Confessions on the 7:45(26)

Shit. Had she said that? That was low, and not exactly true.

“Let me ask you a question,” she said. “Do you and Stephen fight all the time?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you tell him that you hate him?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you mean it?”

He didn’t answer right away. “I guess not.”

“Just sometimes when you get so mad, so frustrated, you say things that you don’t mean, right?”

“I guess.”

“That’s what happened with me and your dad last night. I’m sorry you had to hear that.”

She remembered what it felt like to listen to her parents fight. She and her sister used to cling to each other while their parents raged. She remembered—she felt helpless, powerless, afraid. That’s how she’d made Oliver feel. God, that was terrible. She hated Graham, she did. And she hated herself.

She stroked her son’s silky hair; his forehead felt hot.

He was quiet a moment, his chest rising and falling with his breath.

“Zander’s parents are getting a divorce,” he said softly. “He says he gets two birthday parties and two Christmases now.”

“Okay.” She didn’t know who Zander was.

“I don’t want two birthdays,” he said.

“I understand.”

“So where is Dad?”

“Boys’ weekend. I told you.”

The lie hung between them.

“Okay, I think he’s at Uncle Joe’s,” she admitted finally. That’s usually where Graham went when they needed a break, to his brother’s bachelor pad.

“I think he’s outside,” said Oliver.

“What?” she asked. “What do you mean?”

“I think he’s sitting in his car across the street.”

Selena got up and went to the window. Sure enough, there was Graham, sitting in their SUV across the street. She bit back an intense roil of anger, of annoyance. What the fuck? She told him that she needed time and space to think. That he should stay away. That she’d make an excuse for the boys and he could call on Saturday to talk to them. But, of course, he was going to do whatever he wanted. Because that was Graham. He didn’t respect or even understand that other people had boundaries and only bullies pushed through them.

When she was a young woman, out of college, working, and her mother had finally confessed to Selena and her sister the true scope of their father’s many affairs, Selena pretended to understand why her mother had stayed so long.

She said all the right things, offered her mother compassion and sympathy. But, deep down, she hadn’t really understood. Why had her mother endured the shame, the humiliation, the rage and just let him get away with it for, it turned out, decades? How could she live with it, with him, with herself? Selena had wondered. In this moment, in the dark of her bedroom, talking to her oldest boy, the truth of it came home, hard. You’d endure just about anything to spare your child pain. She pulled on her robe.

“I’ll go get him,” she said. “Let’s get you back into your bed, okay?”

“But—”

She stewarded him to his room and tucked him in again.

“Do you hate him?” Oliver asked as she moved away.

The answer was so complicated it backed up in her throat. “No,” she said. “Of course not. No more than you hate Stephen.”

He nodded, seemed to get the complexity of the statement, her little old man. “And we both love you and your brother more than anything. Never forget that.”

No matter what happens next, she thought, but didn’t say.

He was already drifting off, exhausted, as she pulled the door to his bedroom closed.

Downstairs, she turned off the alarm and walked out into the dark in her robe and slippers. She knocked hard on the window, startling Graham from his doze. She looked around the neighborhood. She should have just called him on his cell phone; what would people think if they saw? They’d think they were a flawed mess of a family, just like everyone else probably was.

“What the hell are you doing?” she asked when he rolled down the window.

“Joe kicked me out,” he said, pathetically. “He had company.”

“Have you ever heard of a hotel?”

“I didn’t want to spend the money.”

He had her there. She’d thought about canceling all his credit cards, moving their money from accounts he had access to into one that he didn’t know about. But she hadn’t followed through.

He had a bandage over his eye. In her rage, she’d picked up Stephen’s robot and hurled it at Graham, hitting him right on the forehead. There had been lots of blood. Not her finest moment. She almost felt sorry for him.

“Just come inside. Do you want the neighbors to see you out here?”

“I don’t give a fuck about the neighbors.”

“Or anyone else.”

He offered her an elaborate eye roll, dropped his head back against the seat.

“Selena.”

She walked across the street and up the path to their door, hugging herself against the cold, and he followed.

“Sleep in your office,” she said.

“Can we talk?”

“No,” she said, walking up the stairs.