A Son's Tale

“Ask him.”

“Sammie?”

Vaguely aware that her parents were standing at the couch across from them, Morgan held her son at arm’s length, only so she could look into his sweet, earnest face. And accept whatever news he had to give her.

Sammie glanced back in the direction of the men behind Detective Martin.

“Tell her, son.” Frank Whittier’s voice.

And then, “Trust her.” Cal. Her eyes filled with tears again.

“Talk to me, Sammie.”

“I wasn’t going to run again, Mom, I swear.”

“You ran away?”

“Not really.” His head dropped, his shoulders slumped. “I promised you I wouldn’t and I guess I broke my promise, but it wasn’t like before.” He looked back up at her. “I don’t want to leave you,” he said, starting to cry again, though she could see he was trying as hard as he could to be the man he wanted to be. “I promised I wouldn’t run away from you again and I didn’t.”

Sammie’s back was to her parents so he didn’t see when George sat down. But Morgan saw. And the knot in her stomach started to tighten again.

“Grandpa called me when I was at practice this afternoon,” he said, his brown eyes wide, begging her to believe him.

Morgan looked, not at her father, or her mother, who would always support George, but at Elaine Martin.

The detective nodded. “The phone records were waiting for us when we got back.”

“He told me that you’d agreed to give me up. That you thought it was best.”

That was when Morgan looked at her father. “You promised…”

“You were going to see Cal,” he told her. “You’re so easily swayed. Your judgment betrays you. I wasn’t going to let you change your mind. One way or the other, the boy belongs with me.”

“What I wanted,” she said, loud and clear, “was for you to let me talk to my son about my decisions. You promised.”

“And I would have kept that promise if you hadn’t gone to see Whittier. He was going to try to change your mind. And you’d just admitted that you were in love with him.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

Conscious of the other people in the room, Morgan shook her head and focused again on the son whom she loved with every fiber of her being. “Grandpa called you and then what?”

“I just didn’t know what to do,” he said, the words ending on a high whine.

“I understand, sweetie, just tell me.”

Morgan sat down, pulling Sammie into her arms. With his head cradled against her chest, in a way it hadn’t been since before he’d started kindergarten, he said, “I figured that if, when I ran away from you, that made a court case for them to take me away from you, then if I ran away from Grandpa, that would make another court case for them to take me away from him.”

Out of the mouths of babes. She’d heard the cliché many times. Now it seemed relevant.

Grace stood, crossed over to sit beside Sammie.

He glanced at her, then huddled back against Morgan, his back to his grandmother.

“I knew about this place in the boys’ locker room off the gym. It had rubber mats over it, you know, for walking on when you get out of the shower, but one time last summer when I went in to pee, there was a guy working o

n the showers and he had the mat up and there was this big hole that went down underground. I thought I could hide there.”