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She turned to me. Her eyes quickly jumped to Kendall.
“This is Kendall. He’s, ah, he’s someone very special to me, Mama.”
Mama looked at Kendall.
“Is this your boyfriend?” She asked taking things further than I expected.
“No. But I’m hoping one day,” I said not realizing how much I was putting Kendall on the spot.
Mama got up and approached Kendall.
“It’s very nice to meet you, Kendall,” she said before offering him a hug.
That stunned me. She barely gave me hugs. I couldn’t remember the last time she had given me one. I was beginning to realize that I didn’t know who my mother was. For most of my life, she had been the woman on the couch mindlessly staring at the TV. Was this who she had been before whatever it was that had changed her?
“It’s nice to meet you, too,” Kendall said hugging her back. “Are you excited about moving?”
Mama let him go. “Oh yes. Very excited.”
“This place hasn’t been so bad, has it, Mama?” I asked feeling a bit of a sting.
“This place has been our home. But, it’s time to put this part of our life behind us. We could all use a fresh start. Don’t you think?” She asked squeezing my hand with a smile.
Although I didn’t answer her, I knew she wasn’t wrong. It was time for all of us to move on. What did that mean in my case? How much of my future involved Snow Tip Falls? If I declared for the draft, I could end up on a team on the other side of the country. Was I really gonna return here in the off-season?
“What here do you want me to pack?” Kendall asked when we retreated to my room.
I looked around at the space that was barely bigger than my bed. Anything that had meant something to me I had brought with me to my dorm.
“I think I’m gonna throw it all out.”
Kendall turned to me surprised. “Everything?”
“Yeah.”
He looked around, pulled a yearbook from a shelf, and flipped through it. “Even this stuff?”
“Get rid of everything. Mama’s right. It’s time for a fresh start.”
I don’t know why but Kendall rubbed my back and rested his head on my shoulder. I wasn’t complaining. It felt nice. I wanted more of it. But, I was pretty sure he was doing it because he thought the junk around me meant more to me than it did.
What I saw when I looked around was the place I returned to the time I got my face bashed in after being caught stealing. Or, the room where I cried my eyes out when my mother stopped speaking for a month. I had been terrified she would never speak again.
“They could burn this shit as far as I’m concerned,” I told him grabbing a handful of crap and tossing it into a box.
Once I decided that, packing took no time at all.
“Where’s the pile for the dump,” I asked pushing out four full boxes.
“All of it?” Cage asked.
“Everything.”
Cage looked behind me at Kendall. I turned around in time to see Kendall shrug. I didn’t know what to make of the two of them but it rubbed me the wrong way.
“You guys need any help packing up the rest of this shit?”
“We’re getting through it okay,” Cage explained. “Was there any of this that you wanted to keep?”
