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"I look like mommy material to you?" she shot back.
"Got a point there," he agreed. "The fuck am I supposed to do with him?"
"He ain't rocket science, Phil. He's a person. You feed him. You clean him. You teach him shit. Put him to bed. Shower, rinse, repeat until he can take care of himself."
"And you?"
"What about me?"
"You're just washing your hands?"
"Look, I love the kid. I do. I love him too much to keep him. So, you need help here and there. You got a long job. You get pinched. My number and address is in the bag with his snacks and information about his doctor and stuff."
"Does he have a name?"
"Of course he has a fucking name. He's not a couch."
"You gonna tell me it, or am I supposed to guess?"
"You haven't changed a fucking bit," my ma said, shaking her head at him, but she was smiling. "His name is Sean."
Then, ten minutes later, my ma stooped down, threw her arms around me, and squeezed me until I was sure I was going to pop.
And she walked away.
"Alright, kid. Honest to fuck here, don't know what to do with you," Phil said, left standing there holding all my bags, looking as lost as I suddenly felt. "But figure it is late for little shits like you, so come on. I'll show you to the bed."
That was what he did.
He led me to a room with a bed and a dresser, pulled off my shoes, put me on the bed, shook my toys out of a bag, and left me there.
He was gone long enough for me to eventually fall asleep.
The next thing I remembered was waking up crying for my ma.
He came walking in to that, big body looking almost fearful at the sight of three-year-old tears.
Sitting down off the end of the bed, he reached for me with hands the size of dinner plates, pulling me awkwardly onto his knee, then wiping at my cheeks with the end of his leather cut, the material not absorbent, so all it did was smear them around more.
"Alright look, kid," he said in a grown man voice, the sound somehow breaking through the pit of sadness inside me, making my cries stop even if the tears kept coming. "I don't know what I'm doing here. Don't know dick about raising no kids. So you're just going to have to work with me here. You need something, you tell me. No more of this crying shit. Don't know what to do with that. Gotta be a man, now, Sean. Ain't nobody around to baby you no more. But you do that, you man up and work with me, we could have a good thing going."
I couldn't claim to know exactly what he was saying to me. But something got through. The tone, maybe some of the words, maybe just an innate understanding that this man, he was all I had now, and I needed to do what he needed from me. Because there was no one else to turn to.
I never cried again.
"That's the saddest thing I think I've ever heard," Peyton cut me off, eyes big and sad, but not watering. I figured she wasn't exactly the kind of chick who cried easily.
"It's life," I corrected. "Plenty of kids have it worse than I had it. Sure, I never got to have someone singing me to sleep or kissing my knee when I scraped it all to shit, but I had a family of sorts."
They were that, too.
A family.
All these men who seemed to take my presence there with a grain of salt. Some ignored me. Others treated me much the way my father did. The clubwhores occasionally pinched my cheeks and told me how handsome I was before they got dragged away. Other than them, I didn't see another woman for years.
About a year after I moved into the compound, one of my father's buddies had a similar drop-in from an old fling, the woman loud and nasty, throwing a dirty kid at Dwayne, my father's friend. Unlike me, he didn't come with his bags, with his toys, with his favorite things. He barely came with clothes that fit him.
So when he was put down on the floor, his eyes locking on me, big and fearful as I remembered feeling the first night I was at the compound, I walked over toward him, patting him on the shoulder the way all the men did.
"You're a man now," I remembered telling him. "So we can't cry," I added, leading him away from the scene his mother was making, swinging, slapping, spitting at Dwayne who seemed too shocked by the situation to do anything but prevent himself from being hit. "Don't worry," I added as I led him down the hall toward my room. "I have toys to play with."
