Page 62 of What Boys Learn

Evidently, Benjamin was not amazed. This time he didn’t even bother to shrug.

Curtis hadn’t been much more talkative. He’d briefly acknowledged my presence each time over the last three days I walked Benjamin inside. His expression looked relaxed, content, even gratified. I’d spent years learning to read the faces of day care staff and teachers. Even when they said something nice about Benjamin—So smart! So articulate! He certainly is ready to share his opinions with others—their smiles showed a degree of strain. Not in Curtis’s case, though. Things must be going well.

I rolled down the window as we passed a fence-bound pasture that faced Curtis’s long driveway. Behind it, a chestnut-colored horse raised its head as we passed, whinnying. Therapy with a view. Here, one could almost imagine that life was beautiful and Benjamin would never see the inside of a police station again.

“Oh,” Benjamin finally said, halfway home. “Dr. C did have one message for you. He said you should take me for a hair trim.”

“That’sthe message?”

Benjamin’s hair was short enough, not much past his ears. I thought it looked cute when the bangs got a little scruffy. He was neater than a lot of Summit boys.

“Yeah, he said it looks better. He said it wouldn’t hurt if I dressed nicer, too. In case the police talk to me again.”

“Did you give him reason to think they will?”

But the pipeline had closed, at least until we had passed downtown Pleasant Park. The last of Main Street’s shops and restaurants were in my rearview mirror when he said, “You never told me how you got pregnant.”

I shook my head once, like I’d just felt a fly buzzing around my ear.

“Sorry,” I said. “You surprised me with that one. Let’s see.”

There was construction ahead of us, just where Green Bay Road met our neighborhood. A pothole brigade.

“When you were thirteen, I did tell you about your father. I mean, I told you I didn’t know who your fatherwas.”

With acid in his voice he said, “One-night stand.”

“Yes, sort of.”Zero-night standwas more like it. I was drunk, screwing with a man who’d bought me drinks and was even more intoxicated than I was, in the grungy bathroom of a Clark Street bar. Did anyone want their kid to know they’d done such things? “I didn’t get to know him well. I made a mistake. But you, Benjamin, were not a mistake at all. Not one little bit.”

“Is that what you told people? That you fucked a stranger but somehow, I wasn’t a mistake?”

I paused. Breathed. Smiled at the construction worker who had just turned his stop sign around to “slow.”

“I told them, from the very start, that I planned to have you. And life went on from there.”

He made a doubtful huffing noise. I made the turn onto our street. I could feel him staring at me, hard.

“You don’t talk about your parents.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t get to know them. My mom died when I was eight. My father had dementia and was institutionalized by the time I was fourteen.”

“But you had a stepmother, right?”

“Not for long.”

He said something under his breath.

“I’m not avoiding the question, Benjamin. I just didn’t get along with her very well. Nothing more to say, really.”

He turned toward me, staring. “The evil stepmother trope. That came up in my lit class. Cinderella. Snow White.”

I laughed. “I guess I’m a walking cliché.”

“I hate when you do that.”

“What?”

“Laugh when you think something isn’t funny.”