Child by Chance

The little boy looked up at her, and Talia’s throat closed as she recognized not only the blue-gray eyes studying her, but their intensity even more. He was a few years older than Tatum had been when Talia had left home, but that look was very similar.

“Hi,” he said, turning back to the workbook in front of him, the neat rows of pencil-written numbers in the three-digit multiplication problems he’d been solving.

“I’m Ms. Malone.”

The words won her another of those glances. He nodded.

Looking around for a chair, Talia prayed that she wouldn’t throw up again.

Snagging a chair and pulling it close enough to reach his desk, she sat down. Kent pulled back, his eyebrows drawing together and up.

“I’m going to be working with you all week,” she said, wishing she’d taken Mrs. Barbour’s offer to introduce them, after all. The principal had been busy. And she’d wanted the moment to herself.

“What, you’re, like, my monitor or something?” Belligerence, or derision, entered his tone as he gave a half scoff. As though he was too cool for words.

Or too old to need a babysitter.

“No.” I’m your mother. The words flew, unwelcome and without permission into her brain. “I’m working with the sixth-grade art classes and have an hour break each day, and since everyone else here already has jobs to do, I’ll be spending my break time with you.”

“Got stuck with me, you mean.”

“That’s funny, and here I was thinking you were going to figure you were being stuck with me.”

That gave him pause. And then, “So, what, you’re just going to sit there and watch me do my math?”

He eyed the thick satchel she’d set on the floor by her feet. And sounded as if he kind of hoped she had more in store for him.

He was bored. She figured that out quickly enough.

“Nope. I’m here to work, not babysit,” she said, wondering where the words were coming from. Surprised by the ease with which they slid off her tongue. The battered women hadn’t been such a leap for her, but she was still a bit stiff with the kids. Until she pretended they were all little Tatums. Or until they got going on their collages and then she got so engrossed in reading their picture messages, in helping them compose those messages, express themselves, that she forgot to worry about anything else.

But this was...a ten-year-old boy who just happened to have shared her belly for nine months.

Oh, God. She was going to throw up again.

“What, you brought papers to grade?” he asked, his nose scrunched as he glanced at her bag again and then frowned at her.

He wasn’t rejecting her presence beside him. Didn’t seem to dislike her being there.

“No,” she said, reaching down to her bag, thinking about putting her head between her knees while she was at it.

There was a trash can not far off. There if she needed it.

She wasn’t going to need it.

“We’re going to do an art project,” she said instead, and pulled out the stack of magazines. A motorcycle and car one. Travel. Surfing. Boating. Sports—but not the famous one with pictures of girls. Home and Garden. Tatum had laughed at that one, but Talia would bet a week’s groceries that Kent would use it. Maybe he’d home in on some brownies on a plate or a basketball hoop in a backyard display...

“What about my math and sentences for English?” There was no sign of the tough guy as Kent glanced down into her open satchel to see colored papers, markers, glue and a couple of plastic containers of assorted embellishments. She had his attention.

“What you don’t finish at school today you have to do as homework,” she told him.

“Cool.” Closing his book, he turned to her with eagerness in his smile. And Talia had the strangest urge to give him a hug.

* * *

MONDAY’S DINNER PRETTY much summed up Sherman’s day.

He’d had errands to run—a case of flyers to drop off at a candidate’s office, shirts and pants to pick up from the cleaners, and they were out of toothpaste—after picking Kent up from school and was still in his creased gray pants, white button-down and gray-and-white silk tie as his son dropped into his seat at the kitchen table and announced that he was starving.

“You never did tell me how school went today,” Sherman said as he dumped salad from a bag, tossed it with the chicken nuggets he’d just pulled from the oven, added some dressing and put it on plates for him and Kent.

“You never asked.”

The boy had dropped his book bag by the door and sat in his pants, button-down shirt and sweater vest, his hand supporting his head, looking grumpy.

“Yes, I did. When you got in the car.” And his phone had rung. He’d taken the call and...

“Fine. School was fine. Okay?”

His son’s first day of in-school suspension and all he had to say was fine?

“What did you do?”

“Sat.”

“Did you go to the cafeteria to eat your lunch?” Sherman, as he’d been instructed, had packed sandwiches. He’d added celery sticks and a couple of Kent’s favorite cookies, too.

“No.”

He frowned. “What about your juice?”

“Someone got it for me.”

He nodded. Okay. So maybe this was good. Kent was seeing that if he misbehaved, he’d be taken out of society. Such as it was.

Brooke wouldn’t be happy with their son missing lunch with his friends. Hell, he wasn’t happy about it. Kent had been alienated enough from the regular kids, as he called them now, when his mother was killed.

Before the accident, Kent had been such a great kid. That person was still there inside him. Sherman knew it. And the counselor Kent was seeing seemed to think so, too. Somehow they just had to get through the anger stage of the grief process.

“Did Mrs. Barbour have anything special for you to do?” He put a plate of salad in front of his son.

“Nope.”

“Did your teachers come in and give you assignments?” Retrieving foil-wrapped bread from the oven, he dropped it on the table along with some peanut butter and a knife.

“Nope.”

He sat. Opened his napkin on his lap. Picked up his fork. “You just sat there all day and did nothing?”

Not at all what he’d envisioned when he’d asked for his son to spend the week in the principal’s office.

“No.” Kent was attacking his salad as if it was a banana split.

“You did schoolwork, then?”

“Duh, Dad, it’s school.”

The disrespect hurt as much as it irritated. He let it slide. Took a bite of salad. Missing the days when Brooke used to make it with fresh lettuce, cutting up cucumber and onion and celery and broccoli while he grilled fresh chicken for the top.

“So how’d you know what to do?” he asked, chewing.

Kent pushed salad onto his fork with his thumb. “Mrs. Barbour gave me a list.”

Sherman picked up a piece of bread he didn’t want, touching his son’s wrist and motioning with the bread, then used it to push food onto his fork. “You just said she didn’t have anything for you to do,” he said.

“I said she didn’t have anything special for me to do. It’s all just regular stuff that we always do.” The boy picked up a piece of lettuce with his fingers and popped it into his mouth.

Biting back the retort that sprang to his tongue, Sherman took a bite of salad and hoped he didn’t get indigestion.

“Did you get it all done?” he asked a moment or two later. Were they at least going to get to skip homework that night and go straight for the basketball game he wanted to watch? Kent loved basketball—or, really, any sport—and so far, they still bonded over their teams.

“No.”

He stopped chewing. “No?”

“No.”

Picking up a piece of bread, Kent used it to shove a huge bite of salad onto his fork the way Sherman always urged him to.

And now Sherman was worried. Why would the boy purposely do something to please him? Why start following the rules at that exact moment?

“Why not?” he asked. If Kent thought he was going to stop doing his schoolwork altogether, things were going to get a hell of a lot harder on him. While the boy had been acting out a lot, so far he’d maintained excellent grades. And so Sherman had been more willing to go along with the counselor’s recommendation and give Kent some slack on some of the rest of it.

Because Dr. Jordon had recommended a less severe course of action, and because Sherman understood Kent’s anger and had a hard time finding it within himself to be hard on the boy. He’d rather die for him than hurt him.

Kent shrugged. “I got extra to do,” he said. And dunked his bread into his chocolate milk, dripping chocolate on the table as he slurped the mess between his lips.

CHAPTER FIVE

“WHAT ARE WE going to do with this?” Kent frowned as he studied his partially completed collection of photos and moved a motorcycle up to a corner of the board—farther away from the center of his life, she noted silently.

“Why do we have to do something with it?” Talia prevaricated—something she was really good at. Better than giving direct answers, for sure.

“I dunno.” He shrugged. “Just seems like we should.”

Shoulds and have-tos seemed to carry weight with the boy. If for no other reason than so he could break the rules. And yet...

“I mean, why do all the work if it’s for nothing?”

“Just for fun.”

“You don’t go to school to have fun,” he said, as though she’d never been a student.

Every day for three days he’d been sitting at his desk when she arrived, dressed in pants—sometimes jeans but always a clean and new-looking pair—and a shirt and sweater or sweater vest. She’d never seen him in tennis shoes.

“There’s nothing wrong with enjoying learning,” she said, watching as he swapped the positions of a backyard grill and a video game character. He had an eye for shape and color. And she itched to intervene, to make suggestions, to take part.

But she couldn’t.

This was his story. His expression. The collage was possibly going to be her only insight into the person who was her son.

She was there to facilitate only. Just like giving birth to him. She hadn’t been a participant in his life. Not since Tanner had had her baby’s father arrested and Talia had made the decision to give him up for adoption. Her role was facilitator.

Still, as he bent over his collage, she longed to touch his hair. To smooth the little piece that wanted to curl just above his ear. Was that why his father kept Kent’s hair so short? Because it had a tendency to curl?

Talia’s hair was straight. And blond. Nothing like Kent’s. Kent’s hair came from Rex. The high-school teacher who’d gone to jail for having sex with his student.

“What do you think should go here?” The boy turned to look at her.

He had Tatum’s eyes. A grayer version of Talia’s blue ones.

“I think you should decide,” she told him. “This is your time to make all the decisions. To use whatever pictures you want to use from these magazines.”

She’d already learned to qualify her statements with him. The day before he’d tried to get away with cutting out letters to form swear words for the middle of his collage.

“What if I want to use a picture that isn’t in the magazine?”

For a second she froze. Did ten-year-old boys look at dirty pictures? Was that what he was implying?

“What picture?”

He reached for his notebook, thumbed through some papers in the back of it, fumbled around in a plastic pocket and pulled out a photo.

“This one,” he said.

Oddly, it was a picture of him. Dressed very similar to the way he was now. Obviously a school photo. Maybe a year or two old.

What kid carried around a picture of himself tucked in his notebook?

“Sure, you can use it,” she said, while her mind wrapped itself around the newest piece of the puzzle she so desperately wanted to see complete. To know that it was a good picture. A healthy one. The picture she needed to have with her as she traversed the roads of her solitary life.

He dropped the picture in a space he’d left after she’d made him remove the curse words. “You never said what’s going to happen to this.”

Why did it matter so much?

“What do you want to happen to it?” she asked.

“Doesn’t matter to me.”

She wished she could believe that. Because she wanted to keep it more than just about anything. To hang it in her home. To have it to look at for the rest of her days.

“I’ll need to keep it for a week or two,” she said. Her program trial included written reports from her on every collage made, to show the board of education what she gleaned from the collages and how that information, that insight, could be used to help the kids. “But after that it’s up to you.”

The collages she was having the kids make in class were on sixteen-by-eleven-inch pieces of poster board. Kent’s was on a full-size piece of poster board.

Picking up the scissors, Kent reached for a magazine. “I guess I could take it home. I mean, if we have to do something with it,” he said.

His tough-guy armor had some definite chinks.

“I’ll make sure you get it back, then,” she told him. Wondering if it was against professional ethics if she took a photo of Kent’s finished work to have blown up and framed for her wall.

* * *

SHERMAN TOOK KENT into LA for a basketball game Thursday night. The tickets were a gift from one of his clients, the seats located in a private suite with a full buffet spread. Kent was grinning and talking the entire way there, throwing out statistics and asking Sherman’s opinion on scores and strategies. A banker and his family were supposed to be there, as well. One that Sherman was counting on for a sizable contribution. But when their passes got them on the elevator and then into the suite, it turned out that they were sharing the box with just the banker and his twelve-year-old daughter, who knew absolutely nothing about basketball. And who seemed to think entirely in rapid-fire questions.

Sherman tried to involve Kent in the conversation. To ask his opinion on answers to some of the more thoughtful questions, but his son was having none of it. Five minutes into the game, or the constant chatter depending upon one’s perspective, Kent got up, helped himself to a plate of finger food and reseated himself in the farthest corner of the booth away from the rest of them, planting his face at the glass separating them from the rest of the stadium.

Sherman called out to him a few times. All but once Kent appeared not to hear. And Sherman, who had business to tend to, couldn’t call his son to task. He probably wouldn’t have even if he could. He didn’t blame Kent for being disappointed.

“Quite the game, huh?” he asked as soon as the two of them were alone in their car, pulling out of the parking garage. Their team had won in the last seconds of the game with a three-point shot from midcourt.

“You wouldn’t know,” Kent practically spat. “You hardly saw any of it.” In his jeans and team jersey, Kent looked about as cute as any little guy ever had, but Sherman didn’t figure his son would want to hear him say so.

“I saw all of it,” he said now. “I just didn’t get to listen to as much of it as you did.” Their suite had had the announcers’ voices piped in.

“Yeah, well, you could’ve told me it was going to be business.”

He’d hoped it was going to be a couple of families spending an enjoyable evening, with the dads having a chance to spend some relaxation time together before discussing business over lunch Friday.

At least his lunch appointment for the next day was still on.

“What about that spread, though?” he asked, pulling onto the highway that would take them to their home over an hour down the road, way past Kent’s bedtime. The boy was going to be tired in the morning, not that Sherman was all that worried about it, considering his son was only going to be sitting in the principal’s office all day. “Chicken nuggets, mozzarella sticks, brownies, chocolate chip cookies...”

There’d been healthy foods, too, but he named Kent’s favorites.

“I had carrot sticks,” the boy said. He had, too. Kent had always loved carrots. Even as a baby. His favorite baby food had been jarred carrots.

“You also had two brownies, a plate of nuggets and some cheese sticks,” Sherman told him. If Kent thought his father was ignoring him, he needed to know that wasn’t the case.

“So?” Arms folded, the boy looked out his window.

“So...I was just talking about the spread. You liked it.”

“Whatever.”

God, he hated that word. Wished it had never been invented. If he had a dollar for every time he came up against that word in a week, he’d be a damned millionaire. Damned because the word was a reminder, every single time, that he was failing his son.

No matter how hard he tried. He just hadn’t found the way to get it right yet. To make Kent’s world right.

But he would. Sooner or later, they were going to beat this thing.

And be happy together again.

* * *

FRIDAY WAS GLUE DAY. She’d covered the board with a tacky substance on Monday night as she’d prepared it to take to Kent on Tuesday. Enough to hold pictures in place temporarily, but allowing for removal and switching positions without damaging the photos. Each day she’d carefully covered and carried the board back and forth from the trunk of her car—which she’d cleared to allow the collage to lie flat—to the principal’s office. Each day her son had seemed more eager, watching for her as she’d come around the corner. Each day since the first, he’d used up every second allotted to them, searching out pictures, cutting and, later, as she’d shown him, tearing them into the shape he wanted and placing them on the board.

Friday, when she’d turned the corner into the office, he’d been grinning and rubbing his hands together.

She’d dressed up that day. Working at a department store required that she have expensive-looking professional clothes and while she spent most of her time in jeans these days, she had a decent wardrobe.

Emphasis being on decent. The slinky leggings and revealing tops she used to wear were packed away under her bed.

“Wow, you look pretty!” Kent said, and then ducked his head.

“Why, thank you,” Talia said, acting as though she’d heard the same from every kid she’d passed in the hallway. “I’ve got an appointment this afternoon,” she told him, not bothering to mention that the appointment was him.

She’d worn the black slacks, black-and-white silk shirt and black-and-white tweed and silk jacket to honor their last meeting.

Today she would say goodbye to her son. And she would be fine.

If anything came of the collage, if she studied it and felt certain that Kent was crying out for help in some way, she’d approach Mrs. Barbour. Or Kent’s teacher. Someone.

“You don’t have to leave early, do ya?” Kent raised his arms up so she could place the board on his desk.

“No.” If she had her way, she wouldn’t leave at all.

But Talia knew she wasn’t going to have her way this time. She’d given up that right knowingly, of her own accord, ten years before.

She handed him the glue. Showed him how to best apply it so as not to damage the magazine photos. “Be sure you’re positive of your positioning before you glue,” she told him. “Once they’re set, we can’t get them back off or change them around anymore.”

She’d been positive when she’d given this child away that it had been the best thing for him.

Some thought she’d taken the easy way out. Well, Rex had. He’d wanted her to have his son, for them to have that between them while he rotted away in jail. But she couldn’t do that to her boy. It hadn’t been easy giving up her baby.

It had been the hardest thing she’d ever done. Way harder than taking off her clothes and walking onto stage for the first time, wearing only a couple of pasties, a G-string and stiletto heels. Though she’d wanted to die that night, too.

Giving up Kent had been the hardest thing she’d ever done until today. Saying goodbye a second time, after spending a whole week’s worth of sessions alone with him, in their little glass room in full view of the principal’s desk and that of her secretary, too, was going to knock the breath out of her permanently.

“I can’t decide if I should put the gun here, or the microscope.”

That gun bothered her. It was innocuous enough. A toy cap gun. When there’d been other, much more deadly choices. He’d picked a toy.

And he was a smart boy. Smart enough to know that if he’d cut an Uzi out of a magazine someone might have asked why.

She wanted to pick the microscope. To advise him that maybe the gun didn’t really go with the rest of the poster. But she couldn’t color his story with her own brush.

Besides, it was with other boy things—a computer, a tablet, the microscope...

“It’ll show up better here, don’t you think?” He was frowning, his lips pursed as he pondered his dilemma. None of her students to date had taken the project so seriously. Not even the adult ones who knew that there was a purpose to the activity.

Then again, she’d never spent one-on-one time with any of them, either.

“I think you’re right—it has more prominence,” she said as much as she could. “But only because of the grouping around it,” she finished. “Change anything in the group and you could change the prominence. Put the gun on top and it would have prominence. Put it below and it might still steal the show.” He had it pointed upward, and the shape of it drew the eye.

After some deliberation he set it aside. “I’ll come back to that part,” he said, and picked up a birthday cake. It had six candles. He pasted it on a picnic table that was already glued to the board.

The rest of their time together flew by in kind. Kent’s independent work was amazing for a kid his age. At least Talia thought so. And yet, he involved her in every step of the process, as well. He knew his own mind, but he also asked for her opinion.

All in all, without studying his collage or knowing that he’d been expelled from class, she’d say that his parents had done about the best job parents could hope to do raising a child.

Or a mother would hope that someone else would do when raising her child.

“What do you think?” Her son held up the top edges of his poster.

His work with her was done.

She had to blink. Pretended to need to scratch her nose.

“I think you’ve got the makings of a talented artist.” They weren’t any of the words raging through her. They were the ones she could say.

And they were the truth.

Her son might not have her hair. Or her nose. But he had her artistic ability, and then some.

He nodded. “I like it.”

“Good.”

Oh, my God. This was it.

“How soon can I have it back?” He was looking at her. She couldn’t just sit there and stare at him. Or cry.

“Within the week,” she told him.

“Cool.”

Talia stood. There was no other choice. She collected her things just as she’d done the other four days she’d been there. Packed them into her bag.

Kent helped her cover the poster board, his smaller fingers brushing her hand, and she almost lost it. And then a look of horror crossed his face.

Because he somehow knew that he’d touched a fraud? A woman who was far too dirty to even breathe the same air he breathed?

Boys his age had to stay as far away as possible from the type of woman she’d been.

But she wasn’t that woman anymore. By choice. It had been her actions that got her away from that life.

“You aren’t going to show anyone else, are you?”

His question finally registered.

“I can’t promise that, Kent,” she told him. She gave him one thing she’d always promised herself she’d give to everyone. Her honesty. For the most part she’d kept that promise. “I can promise you that I won’t show any other students, though. And it’s not going to be hung on display.”