me perched on the edge of the sofa, my hands tucked between my knees, deferring to my husband for the initial attack.
“What’s up?” Josh asks. He stands on the step leading down into the family room, clearly not wanting to go any further and commit to this conversation.
“Come sit down, Josh.”
Josh doesn’t move. “What’s up?”
“Come sit down,” Nick practically barks, and I wonder why we are arguing about this instead of the money that is no longer in his drawer.
Josh looks between us both and then silently steps down into the room. He doesn’t sit down. He and Nick lock gazes for a moment before Josh drops his, shifting impatiently where he stands.
“What is this all about?” he asks in a surly voice.
“Josh, your mother found a rather large amount of money in your underwear drawer.” Nick has a tendency to sound pompous in moments like this, his instinctive default when he’s uncertain or nervous, but right now it feels needed. It lends an import to this moment that would otherwise feel like just another battle about Josh’s phone or the PlayStation, except we stopped bothering with those battles, and I’m not even sure when.
Josh lifts and drops shoulders, a negligent gesture. “So?”
“Where did you get that money?”
His gaze slides away before returning inexorably to the middle space between us. “I saved it.”
“How?”
“Why does it matter?”
“Because I can’t imagine how you’ve managed to save that amount of money.”
Another rise and fall of his shoulders. “Well, I did. Allowance… birthdays… Christmas. Grandma gave me a hundred dollars when I turned sixteen.”
For a second, Nick and I both tense and I know he is wondering if we’ve got this all wrong. It would be such a relief, but based on the way we’ve approached this whole conversation, it would also be a major mistake. I am already bracing myself for Josh’s sneering fury—what, you thought I was doing drugs?—when I remember that I deposited my mother’s birthday check to him into his savings account.
“No, Josh,” I say quietly, the first time I’ve spoken. “That money from Grandma is in your savings account.”
Josh shrugs yet again. “I don’t know, then. I just saved it, all right?” His bullish defensiveness rings a horribly false note. We’ve already got him on the ropes, and that is not good.
“How?” Nick says quietly. He’s dropped the imperious bluster, replaced it with something more serious.
Josh lowers his gaze, looks at the floor. “I don’t know. I just did.”
Why can’t he come up with a decent excuse? I feel oddly disappointed; I wanted something from him that I could at least try to believe in.
“Over six hundred dollars, Josh,” I interject. “Help us understand.”
“Why does it matter?”
“Because,” Nick answers levelly, “as your parents, we need to know how you got that money.”
“I just saved it.” Josh raises his voice, trying to sound impatient now. “Like I said. Birthday money and allowance and stuff. Who cares?”
We’re going to go around in circles now, just like I did with Emma. I haven’t even talked to her since the parents’ weekend, although I’ve texted her a couple of times. She replied only once, a few words that told me nothing. Now, with Josh, we’ll keep pressing and he will keep deflecting and we’ll never get anywhere.
“Is it drugs?” I ask, and it’s as if I’ve just done a poo on the floor. Both Nick and Josh look at me in blank-faced shock. I am not following the script for this particular family drama, and suddenly I don’t care. I meet Josh’s stunned gaze with a calmness I didn’t expect to feel. “Are you dealing drugs?” I ask evenly, with an almost-serenity that is bewildering to my husband and my son. “Is that where you got the money?”
“Ally…” Nick begins, and then stops.
Josh shakes his head. “Why… why would you think that?” He sounds wounded, and Nick looks torn, as if he wants to come to his son’s defense, but I see right through it. Right now, Josh looks like he did when he was four, and he’d broken a crystal vase in the hall, one of our wedding presents. He tried to convince me the neighbor’s cat had somehow got into our house and knocked it over, all wide-eyed innocence with a guilty darkness lurking beneath. It was kind of cute back then. It isn’t now.
“Josh. That’s not an answer.”
“Ally,” Nick says again, and again he stops.
A silence stretches on, elastic, stretching thinner with every second, until I’m sure it’s going to