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"Why don't we go to a pizza place that has a cool arcade? I like playing skee ball, do you?"
Charlie shrugged but didn't verbally respond.
An hour and a half later, after spending thirty bucks on tokens, watching Charlie pick at his pizza and failing to establish any kind of rapport with the six year-old, Eva drove them to Magnolia Bend. She had a panicky feeling deep inside. It didn't help that she'd spent all of Sunday not just worried about bringing Charlie home, but also anxious over how things between her and Jake had changed so quickly.
She wanted to call him and talk to him about Charlie, and yet she didn't, because she was scared of the feelings unleashed at just the touch of his lips. Jake had texted her earlier. He had wanted to know who Charlie was. The tinge of jealously in his breezy question might have made her smile if she'd not been so twisted into knots over the turmoil in her life.
But she'd deal. She always did.
"When is my mom coming to get me?" Charlie asked.
At his sudden question, Eva jerked the steering wheel to keep from going off the highway. "Oh, um, I'm not sure, honey. She's at a place that's helping her get better."
"But she's not sick."
Eva turned her head to look back, not trusting the rearview mirror. Charlie glared at her, anger in his eyes, his mouth pressed into a mulish line. "In a way, she is."
"I don't want to stay with you. I want my mom."
"I know, Charlie."
“I wanna stay with Chris. He has a dog and lets me eat doughnuts for breakfast."
"Chris is leaving for England next week," Eva said, trying not to be hurt that Charlie would rather stay with a man than with her. Weren't little kids supposed to gravitate toward women? Maybe her maternal gene was nonexistent. Maybe Charlie had hated every outing they'd taken. Maybe he didn't love her, didn't like her, and wouldn't even piss on her if she caught fire.
"Where's England?"
"It's really far away. Look, Charlie, we have to do things this way. You don't want to stay with strangers, do you? And where I live is nice. Remember the fire station and the pancakes we had at PattyAnn's?"
"Yeah, but I don't want to go to a new school. I want to go to St. Matthew's. All my friends are there, and I was going to be on the basketball team."
"You can play basketball in Magnolia Bend if you're still here when it starts. Let's just look at this as an adventure. Like a summer camp... just not in summer."
He shrugged and went back to staring out the window. The exit for Magnolia Bend loomed ahead, and Eva tried not to allow the tears welling in her eyes to slip down her cheeks. She felt overwhelmed, sad, and scared for Charlie, and she wished she'd made a stronger effort to get to know her younger brother better.
Her father's final wife, Claren, had not been the easiest person to deal with. Eva would trade shifts so she could see Charlie, and the woman would drum up some excuse as to why Charlie couldn't go. Eva should have pushed harder to spend time with the boy; she should have paid more attention to Claren and what was going on in their life. She knew she'd had a problem with prescriptive drugs when she'd been with her father. She knew how screwed up Claren was, so she should have realized the woman was using again. God, she'd been buying Oxycotin like it was a grocery item. And the fact that she had been prostituting herself to score the drug was mind-boggling.
Charlie had needed Eva, and she'd been too busy trying to climb the ladder toward captain of the MBFD to notice. She'd been too involved in herself, and now Charlie had to pay for the adults in his life ignoring his needs.
Eva would work to fix it. She'd make sure of that.
"What about my birthday?" Charlie asked.
Oh, snap.
Charlie's birthday was... next week.
"We'll have a party, uh, if you want one. You want one, right?"
The boy shrugged. "Mom said I could have a campout, like with a tent."
"Uh, no problem. We can have a campout in the backyard. We can even roast marshmallows and tell ghost stories."
"But who's gonna come?"
Good question. "I don't know. Yet. But we'll have fun. I promise."
God help that to be true.
