon as possible. This had to be a God thing. It screamed for the prayer, “Please give me the words I need to say.”
Or the words Jake needed to say. I’d wrestled with it during the long hours I’d lain awake the night before—Jake’s refusal to talk about any of this—and it had come to me that it wasn’t all that unusual. Jake had always been one to bottle things up—who was being mean to him on the playground, what unfair thing was happening in the classroom, which fear was haunting his nightmares— until it all poured out in a burst of little-boy angst. And just to me. The only person he would ever share those secrets with was me.
Until he turned twelve. That was normal, I’d thought. His voice was changing. His legs were getting hairier. He was showing all the signs of starting the painful trek into manhood, so why wouldn’t he switch his confidences to Dan? I was wistful about it, but not disturbed.
Except that he didn’t go to Dan, who was at that time hiding in his studio, busily making me think he was filling orders for customers of the business I helped him start. The shop that was slowly going under and would finally sink before I knew where it was headed— when it was too late to stop it.
Jake went to his room and did some hiding of his own. Which, I had to admit, I didn’t see as a problem until the day in court when he informed the judge that he wanted to live with his father. The day he wouldn’t even look at me.
I turned onto the dirt road that led from Lakeside Drive back to Dan’s place in the southern part of Las Cruces. Though it was only a few miles from the house I’d bought, it might as well have been on a different planet. Yet I was barely aware of the copse of apple and pear trees gone wild that we rode through, their branches entwined overhead like a feral canopy of fruit. God was giving me a different image—of the bond I’d had with Jake before the divorce. It had to be there still. I thought when I came here to mend it that it might have to happen gradually. But there was no gradual now. There was only right now—or there was prison.
We stopped in a cloud of dust in front of Dan’s L-shaped, tile-roofed farmhouse. It was pleasant enough, swathed in shade trees and reminiscent of pictures I’d seen of New Mexico’s territorial period, even though it was only about twenty years old. I still wasn’t sure how Dan had afforded it. He knew as much about handling money as I did about soccer, and of course What money? was always the question. He played the role of starving artist well.
Motion caught my eye in one of the front windows as I got out of the car after Alex, who was already disappearing around the back. All the windows were wide, with three paned panels framed in cornflower blue against salmon-colored adobe walls. A face disappeared from the glass, but not before I recognized curls and a set of unnaturally white teeth. I wondered if Ginger and Dan had ever discussed their views of Rembrandt—an artist for him, a toothpaste for her.
She opened the door for me before I got there. What—did she live there?
One would think so, the way she ushered me into the open, cream-tiled entranceway with an air of ownership. I didn’t ponder that, however, because Jake was there, too, standing in a shaft of fading sun that striped through one of the skylights between the ceiling vegas. The light seemed to go through him, as if he weren’t wholly there. The downward cast of his eyes told me he wasn’t.
“Danny called and said you were coming,” Ginger said.
Danny? I would have pondered that longer if I hadn’t seen her rest her hand on Jake’s back.
“I knew you’d want to have some alone time, so I’ve got you set up in the den. Alex is always hungry when he gets home, so he’ll be out here demanding food any minute.” She rubbed Jake’s back. “Won’t he? And Ian’s due in from practice in thirty minutes. It gets a little wild around here after school.” She nodded her head of full, fat curls toward the back of the house. “You two get settled, and I’ll bring you some snacks and make sure everybody leaves you alone.”
She couldn’t have been more accommodating, but all I could think of when she dropped her hand from Jake’s back was that he’d never flinched while it was there. And that now, when she’d set it up, my son was going to give me some “alone time.”
Jake led the way halfheartedly through the open, airy living room and kitchen, all of which carried the mixed aroma of apple-cinnamon potpourri and cayenne pepper. French doors, painted the same cornflower blue as the window frames, opened into a room I hadn’t been invited into before.
The floor was covered in terra-cotta tile, and an adobe window seat was piled with pillows in patterns I’d only seen on Navajo pottery. The furniture was cozied around an adobe kiva where a small fire crackled.
None of it took the chill off of Jake, however. He fell onto one of the sofas and sat there, flattened against burnt-orange cushions and yet at the same time crouched for flight back to his cave, where I wasn’t welcome.
I perched on the window seat facing him. “Thanks for seeing me.”
“It’s not like I had a choice.”
“You don’t, because we have to get this worked out. Let’s just walk through it, okay?”
Since he didn’t hurl himself from the room, I cut to the chase.
“All right, so how did you get downtown yesterday?”
“I just did.”
I sucked in a breath. “All right, so, you’re there. How did you wind up in somebody else’s truck? Did you steal it?”
“No!”
He glanced at me for a flicker of a second and looked away.
“So somebody let you get in the truck.”
“I guess.”
“You’re not sure, or you don’t remember?”
He shook his head. I wanted to shake the rest of him. No wonder cops wound up smacking their suspects.
“What about the note? I know you didn’t write that, Jake. I mean, unless something’s changed.”
“Don’t say I’m not smart enough to write like that.”
I stared at him. “I wasn’t going to say that. When have I ever said you weren’t smart?”
“I just don’t want to talk about this.” This time he did hurl himself from the room, nearly mowing down Ginger, who was entering with a tray.
“You want me to bring this to your room, Jakey?” she said.
He didn’t answer. When she looked at me, I got up and went for the back door.
“I guess nobody’s hungry,” I heard her say.
The door opened onto a wide-planked deck overlooking a surprisingly neat area of brick walkways and stoned circles and cable-spool tables holding pots of red geraniums. Alex was in a far corner, batting at a soccer ball with his foot. I sat on the low step and tried to stuff my rising anger. It was a lot like pushing toothpaste back into a tube.
But I hadn’t seen anger in Jake just now. He was irritated—sick of being questioned and threatened and advised of his rights. But I didn’t see the kind of rage it would have taken to break someone’s legs and fracture his skull and throw him into a coma.
Or was it just buried under the shruggy shoulders and the snipped-off answers? I’d seen boys do that in Chad, boys who had more to bury than Jake did. But even as the idea came to me, I dismissed it. They interred their anger under faces that showed nothing. I could see something in Jake, a shadow of—what was it? Fear? Guilt?
I stood up, sending a pair of fallen yellow cottonwood leaves scurrying. It couldn’t be guilt. But Jake wasn’t going to help me prove it. I was going to have to do that on my own.
I looked at Alex, who was bouncing the soccer ball on his lifted knee with surprising accuracy.
Or . . . I might get a little help.
He stopped and grinned as I strode toward him, hugging my arms around myself against the gathering chill. “So,” I said, “are you going to teach me about soccer, or what?”
His grin widened. He was unarguably the most charming child ever created.
“You wanna learn?” he said.
I nodded at the ball he had parked on his hip. “Show me how you move it around with your feet.”
“It’s called dribbling, Mom,” he said with exaggerated patience. “You just do this.”
I watched him tap the ball with his insteps in a circle around me. “How did you get so good at this?” I asked.
“Practice. Jake helps me.”
The ball escaped, and he had to chase it under the bank of creosote bushes that separated the yard from Dan’s outdoor sculpture gallery beyond.
“Are you and your brother still close?” I asked when he emerged. “Kind of.” He went back to juggling the ball off of his knee. Apparently that was his latest very-cool skill. I showed the proper appreciation.
“Jake hangs out with his own friends mostly,” he said. “But me and him play soccer, like, every day. Or we did.”
“Until when?” I said.
“Until yesterday.”
The ball got loose again, and this time I stopped it with my foot.
“Good trap, Mom,” he said.
“Alex.”
He looked at me, brown eyes round.
“I don’t think your brother ran over that boy, and I’m going to prove it. Will you help me if you can?”
His gaze dropped to the ball, and he pried it away from me with his toe. It wasn’t the reaction I expected.
“Are you and Dad gonna fight about it if I do?”
I expected that even less. “No! Why would we fight about that?”
He put the ball in motion again. “You guys fight about everything— and then I don’t know whose side I’m supposed to be on.”
I couldn’t even go there, not with a screaming fit starting in my head. I was going to have to save that one for Dan. Meanwhile, my ten-year-old continued to dribble a ball in a circle that probably matched what was going on in his head.
“Let me give it a try,” I said.
He pushed the ball to me with the inside of his foot, and I trapped it again with mine, since that had impressed him the first time. I had less success with dribbling. Two kicks, and the thing was in the koi pond. Alex retrieved it, snickering happily.
“You got a long way to go, Mom,” he said.
“Alexander—don’t you want a snack?”
We both looked up at the figure standing in the back door with the tray of goodies nobody seemed to want.
“I’m good,” Alex called to her.
When Ginger disappeared, I said, “Does she live here now?”
“No. But she’s gonna homeschool Jake since they won’t let him back in the school. That’s why she’s here.”
I detected an edge in his voice, and I went for it.
“So—she calls you Alexander?”
“She puts a y on the end of everybody’s name. Danny. Jakey. It doesn’t work with mine.”
“You can’t exactly say Alex-y.”
“Yeah, but it’s like she has to do something with it, so she calls me Alexander. She’s just weird.”
Well. His loyalties to me and to his father might be divided. But there was no place in there for Ginger.
At least there was that.