RECLAIM MY HEART(22)

Her son looked at Lucas. “Sure. What are we going to do?”
“No, not all of us, son,” Tyne gently clarified. “Just us. You and me. Lucas said we can borrow his car.”
Gray clouds seemed to roll in as Zach stopped, frowned, and stared down into his bowl of milky flakes. “I dunno.”
Before he could outright refuse, she smiled brightly. “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go. There’s a mall in Lancaster. I’ll buy you a new t-shirt. Or I’ll take you to a movie. Maybe we could find a comic book shop. Music store. You name it.”
He toyed with his spoon the whole time she talked, glancing up at her through hooded eyes, then just as quickly looking down again. “My shirts are fine. Don’t really need anything.”
“Oh, come on, Zach.” The pleading she heard in her tone annoyed her. She’d never thought she’d have to beg her kid to spend some time with her. “We’ll have fun.”
Zach’s gaze narrowed on her. “We can go anywhere? You mean it?”
She nodded emphatically. “Like I said, you name the place.”
The last thing she wanted to do was have her nerves frayed to ribbons by two hours spent sitting through a loud, space-age movie that would surely bring on a headache, but if it meant she could have some alone time with Zach before and afterward, she’d just have to take two aspirin and suck it up.
“I want to see the high school where you guys, like, met. Where did you say it was? Broken Mills or something?”
“Oak Mills,” Lucas supplied.
Tyne couldn’t have been more stunned had Zach tossed his bowl into the air and splashed milk onto the ceiling.
Zach focused his attention on Lucas. “Didn’t you say that’s where Mom grew up?”
Lucas nodded slowly.
Zach nodded too, looking up at Tyne. “That’s where I“Th?s whered like to go.”
Feeling as if all the blood had drained from her face, Tyne struggled to find words to express the thoughts zipping through her head. She took a moment, turning and setting the carton she held onto the Formica countertop. Then she opened a cabinet and took down a glass with deliberation. Orange juice gushed from the container into the glass, making a small mess, which she ignored. She picked up the glass and turned back to her son.
“Are you really sure that’s what you want to do? There’s really nothing to do in Oak Mills. I hadn’t planned on going there.”
Lancaster, in fact, was located in the opposite direction from her home town.
The storm clouds returned, this time complete with flashing lightning and rolling thunder.
“See?” Zach shoved his way up from the table, his chair grating against the linoleum. “I knew you didn’t mean it. It’s just like always. You only want me to do what you want me to do.” He stalked toward the kitchen door. “It doesn’t matter what I want. You don’t care what I want.”
“Zach!”
“Zach.”
Tyne and Lucas spoke in unison.
“Hold up.” The light tone of Lucas’s voice belied the sudden tension in his jaw, and when Zach stopped and begrudgingly turned back to face them, he said, “Can we just take a deep breath? Can we talk about this rather than shouting?”
“There’s nothin’ to talk about.” Zach’s shoulders were hunched, his fists clenched. “It’s her way or no way. Don’t you see that? That’s how it always is.”
Tyne tried to remain calm. “That’s not true.”
“It is! It is so true.”
Her son was being a little snot, and she was just on the verge of pointing that out. She blinked a couple of times as it dawned on her; he was pushing her buttons as hard as he could push. Intentionally. If they ended up in a fight, he wouldn’t have to go anywhere with her.
Going to the high school where she and Lucas had first met certainly wasn’t on her ‘top ten list’ of things to do. She couldn’t imagine it even making her ‘top one hundred.’ Dealing with those memories would only lead to emotional upheaval. And tears, and crying, and…?useless, emotional…?crap. Who the hell needed that? But if going to the school meant she could spend the day with her son, she’d do it.
She found the calm she’d been striving for. “Zach, if you want to go see Oak Mills High, then we’ll go see Oak Mills High. I’ll show you the football field where Lucas was a running back, and the track where I sprinted a fifty yard dash against the fastest girl on the team.”
Zach seemed to turn down his contempt a notch or two. “The fastest girl on the team? You lost?”
Tyne grinned, shaking her head. “I won. Well…?I won against her once.” She chuckled. “And that girl was full of lame excuses, let me tell you; I jumped the gun, her shoe wasn’t laced tight enough, she had dirt stuck in her cleats. She was a regular Tonya Harding, that one.”
The tension in her son’s gangly body melted a little. “Sore loser, huh?”
“You’ve got that right,” Lucas said, his coffee cup poised close to his mouth. “Victoria Davis got her butt whipped, fair and square.” Lucas grinned at Tyne, his voice softening. “I can remember that like it was yesterday.”
She remembered too. She’d hung back when the rest of the team had jogged toward the locker room after practice, and she and Lucas had celebrated her win with a few passionate moments behind the brick concession stand where anyone might have happened upon them. Oh, the risks they had taken when they’d been teens.
“Get yourself ready,” she told Zach. “And we’ll g KAndthem. o.”