Emotion slams into my chest. I haven’t given Atlas much detail about his mom. He’s five. It’s not like he understands much of it, and I don’t want to complicate it for him. He knows she died when he was born and because her brain had a bleed in it. I don’t tell him about the agonizing decision to take her off life support when he was two days old, or the day I took him home from the hospital and let him cry for three hours because I couldn’t bear to pick him up. I didn’t want to look at him and see the reminder of Athena. I wanted to die with her in those days.
Those details, those moments when I didn’t know how to even breathe, he doesn’t need to know. He’s young, and though he only has me, I want to protect him from the outside world, and the cruelty of it, for as long as I can.
“No, not because of you. It was just something that happened, Buddy. Not because of you.”
He’s staring at my dad’s house now, his focus on the front porch with the swing my mom used to sit on. Every day when I’d come home from school, I remember her sitting on the swing, rocking back and forth. The wind picks up, the swing creaking to life. The sound catches my attention.
Atlas sighs beside me, his eyes turn up to mine. “I think I’m supposed to live here,” he tells me, chocolate covering his lips and chin. He tilts his head to study my expression to his words. He’s always watching me. Perhaps it’s to judge my reactions, but whatever the reason, I notice he spends a lot of time analyzing my responses and playing his words off it. “And I like Grandpa Fletch. He took me to a bar. I think he’s cool.”
“I thought I was cool?” I tease, using my sleeve to wipe the chocolate from his mouth.
He pulls back. “You are cool. But he took me to a bar.”
I can’t believe my dad took him to a fucking bar. And it’s not even the bar that pisses me off. It’s that he introduced Atlas to her. I didn’t want to meet her, let alone have him know her.
I’ve already complicated this enough. The deeper you go, the more the truth becomes a fear, and that fear, it scares the shit out of me.
Inside the house, Dad’s asleep in his chair and Bear’s on the couch, beer in hand, watching Thursday night football. Dad stirs in his recliner when Atlas runs through the house and jumps onto the couch next to Bear. “Uncle B, I had beer in a bar!”
“I heard,” Bear notes, wrapping his arm around him. Bear lifts his eyes to mine and then holds Atlas closer. “C’mon, man, we need your luck. The Seahawks are getting stomped.”
Dad notices me when he wakes, standing up and stretching. I exhale, staring at him. “What the fuck were you thinking?” I keep my voice down.
“It’s not that big of a deal.”
“It is. Just because you fucked up with us doesn’t mean you get to make decisions about my son,” I snap, knowing I’m crossing a line. There’s a lot my dad didn’t do for us. Spending time with us was one of them.
He chuckles. “You got a lot to learn, son.”
I push past him toward the door I just came in. I look over at Bear, who’s on the couch. “Can you watch him for a little while? I have somewhere I need to be.”
Bear grumbles something back at me, but I’m not in the mood to deal with it. I don’t know where I’m going when I leave the house, but it seems my body knows before I do. I know the mess I’ve gotten myself into, stolen moments with her, but the need to know her is so much stronger.
By Catch - Non-targeted fish species and marine life caught incidentally by fishing vessels—whether in nets or otherwise. By-catch has to be thrown overboard regardless of whether it’s dead or not. Factory trawlers, in particular, are criticized for wasting millions of pounds of fish annually.
Mal watches me rush through the back door, a tray of drinks balanced precariously on her hand. She smiles. “At least your shirt’s on right. Presley should take some notes from you.”
I peel my jacket off and toss it into the supply room. “Shut up. I