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"How long you been out?" Colson asked, hands slipping into his front pockets. A defensive move.
"Just about two days," I told him.
"And you didn't tell me because..."
"I didn't tell Thad before either. He found out because he called and I was already on my way here."
"And you didn't tell me once you got here because..."
Colson was not someone who backed down, who let you have your reasons without explanations.
"Honestly, I don't know," I admitted. "I was nervous."
"About seeing me."
"I guess."
"Fuck," he hissed, running a hand down the scruff on his face, glancing down the hall before he looked at me again. "How did we get like this?" he wondered. "Winnie?" he asked when my gaze slipped to my feet for a moment. "Spill it."
"You didn't come see me for almost a year," I admitted, knowing that one way or another, he would get the truth from me. I might as well use the band-aid technique.
Colson's head hung, shaking in either shame or regret. Maybe a mix of the two. "I'm a shit," he declared, voice rough. "Never meant to hurt you. You gotta know that."
"I know that."
While Colson and I might not have been quite as close as Thad and I had always been thanks to shared interests, he had always been there for me, had always been my protector, my shoulder to lean on.
"We can rebuild this," he told me. With conviction. Which was how he always spoke, honestly. But this was with determination. Like he had set his mind to it. Like he was going to do everything in his power to make it so. "With Jelly, it was hard to get out that way as much as I would have liked. But you're here now. We'll work on this."
"We won't need to work on it," I declared, moving toward him, wrapping my arms around him, feeling that warm sensation move through me once again as his arms folded around me, familiar, comforting. "It will all fall into place."
Until...
I pushed that thought away, refusing to harp on it. That was a problem for another time.
"Come on. I gotta get in there before she cons his gullible ass into giving her cookies for breakfast."
We moved inside, having coffee, deciding to all go out to breakfast together.
It was odd to see Colson as a father. She brought out a softness that I hadn't ever really seen in him. Colson had been the man of our family, even when he was nothing but a little boy. The weight of that burden had made him older than his years, heavier when Thad and I got to be young and light.
When he had told me on the phone that he'd gotten a girl pregnant, I had always known he would take care of it. I knew he would work to provide for it, be a part of its life. Then when, three months after Jelena's birth, her mother decided she was not cut out to be a mother and gave Colson the choice to take over, or have his daughter put up for adoption, he had, of course, stepped up. As I knew he would. I hadn't been able, when I had heard the news, to picture it. I could see him doing the necessary tasks. Feeding, cleaning, washing clothes for her. But I couldn't see him rocking, snuggling, being sweet and silly with her. I hadn't thought he was capable.
But sitting at a diner with him as he cut up her food, had a bubble blowing in their milk contest with her, as he entertained her with silly drawings on the placemat, I realized I had been wrong all along about him. There had always been sweet and soft and fun inside him. It had just taken a little girl with an infectious laugh to bring it out of him.
"Did you get a card from Auntie May?" Thad asked, making the entire aura around the table shift.
Auntie May.
That was a sore spot.
No.
It was a gaping, festering wound.
For all three of us.
See, Colson, Thad, and I were as close as we were out of necessity, the need to close ranks, protect one another.
Colson and Thad were eleven and I was nine when Child Protective Services ripped us out of our beds in the middle of the night, pulling us through the only home we ever knew, bringing us to a room with a social worker who told us our mother could no longer take care of us anymore.
That was not exactly a surprise.
We hadn't seen our mother in three days.
It was not an uncommon occurrence. And we had learned to take care of ourselves. Get up for school. Eat cereal. Get to the bus stop together. Come home, sit at the table and do our homework, watch TV, eat freezer meals cooked in the microwave, go to bed. Shower, rinse, repeat.
