fucking slave to make ends meet. She had a part-time job during the day, looked after me between school and bedtime, and then a part-time job in the evenings, and odd-jobs all over the place. I can only imagine how exhausted she must have been.”
I gripped his hands tighter and shuffled closer so my knee touched his. Ryan had noticeably paled as he talked, and the heat seemed to have been sucked out of the room.
“I remember this one time, I must have been nine years old. I came home from school and she wasn’t there. We didn’t have a TV and there was nothing in the cupboards like the kind of packaged snacks my friends at school had. It’d been kind of a shitty day, kids being assholes like only kids can, and I was sitting there for a while feeling sorry for myself, angry at her for not having money like them. What a piece of shit…”
I shook my head. “You were only a-”
“Kid. Yeah. So I was sitting there on the couch and I heard her car kinda cough and splutter its way into the driveway and a minute later she came inside. She had this look on her face I was too young to understand, but I remember it and I know what it means now. She was nervous. What was she nervous about? Well, I was sitting there pouting like a spoiled brat and she knelt in front of me and she had this soccer ball in her hand. I looked at it, and then I looked at her.”
Ryan stopped for a second and then almost gave me a heart attack when he sobbed. A tear dropped from his eye, and I reached up to cradle his face and wipe it away with my thumb without thinking.
There was an impending sense of doom growing inside of me that was terrifying, as Ryan waved his hand in the general area in front of him, as if the memory of his mother was right there for us both to see.
“She had these bags under her eyes, wearing one of the two dresses I’d seen her wear in… ever. She had nothing for herself and she bought me a soccer ball. She must have been tired right down to her bones, but you know what she said?”
I shook my head, feeling cool air on tear-streaks on my own face.
“She said, “Sorry I’m late, sweetie, you wanna come play kicks with me in the park?””
Ryan didn’t talk for a while and I dropped my hand back down.
“I couldn’t have put it into words then, but that was the first time I had an inkling that she was giving me everything, and I promised to myself that, no matter what it took, I’d give her everything too. Only, when I gave it, it really would be everything. The world on a silver platter. Before I could do that, though, she got cancer.”
“Oh, Ryan…”
“Probably from one of the shitty jobs she forced herself to have so that I could have anything at all,” he muttered. “But the medical bills kept on getting bigger until I wasn’t breaking even anymore. So, I knew this guy who could get some F, and I managed to make some arrangements so that I could buy from him and sell it on. Pretty much straight away, that started making even more than the cosmetics business. It covers the medical bills and then some.”
“Is she getting… what do they call it… is she in remission?”
Ryan’s face contorted for a second before he squeezed out the answer he didn’t want to give. “No. But she will. She’s going to have it all.”
I reached out and pulled him towards me, holding his head against my chest as we fell backwards along the couch. “Shhh, it’s OK.”
Holy shit. What an emotional can of worms I’d forced him to open. This poor guy was just doing the wrong thing to try to do the right thing. He was a good man.
I will keep you safe. I’ll say it’s entrapment, we can still use the information to work up your supply chain… just not against you. And it could take years. That’s a long time for us. Whatever “us” is.
I stroked his hair for a while until he was breathing normally again. “Sounds like we’ve got some things in common then,” I said.
“Like what?”
“I’m an only child too, and I never knew my dad. Of course, I never knew my mom either.