“And what’s getting him through seventeen?”
“You think I want something.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.
I thought about the garage light burning until two in the morning.
The motorcycle that wasn’t running.
The quiet at dinner.
The way he had stopped asking me anything. The names he never brought home.
A boy named Jamie I had heard about for the first time tonight in the same breath as a crooked tie.
“Five minutes,” Vanessa said again. “Or I will. Because he asked me to. And because I am tired of being the ghost in your story.”
“Five minutes.”
The screen door creaked.
Austin stepped out onto the porch with a glass of water in his hand. He looked across the yard and saw the two of us standing there. He wasn’t surprised to find us together.
He wasn’t afraid. He was waiting.
Minutes later, the three of us sat down inside the living room.
The camera was still on my wrist where I’d looped it on the porch, and Austin’s tie, his father’s navy tie with the small flaw in the weave, sat crooked at his throat.
I had been carrying both of them around for nine years without looking at either. A story, not a son. That was what I’d been guarding.
