The Kindest Lie(81)
He tore at the paper around the first box with frantic fingers and found two new Nintendo games he’d been wanting. Screaming in delight, he kissed Granny and Daddy and even Drew, whose face flushed.
“Glad you like it. Merry Christmas,” Granny said, beaming. “Now open the other one.”
In the second, larger box, he found a pair of brown snow boots. Holding them to his nose, he inhaled the smell of leather and some strange chemical they must put in new shoes.
“Cool.”
He knew money was tight and that she had likely delayed payment to a supplier for the shop just to buy the boots and those games. Even in his euphoria, he made a mental note not to forget what she’d done.
“Okay, brush your teeth and wash up good before you start playing.”
After Midnight finished in the bathroom, he rummaged through Daddy’s dresser drawer for a rechargeable battery he remembered seeing there. He heard Granny and Daddy talking in the hallway and swore they’d just mentioned a gang. When they got closer to the bedroom, he scrambled under the bed to hide.
Daddy came in and plopped down on the mattress, which squeaked and dipped just above Midnight’s head. From his vantage point on the floor, he could see his father’s crusty white heels, his toes sinking into the carpet.
“I don’t know about any gangs, but I do know he’s hanging out with the wrong people,” he heard Daddy say. “Christina from the diner told me he was in there the other night with some strange Black woman. She described her right down to her fancy coat and purse and boots. Bushy hair. Fit Eli Tuttle’s sister to a tee.”
Midnight fidgeted in his hiding place. He heard Granny sigh. “You don’t need to be worried about Ruth. She’s like family. I know you and Eli don’t see eye to eye, but that should have nothing to do with her.”
“Don’t want her around my kid. I don’t like it. Don’t like it at all.”
Dust traveled up his nose and Midnight stifled a sneeze. The one person in this stupid town who looked at him like he was really somebody was Miss Ruth, and Daddy wanted to take her away from him, too.
He heard the flick of a lighter and then smelled smoke from Granny’s Newport. “Keep your voice down before Patrick hears you. Besides, she’s just back in town to get to know her own son. Ernestine’s beside herself about it, but you can’t control your kids when they’re grown.”
An ache shot through Midnight. He almost forgot to breathe.
“Who the hell is her son?”
After a long pause, Granny said, “Corey Cunningham.”
That hit Midnight like a kick to his gut. He barely heard anything else. His brain froze. Miss Ruth was Corey’s mom. Corey was her son. It didn’t make any sense. Corey’s mom was Mrs. Cunningham. He forced himself to lie still, to not make any sound. His stomach was an elevator dropping twenty stories in two seconds.
Only snatches of conversation filtered through the fog in his mind. Different versions of the same word kept coming up. Adoption. Adopted. Corey was adopted. What did that mean? In fourth grade, a girl named Jessica Seeley told everyone she was adopted and that it meant she had four parents to love her instead of just two. She said her new mom and dad picked her out of a whole nursery full of babies and chose to take her home. At the time he thought it sounded pretty cool, but now it just seemed greedy. Midnight barely had one parent, and he wasn’t sure that one even loved him sometimes.
A bubble of happy that had been growing in Midnight’s heart popped. How had he been so stupid? He hadn’t even had time to decide exactly how he felt, whether he wished Miss Ruth were his mom or his girlfriend.
The only thing he did know was that when Miss Ruth looked at him, only him, and asked him questions, he felt special. To her, if to nobody else. Nobody except Mom had treated him like that before. When she died, he had given up on hoping for much of anything.
If Miss Ruth thought he mattered, maybe he really did. He couldn’t have been wrong about her, about everything. If this was true, though, that she was only around him to get to know Corey, it had all been a lie.
Twenty-Eight
Ruth
Before the sun came up on Christmas morning, Ruth lay in bed with her eyes closed but her mind racing, fully awake with all the feelings she hadn’t had time to feel until now. The anticipation for meeting Corey one day soon skittered in her veins, and when she imagined it, she got scared. Then came the longing to be close to her grandmother and brother again. People said you could be lonely in a house full of people, and whoever said that spoke the truth.
Her phone vibrated on the nightstand and right away Xavier’s name appeared. She picked it up, and in her haste, her fingers went limp and the phone fell to the floor. She scrambled to scoop it up and said hello loudly before realizing it was a text message, not an actual call.
Merry Christmas, Ruth.
She reread the text over and over and waited to see if he typed more. He didn’t. She analyzed every word, how he had called her by her first name instead of baby or honey or sweetheart like he usually did. The use of a period instead of an exclamation point. Did that mean Xavier greeted her on Christmas out of obligation instead of genuine affection?
Matching his tenor and tone, she texted:
Merry Christmas, Xavier.
She had so much to tell him, but she couldn’t say over a text message that she’d found her son. In their four years of marriage, they’d never been apart before, and she missed his uneven breathing, the warmth of his rough thighs brushing against hers in bed at night. These stiff sheets didn’t carry his scent, and she struggled to conjure the exact smell of him. And that laugh of his that sounded more like a hiccup with its guttural stops and starts. His absence made the whole world unsteady, teetering on its axis, everything precarious.