Rules of the Game

by Sandy James

  The boys hadn’t trashed the place, but they’d come pretty damn close. There were crinkled pop cans, candy wrappers and empty bags of chips everywhere. I shoved my books back on shelves and opened the windows to let in some air and Manhattan noise. “Well?” I demanded when I started to gather up the debris. “Where’d you meet these losers?”

  “The pizza place down the street.” He pointed to his left, then changed his mind and pointed right, setting his friends to laughing again.

  I came to stand over Eli, fisted my hands against my hips and glowered down at him. “You’re stoned.”

  My accusation only made him chuckle harder.

  “How could you do this to me?” I demanded. “After I brought you home with me, how could you bring strangers into my house and smoke dope?”

  “You brought me here ’cause you owed me.” His laughter had given way to anger so quickly, it took my breath away.

  “You’re wrong, Eli. I don’t owe you a goddamn thing.” I grabbed the enormous Nikes from the floor and threw them at the two potheads sitting on my couch. The shoes bounced off their chests, but they made no move to catch them. “Get out! Get the hell out of my house!”

  The intruders took their own sweet time retrieving their shoes and getting them on. They were damned lucky I hadn’t called the cops. The only thing keeping me from dialing 911 was knowing Eli would get in trouble too. Stephanie would never forgive me. I had her son in my care less than twenty-four hours, and I’d turned him into a drug-smoking juvenile delinquent.

  Someone pounded on the door, and for a moment, I feared one of my neighbors had called the police.

  “Maddie!” Scott’s voice called through the door as he pounded it again. “Maddie? Eli? Let me in!” He sounded frantic, which probably meant he’d smelled the pot.

  Thankful to have a male presence, especially one as big and potentially scary as Scott, I hurried to open the door. Maybe he could go all biker on the two clowns who seemed reluctant to leave.

  “Jesus Christ, what happened here?” He sniffed the air, frowned and narrowed his eyes at the boys.

  “Eli made some friends.” I sarcastically punctuated the air with quotation mark gestures. “I was just asking them to leave, but they’re obviously not in a hurry.”

  “Well, by all means, let me help them.” Scott grabbed one of them by the back of his oversized shirt and sagging pants and gave him the bum’s rush out the door. The second kid joined him moments later. “I better look out the window and see you outside this building in two minutes or less, or I’m calling the cops. And I don’t want to see either of your sorry asses here again, or you’ll regret it for a long time.” Scott slammed the door.

  I reached for his hand, hoping he knew how eternally grateful I was to have his help. “Thank you.”

  “That was the easy part.” A nod toward Eli. “Here comes the hard part.” He moved to the window, obviously to follow through on his threat by checking on the boys who’d left.

  Now what was I supposed to do? I had no experience with any of this. I didn’t know how to deal with kids, especially one I knew absolutely nothing about except that we shared DNA. “What do I do?”

  Looking over his shoulder, Scott replied, “Deal with him.”

  “How?”

  “Just give it your best shot.”

  I walked over to Eli as if I was marching the long corridor to my own execution. Digging deep down, I tried to channel my mother’s stern countenance and tone, hoping I’d inspire the type of gut-twisting guilt she’d always been able to dredge out of Terri and me whenever we’d screwed up. All she had to do was frown at either of us and tell us we’d disappointed her, and we’d both burst into penitent tears. “Well, Eli—what do you have to say for yourself?”

  Eli just shrugged, picked up the remote and started flipping through channels too quickly to even know what he was watching.

  “Well?” I shouted. His lack of response only pushed me further over the edge of self-control.

  When he gave me a condescending flip of his wrist, I had to take a deep breath not to smack it out of the air. “You’re overreacting,” he finally replied. “I just smoked a little weed. So what? Half the kids in Indiana grow it in their back yard.”

  “You think that makes it okay to use my money to buy drugs?”

  Scott came to stand beside me. “Answer her.”

  “I don’t have to tell her anything. She’s not my mom.”

  “But that’s why you told me you wanted to come here, because I was your mom. You don’t get to play it both ways—I can’t be your mom when you want something and not your mom when you screw up and don’t want to hear about it.”

  Before Eli could reply, Scott snatched the remote from his hands, turned off the TV and tossed the remote on the couch. “Get up,” he ordered, sounding like a marine drill sergeant.

  “Don’t have to.”

  “Wanna bet?” Scott had Eli by the back of the shirt and on his feet before I could even blink. “Time for some cleanup duty, then you and me are going for some male bonding.”

  The kid actually obeyed. Had his father’s death left him with a hole in his life where a male role model should be? Had Sean been ignoring Eli to spend time with his girlfriend before the accident? Scott was such a strong guy, so perhaps he could help fill the gap Sean left behind, especially since Sean had obviously deceived his family. “Where are you guys going?” I couldn’t help but ask.

  “Not sure yet,” Scott replied. He stood vigilant over Eli as he gathered up the discarded wrappers and crumpled aluminum cans. “I have a few ideas.”

  “You don’t think I should go?” I’d never felt more impotent in my life, and I despised that feeling. “I mean, I’m his mom.”

  “Let me talk to him. I think there’s a time in a guy’s life he needs to talk to another guy.”

  Scott walked Eli out the door fifteen minutes later. I cleaned the whole place from ceiling to carpet for the first time in I couldn’t remember, but it didn’t take long enough to suit me. I thought about trying to write, but I wasn’t exactly in the mood to be creative. All I’d end up doing was writing scenes I’d have to rewrite or trash entirely.

  I thought about Eli and his old school. Had he been expelled for using dope? My overactive imagination ran rampant, concocting all kinds of hideous things my son had done. Had I spawned some future Charles Manson? Each glance to the advancing clock without a call from Scott only raised my anxiety.

  What in the hell were they doing?

  Chapter Fifteen

  Scott’s late call to join him and Eli in Jersey City came as a surprise. It took me almost an hour to get there.

  I walked into Trixie’s, craning my neck to search for my guys. The Three Obese Stooges still sat at the bar, and I had a passing idea that they probably hadn’t moved since the night I met Scott. The wannabe-cougar still tended bar, and she must have recognized me because she flashed me a grin with lipstick-stained teeth and inclined her head toward the pool hall.

  As I entered, my eyes immediately went to the only guys in the place not wearing leather. Scott missed a shot, picked up a block of blue chalk and rubbed it on the end of his cue as Eli lined up to shoot. My incredibly handsome boyfriend glanced up, saw me and nodded. No smile, but I tried not to read too much into that.

  After he sank his shot, Eli grinned. Then he realized Scott’s gaze wasn’t on him, so he followed it to me. The smile immediately dropped to a frown.

  With a flick of his wrist, Scott waved me over.

  “How’s the male bonding going?” I asked before he leaned in and brushed his lips over mine.

  “It’s going.”

  Eli simply shrugged and stuck his cue into the holder without even finishing the game.

  “Am I interrupting?” I couldn’t help but think Eli’s dismissal was letting me know I was butting in, even if Scott had called me.

  “Nah,” Scott replied. “We thought we’d get something to eat and figured we’d i
nclude you. Aren’t you hungry, or did you eat earlier?”

  I shrugged even though I was so hungry I could start gnawing on the table. “Didn’t eat. I was cleaning.”

  Scott clapped Eli on the shoulder. “Where to?”

  “I just want a burger.”

  “Burgers sound great.” I normally hated hamburgers, but I was trying to placate him, even though I had no idea why. The kid had been smoking weed with a couple of lowlifes in my precious condo. I should be furious with him. Yet all I could think was that I didn’t want him to hate me.

  How bizarre was this parent shit? How could a person be a disciplinarian if she cared what the person she was punishing thought? And if she was worried about what the kid thought, then how could she follow through with any kind of reprimand? What a paradoxical nightmare.

  Why did I feel as if my parents were suddenly much smarter than I’d figured they’d been when I was growing up?

  “Burgers it is,” Scott said. “I know just the place.” He reached for my hand and led us out.

  We ended up at a twenty-four hour diner a couple of blocks down. Eli sat in sullen silence, and I started to think this trip had been a colossal waste of time. At least after I’d arrived. Scott and Eli seemed to be enjoying themselves when I’d gotten there. I was evidently the problem.

  A guy in a dirty apron wrapped around his beer gut set some glasses of soda out for us after he took our orders, then he went back to the grill and left us to our awkward quiet.

  Eli shifted his glass between his hands and finally spoke. “I’m sorry.”

  “Were you talking to Maddie?” Scott asked. “‘Cause if you were, you need to act like a man, look her in the eye and say it again.”

  My son immediately complied. “I didn’t mean for it to get outta hand like that. I just met those dudes, and we got to talking, and…” He finished the sentence by dropping his eyes back to his glass and shrugging.

  I almost said that it was fine, but Scott’s hand covered mine. “And?”

  “And I won’t do it again,” Eli added.

  “You learned this from your brothers and sister, right?” I asked Scott. It was simply hard to come up with another explanation for how easy this parenting thing seemed to be for him, which only made me more aware how little about Scott I truly knew. We really needed to talk.

  “Yeah.”

  “You had to be their father, didn’t you? Your sister said you were just a kid yourself, but that you raised them all and kept the family together.”

  “Yeah, well. I did what I had to do.”

  Although I wanted to know so much more about Scott, he obviously wasn’t in the mood to talk much, so I turned my attention back to my son. “You mean it? You won’t do something that stupid again?”

  “I said I was sorry, didn’t I?” A loud clearing of Scott’s throat brought a little contrition into Eli’s features and tone. “Won’t happen again.”

  Did that mean that the fun and games were over? After some screw up, did parents and children always get a mulligan—a chance to start fresh?

  The cook dropped some plates full of enormous burgers that smelled delicious but would probably raise our cholesterol levels twenty points. They tasted as good as they looked. We ate mostly in polite conversation about absolutely nothing of importance, and Scott picked up the check before I could.

  Eli seemed to enjoy the subway ride back to my place, watching everyone around him. I’d offered to pay for a cab, but Scott figured it might be nice for Eli to learn how to get around on public transportation. I don’t think we said more than ten words to each other all the way home. I noticed Eli moving his fingers. I wondered if that meant he was a musician listening to the songs in his head or a writer plucking away at invisible keys, as I often did to type out some story only I heard.

  Back at my condo, Scott came in and told Eli and me to take a seat. “We need to hash this out.”

  “I thought we did.” Eli kicked off his monster-sized tennis shoes and scooted back to flop against the easy chair.

  So did I, but I wasn’t going to contradict Scott. He finally had things in hand, and since he seemed to know what he was doing with my son when I was beyond clueless, I would gladly follow wherever he led.

  “That was about the pot. This is about what’s really bothering you.” Scott leaned against the couch then leveled a hard stare at Eli. “Since you’re smart, I’m gonna talk to you like an adult. Have you ever heard of the five stages of grief?”

  I’d never seen a kid’s eyes that full of unbridled curiosity. Eli liked to learn. “Nope.”

  “Well, it’s time you learned ’cause you’re smack dab in the middle of working your way through them. Whenever someone faces something major, some life change like you losing your dad, he goes through five stages of handling that loss. I’ve seen it before. Divorces. Deaths. Illnesses. Anything that makes you feel like you’ve lost something important.”

  “Aw, c’mon,” Eli scoffed. “No way everyone feels the same about stuff.”

  “Sure they do,” I said. I thought back to when I’d been that age. Every teenager had the opinion that the universe made revolutions around him and that he was by far the most exceptional creature to have ever inhabited the planet.

  Scott plowed right on. “You already went through the first. Denial. You did that when you started looking for Maddie and calling her your real mom.”

  “What would I be denying?” he asked.

  “That you lost your dad and that he hurt you. It was almost like claiming he never existed.”

  The kid had to think about that one for a minute. “What’s the next stage?”

  “The one you’re in now. Anger. That’s why you did what you did today. You were acting out.”

  A hardness settled on Eli’s face, but I also saw a growing understanding. Scott understood him, and Eli realized it.

  “So what comes next?” my son asked.

  “Bargaining.” Scott sat next to me on the couch.

  “Bargaining for what?”

  “Usually more time.”

  “You mean with my dad? He’s dead. How am I supposed to get more time with him?”

  The warmth of Scott’s hand settled over mine. I hadn’t realized how tightly I was clutching the throw pillow until his tanned hand covered my whitened knuckles. I tossed the pillow aside, held his hand and tried to relax.

  “Some people visit their loved one’s grave. Some pray. Some slip past bargaining pretty quick and go right to the next step.”

  “Which is?” Eli asked.

  “Depression.”

  “Gee, that sounds like loads of fun.” My son sat back and glared at me like this was all my fault.

  I listened to the whole exchange with growing fascination. When had my blue-collar knight in shining armor learned all this psychobabble? “Are you a psychiatrist or something?” I’d never been quite this off center. All the assumptions I made about Scott working with his hands or owning some car repair business were starting to crumple like the walls of a weak dam against an onslaught of rapidly rising floodwaters.

  Terri had been right—I’d handed my body and my heart over to this man, and I knew absolutely nothing about who he really was.

  Eli’s posture relaxed, and his curiosity evidently got the better of him. “So what’s the last stage?”

  “Acceptance,” Scott said, answering the question I’d almost asked. “You’ll deal with the loss, and you’ll move forward with your life. It’s up to you just how much you screw that life up before you get there.”

  Scott’s cell phone rang. He popped it off the clip, checked the number and let it go to voicemail. Leaning over, he pressed a quick kiss to my lips. “I’m gonna have to go.”

  Running off to answer a call he wouldn’t take in front of me. That didn’t bode well. Not well at all.

  Another woman?

  No. I trusted him to be faithful.

  His job?

  Had to be. But what kind of job did a
man have to jump to a beck and call at all hours of the night?

  Oh, my God! Was he really some kind of mafia hit man?

  As if. I really needed to get my overactive imagination under control or at least channel it into a book where it would stop causing trouble. Nothing was wrong. Absolutely nothing.

  Now who was in denial?

  Chapter Sixteen

  Although Scott and Eli had been alone for quite a while, neither ever told me what they talked about, and Scott never confided what he’d learned about my son. But their little male bonding session and our talk back at the condo seemed to change Eli’s attitude. Unfortunately, I was still in the dark about Scott’s profession because we’d never had our little talk.

  The next morning, my son had made the sofa bed and thrown a load of laundry in the stackable washer before I’d even dragged my exhausted ass out of bed. We had breakfast together at Galaxy Café. Our omelets were sufficient to feed a third world country.

  We talked about everything, yet we talked about nothing. I don’t think either of us was comfortable enough to open up any wounds that were just scabbing over. Two topics were clearly verboten—Eli never asked who his father was, and I never asked how he felt about Sean Robertson’s death.

  Our emotional guards remained firmly in place, so we also didn’t talk openly and honestly about why he’d been smoking weed with some lowlifes or whether he’d used drugs before. Nor did I ask about why Stephanie had to homeschool him and if he’d done something that would have gotten him expelled.

  I was a chickenshit, too afraid he wouldn’t like me if I turned all authoritarian parent on him. I didn’t have the right to boss him around too much. In my head, I kept hearing him telling me I’d given him away, and I hoped if he learned to like me, he’d forgive me one day.

  We walked up the steps to the Museum of Modern Art and stopped to look at the directory. Eli had picked it as an educational destination, telling me we’d see the museum from the movie later, and I’d agreed wholeheartedly. Subway ads for a special exhibit of Willem de Kooning pieces had drawn my attention a few weeks ago, and a quick check of MoMA’s website told me it was still there. Eli’s only request was to see the comic book, anime and graphic novel exhibits. I didn’t know much about any of those art forms, but Eli had chatted nonstop on the subway to try to explain how they were all unique. His excitement dictated we hit those areas first. His enthusiasm became infectious.