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My favorite person is my mom.
He’d turned it into a little piece of art, illustrating the borders and drawing elaborate numbers. To keep it nice, he’d rolled it and slid it into a tube from a used-up roll of paper towels. He meant to present it to Eight so he could read it during the game and they could talk after.
Marcella meant to impress upon the man that he had damn well better read it and appreciate it.
Jesus, this was hard. She wanted Eight to go the fuck away, to never have come back into the picture at all, so they could have stayed the way they’d been without him. She wanted to have made a different choice and prevented him from coming near her son.
But neither of those things had happened. She’d opened this door. Now, as much as she personally wanted him away, for Ajax, she needed him to stay. She needed him to want this. She needed him to be ready to be a father.
Considering that he was here already, early on a Saturday morning, half an hour before game time, maybe he was.
As Ajax scrambled out of the car, Eight swung off his bike. Marcella hurried out and around the car as well, arriving on the other side in time to see her son and the man who’d helped her make him slapping hands.
Ajax put his backpack on the ground and crouched to open it. Eight looked over at Marcella and smiled. “Hey, Marce.”
“Hi. You’re early.” He looked tired, too.
“Wanted to make sure I wasn’t late.”
He was trying. It was good he was trying.
Ajax stood and presented Eight with the paper-towel tube. Since she’d last seen it, he’d drawn soccer balls, baseballs, and motorcycles over the cardboard and added a piece of blue curling ribbon.
“I made a list of facts about me. You can read it and after the game we can talk about it. If you want.”
Eight took the cardboard tube and looked down at it as if he didn’t understand. Then a whistle blew, and Ajax flung his attention to the field. “I gotta go.” He held out his hand to Eight. When Eight grasped it, they shook, and Ajax said, “Thank you for coming.”
“Sure. I said I would.”
With a quick hug for Marcella, Ajax snatched up his pack and ran to his gathering team.
Marcella walked up alongside Eight as they both watched him run. Eight had a pale, gobsmacked look about him.
“You okay?”
“You know what, Marce? I have no fucking idea.”
She turned to look straight at him. “If you hurt that boy, I will make it the mission of the rest of my life to make you regret it.”
He met her emphatic look. “I know. I don’t want to fuck this up, okay? But I’m feeling my way here. It’d be nice if you’d cut me some slack. Maybe even help me out. I don’t want to be your enemy, Marcella. I’m not trying to fuck shit up for you, either. I’m not a threat.”
She laughed. “Yeah, Eight, you are. You sidle in and change everything. I don’t want to be your enemy, either. As long as Ajax wants this, I want it. But if you want me to cut you some slack, then you need to see how this tears up the life I made for my son. Even if it works out, you make everything different just bybeinghere.”
In his eyes, Marcella saw that he hadn’t considered that. Now he was, and she watched the understanding dawn. A barbed comment leapt to the tip of her tongue, something about how fucking arrogant and self-centered it was not to realize this affected other people than him, but she bit it off before it could become words. If he wanted some slack, even some help, to wend his way to being a good father, she would help him. For Ajax’s sake.
The first step was to stop throwing his failures in his face.
It did not matter whether Eight was the kind of man who should be a father. Hewasa father. The father of her child. So she would have to help him be the best father he could possibly be.
“Do you want me to go?” he asked. She heard the dejection in his voice.
“No, Eight. I want you to stay. I want you to step up. I want you to do right by … our son.” Whoo, it was hard to get that possessive pronoun out.
Those three little letters had an obvious impact on Eight as well. “I want that, too.”
She took a step, coming right up to him, and slipped the paper-towel roll from his hand. As she pulled her son’s Top Ten list from its protection, she said, “I’m gonna help you do it.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
