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“Where’s your mom?” she said, glancing back. “She’s usually waiting.”
He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. “She’ll be here.”
He watched Piper until she disappeared around the corner.
He waited fifteen minutes. Twenty. Watching up and down the street. He could hear the football coach’s whistle blowing way off from the field behind the school. The air was thick with humidity, causing him to sweat beneath his backpack.
It was spring, the bright days already long and growing longer. He knew the way home. It wouldn’t take him much time to walk, though he hadn’t done it alone before.
At his other school, the teachers had waited to see everyone off. But they didn’t do that here in middle school. He could just walk home. But what if she came here and didn’t find him? She’d freak out. What if he waited and waited and she didn’t come?
His stomach felt queasy. A couple of times she hadn’t picked him up from other schools. Once she’d been late at work; he’d had to wait with a teacher who didn’t seem too happy about it. Once a nice mom who felt bad for him gave him a lift. He found his mom sleeping on the couch.
“Oh my goodness!” she said when she saw him. “I dozed off!”
She didn’t apologize and acted like it was nothing. It didn’t feel like nothing to him.
But he was older now, almost fourteen.
Finally, he left the school and made his way home.
He’d have to pass the mall with the gun shop and the strip club, where there was always a suspicious gathering of men hanging around. Sometimes they called at his mom as they walked by.
“Just ignore them,” she’d say, tugging on his arm. “Men are pigs.”
He knew his mom wasn’t pretty. That her nose was long, and her face marked with some faint acne scars. Even when she wore makeup, it didn’t seem to quite take. Her hair, when she loosed it from its ponytail, was limp and flat. But she’d had a few boyfriends. Men who were there for a time, then not. He barely remembered any of them.
That day, the men in the mall ignored him, didn’t even seem to notice him at all.
Their apartment building sat beside a green lake with a rusty fountain in the middle of it. The building was painted bright white and the hallways were exposed to the elements, like an old motel. He climbed up the stairs. He had a key and let himself inside, dropped his heavy backpack, relishing the cool of the interior.
“Mom?”
He walked through the living room to her room, which was empty. Then to his, also empty. Everything was plain and neat and orderly, beds made, kitchen clean. In the kitchen, he made some microwave macaroni and cheese, then ate it in front of the television, which he would not be able to do if his mom was home.
He watchedSpongeBob, which was silly, childish but always funny.
He fell asleep on the couch with a knot in his stomach and an ache behind his eyes. When he woke up the dim light of dusk colored the room gray. There was a dryness to his throat, a humming in his ears.
“Mom?”
She wasn’t home.
Who could he call? He couldn’t think of anyone. There was no one—no grandparents, aunts, or uncles. Should he call the police? What would he say?My mom. She didn’t come home.
Henry didn’t know his father. For a long time, when he’d asked, she simply said, “You don’t have one.”
But after health class and sixth grade biology, he’d insisted on answers.There has to be a father. Scientifically.
“Look,” she told him then, cheeks reddening. “I went to a sperm bank. I wanted a child, not a husband.”
“Who is he?” Henry asked, grappling with that bit of information.A sperm bank?
“I have no idea and those records are sealed. Whoever donated his sperm, he didn’t want to be known. He probably just did it for the money.”
Henry had been aware of a feeling that would only grow and expand. A kind of shame. A kind of otherness. That there was something deeply and truly deficient within him. That feeling would only grow as he got older.
“It’s okay,” she said gently, maybe reading the horror on his face. “Some people have a mom and dad, a big family. Some people might have two dads, or two moms, or just a dad. You just have me. We only have each other. That’s it.”
