For the Children

“And you don’t think that was reason enough to take you out of there? Next time you might not get so lucky.”

“I wasn’t at home when it happened,” Abraham said, looking over at Kirk. “The guy wasn’t one of my mom’s, uh, anyone she—he’d never been to our house. He wanted to come over and she’d told him no because he gave her the creeps. He was just some drunk that asked her out and she turned him down.”

“So how’d he find you?”

“I don’t know.” Abraham shrugged. “I was hanging out down the street and he pulled up and started talking to me. Asked me if I knew where Carla Billings lived. I lied to him. Gave him directions to where one of my old teachers lives. An hour later he came looking for me.”

The muscles in Kirk’s neck were so tight they hurt. “And where was your mother when all this was going on?”

“Home,” Abraham said. “Working. But she’s the one who saved me, Coach. I was in that parking lot, thinking I was a goner and she came rushing up out of nowhere like she’s a superhero or something. She kicked the guy and screamed so much he took off before someone could come arrest his ass.”

An ideal life for a twelve-year-old.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Abraham said, his voice calm now, as though he were the adult and Kirk the child, the one needing assurance. “But that kind of stuff happens to all kinds of kids, Coach. It could happen to me here just as easily as it did there, probably easier ’cause I don’t know the ins and outs like I do at home. And my mom takes care of me, Coach. I know things don’t look so great, but we’re all the family we’ve got. And family is everything. Haven’t you learned that yet?”

Out of the mouths of twelve-year-old kids….

“Yeah, I learned that,” he said, his throat dry. “But, honestly, Abe, wouldn’t you prefer a normal home life?”

“Normal compared to what?” the boy asked. “I know kids at school whose dads beat ’em up on a regular basis. I just got beat up once. Besides, this is the life I was given.”

“It doesn’t have to stay that way,” Kirk said, arguing a side he wasn’t sure he agreed with. Valerie had made a mistake about Brian, and Kirk believed she’d made a mistake in supporting her peer on this one.

“Listen,” Abraham said, an adult in a kid’s body. “At least before, I had something, you know? Now I got no family at all. Maybe for some kids this would be better, but not for me.”

“You haven’t even tried.”

“What’s to try?” he asked, bitterness returning to his voice. “My mom’s the one I belong to, she’s where I have a place and a job to do. If I can’t do that, I’m nothing.”

The boy was wrong about that, but Kirk was unable to help Abraham to see things any other way. Maybe because he wasn’t clear on the whole thing, either. Instead, he saw something in a disadvantaged young man that, as a thirty-four-year-old multimillionaire, he hadn’t understood himself. A sense of what mattered most.

Against the prompting of an inner self he didn’t often get along with, Kirk pulled up in front of the Mortons’ at eight o’clock sharp, just as he’d said he would, and dropped off a young man who’d lost everything that mattered to him. A boy who was giving up.

A STRANGE KIND of adrenaline pumping through her veins, Valerie barely got around the corner from dropping off the boys the following Friday afternoon before picking up her cell phone.

“How would you like to go to dinner?”

“Valerie?”

She couldn’t blame him for his surprise.

“Yeah, I know, we don’t do dinner, but I just left the boys with friends who’re taking them camping overnight. I have a free evening and I don’t want to waste it.”

Strange how spending some time with him was the only thing that didn’t seem like a waste of time at the moment. Freedom did strange things to an otherwise focused and responsible single mother. “Besides,” she continued before he could answer, “I want to thank you.”

“For what?”

“I’ll tell you at dinner.”

“Is that a bribe to get me to go?”

She pulled up to the stop sign at the next intersection. And, with no traffic behind her, stayed there. She’d been thinking about him all week, about his teenage years. And the man he’d become.

She admired him. A lot.

“Do I need one?” she asked.

“No.”