“I brought you something,” says Scott.
He stands and goes to the trunk of the rental car. Inside is a plastic dump truck he found at the gas station. It’s bound to a cardboard box by unbreakable nylon ties, and they spend a few minutes trying to wrestle it free before Eleanor goes inside and fetches some scissors.
“What do we say?” she asks the boy, once the truck is free and the subject of vigorous digging.
“Thank you,” she offers after a moment, when it’s clear the boy isn’t going to speak.
“I didn’t want to show up empty-handed,” says Scott.
She nods.
“Sorry about Doug. We had—things are hard right now.”
Scott musses the boy’s hair.
“Let’s talk inside,” he says. “I passed a news van on the way in. My feeling is I’ve been on TV enough this week.”
She nods. Neither of them wants to be on display.
They catch up at the kitchen table while the boy watches Thomas and Friends and plays with his truck. It will be bedtime soon and the boy is fidgety, his body flopping around on the sofa, his eyes glued to the screen. Scott sits at the kitchen table and watches him through the doorway. The boy’s hair has been cut recently, but not completely—so the bangs are blunt, but the back is bushy. It seems like a junior version of Eleanor’s hair, as if he has adapted in order to fit into the family.
“I thought I could do it myself,” Eleanor explains, putting the kettle on the stove, “but he was so agitated after a few minutes I had to give up. So now every day I try to cut a little bit more, sneaking up on him when he’s playing with his trucks, or—”
As she says it she grabs the scissors from the drawer by the stove and pads in toward the boy, trying to stay out of his field of vision. But he sees her and waves her off, making a kind of primal growl.
“Just—” she says, trying to reason with an unreasonable animal. “It’s longer on the—”
The boy makes the sound again, eyes on the TV. Eleanor nods, comes back into the kitchen.
“I don’t know,” says Scott. “There’s something perfect about a cute kid with a bad haircut.”
“You’re just saying that to make me feel better,” she says, dumping the scissors back into the drawer.
She pours them both a cup of tea. Since they sat, the sun has dropped into view at the top edge of the window frame, and when Eleanor leans in to pour his tea, her head slips into the creamy light, creating an eclipse. He squints up at her.
“You look good,” he tells her.
“Really?” she says.
“You’re still standing. You made tea.”
She thinks about that.
“He needs me,” she says.
Scott watches the boy flip around, absently chewing on the fingers of his left hand.
Eleanor stares into the setting sun for a moment, stirs her tea.
“When my grandfather was born,” he says, “he weighed three pounds. This was in West Texas in the ’twenties. Before ICUs. So for three months he slept in a sock drawer.”
“That’s not true.”
“As far as I know,” he says. “People can survive much more than you think is my point. Even kids.”
“I mean, we talk about it—his parents. He knows they’re—passed—as much as he understands what that means. But I can tell from the way he looks to the door whenever Doug comes home that he’s still waiting.”
Scott thinks about that. To know a thing and not know it at the same time. In some ways, the boy is the lucky one. By the time he is old enough to truly understand what happened, the wound will be old, the pain of it faded with time.
“So you said Doug—” says Scott, “—some problems?”
Eleanor sighs, dips her tea bag absently in the cup.
“Look,” she says, “he’s weak. Doug. He’s just—and I didn’t—I thought it was something else at first—how insecurity, you know, defensiveness, can seem like confidence? But now I think his opinions are louder because he’s not really sure what he believes. Does that make sense?”
“He’s a young man. It’s not a new story. I had some of that myself. Dogma.”
She nods, a ray of hope returning to her eyes.
“But you grew out of it.”
“Grew? No. I burned it all down, drank myself into a stupor, pissed off everyone I knew.”
They think about that for a moment, how sometimes the only way to learn not to play with fire is to go up in flames.
“I’m not saying that’s what he’ll do,” says Scott, “but it’s not realistic to think he’ll just wake up one morning and say, You know what? I’m an asshole.”
She nods.
“And then there’s the money,” she says quietly.
He waits.
“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s—I get nauseous just thinking about it.”
“You’re talking about the will?”
She nods.
“It’s—a lot,” she says.
“What they left you?”
“Him. It’s—it’s his money. It’s not—”
“He’s four.”