Page 88 of Hold on Tight

“Where’s Aaron?” Jake asked. He couldn’t help it. It was petty and low and not a fair thing to demand of a seven-year-old boy, but it was the only question he wanted to know the answer to right then.

“He’s in Florida,” Sam said. “Mom told him she didn’t want to marry him and he went back to Florida.”

This gave Jake immense amounts of pointless pleasure, a rush of release that was almost sexual in its satisfaction. He’d meant what he said to her. He’d believed Aaron would take care of her. Take care of Sam. But when it came down to this—fuck all that. He was still glad the guy wasn’t screwing Mira. He was so damn glad his throat was choked with it.

He sat down on the step next to Sam, and Sam pointed at his running prosthesis, at the curved metal “foot,” and said, “That thing is kind of like Wolverine’s claws. You look like a superhero.”

“I know,” Jake said. “And it’s fast.”

“Were you running?”

“I was.”

“Are you still going to do a triathlon?”

“I think so.”

Sam leaned over and gave the running prosthesis a thorough examination.

“Sam, maybe you should tell me why you’re here so I can try to explain it to your mom and she won’t be so mad. First of all, how did you get here?”

“On the bus,” Sam said. “Mom always says that the bus drivers are nice and don’t want you to be lost, so you can always ask them questions. So I waited for the bus near our house and asked how to get to your house. I remembered it was near Samami Restaurant, so I said that.”

“You’re very smart,” Jake said, thinking,I wonder how much credit I get for that genetically?

“I came because I kept telling Mom I wanted to hang out with you and she kept saying, ‘Tomorrow. I’ll text him tomorrow.’ And then I’d say, ‘Mom, you said you’d text Jake today,’ and she’d say, ‘It’s late’ or ‘I’m tired’ or ‘I can’t think about that right now’ or ‘He’s probably busy.’ And finally I decided I needed to come find you.”

“And so you did.” It made him feel rotten to think of all those times Mira had decidednotto reach out to him, even though of course he probably would have found ways to ignore her texts. Even though he had pushed her away. Handed her to Aaron on a silver platter.

She told him she didn’t want to marry him.

Fuck it, that felt good, which made him an asshole.

“I wanted to tell you that I think you should ask Mom to marry you.”

He turned, startled.

“You’re my dad already, so it makes sense.”

Sometimes Sam blew him away. “Not every two people who have a kid together are meant to be married.”

“Do you love her?”

Jake nodded, as if he were a puppet driven by some other set of strings. As if it were impossible for him to lie. And maybe itwasimpossible for him to lie to Sam.

“So you should marry her.”

Even when he was Sam’s age, he was pretty sure he hadn’t held such a romantic view of love and marriage. Even then, he was pretty sure he’d already believed that marriage, at best, was a complicated alchemy of necessity and forbearance that love had little to do with. That it was terribly easy to make the kind of mistake that would corrupt not only your own happiness, and your partner’s, but the next generation’s, too. How had Sam held on to this pretty, rose-colored version of the world, despite the fact that he’d believed his own origins story featured a plastic cup and a turkey baster?

“She loves you. I can tell.”

Jake felt a surge of unruly, unwanted, unadmirable victory, followed by the sharp recollection of why such a victory wasn’t a win for anyone.

“I wouldn’t make her happy.”

“Huh,” Sam said thoughtfully, tilting his head to one side. “But you make really good pancakes.”

Jake laughed, against his will. Sam had such a broad streak of wisdom in him, so often seemed so old for his age, that Jake had seriously expected him to say something revelatory. “Pancakes are good,” he agreed. “But I don’t think I could make her happy by just making really good pancakes.”