Page 50 of The Falcon and the Foe

RUSS

We stayed up past my scheduled lights out. The fire wouldn’t quit, and none of us had the heart to snuff it out. The scouts sang songs, only some of which I knew, and practiced TikTok dances, none of which I knew. I wished I could bottle up this moment of pure fun and smell it when the doldrums of adulthood were especially blah.

Cal and I split another s’more. We clapped at the latest dance some of the scouts choreographed for when their phones got reception.

“Nice work, Quentin!” I gave him a thumbs-up, which he didn’t acknowledge.

I looked up at the stars, salting the pitch-black sky, hoping they could give me some guidance.

“My son hates me,” I said, possibly drunk on s’mores.

“Nah, he’s just being a kid. It’s a rite of passage to be embarrassed by your dad.”

“He won’t even look at me.” The logical side of me knew it was a phase and knew that Cal was right, but it still hurt. It was just me and Quentin versus the world. If we didn’t have that bond, then I had nothing.

Cal poured water on his hands to clean them off from s’mores. He took a deep breath as he watched the kids.

“He loves you.”

“I know he loves me. But does he like me?”

“Well.” Cal squinted with awkwardness, his forehead creasing with mature wrinkles that gave his face a masculine glow.

“Well, what?”

Cal teetered his head.

“Spit it out.”

“Well, you freak out on him in front of his friends. A lot.”

I sat up straight. “I don’t freak out.”

“Climbing the tree. Standing too close to the fire. And earlier today, yelling at him for taking off his seat belt for a split-second.” Cal listed them off on his fingers, each one a shot fired.

“I don’t want my son to go headfirst through a windshield or get paralyzed falling from a tree. I don’t see the problem.”

Cal continued to teeter his head and squint his eyes, and damn, it was cute but also annoying.

“What?” I asked with more impatience.

“The fact that your mind instantly goes there is the problem,” he said with surprising resolve like it’d been building up. “You drill the importance of preparation and survival into him, and yet you treat him like he’s made of glass.”

I looked away. “He’s small for his age.”

“You overreact,” Cal said. No squinting, no teetering. He said it as if it were a fact, not an opinion. “When you yell at him for those things, it’s not a normal parent reprimanding his kid for crossing a boundary. There’s panic in your voice, Russ. Every time.”

I shook my head. He didn’t understand how quickly life could turn on a dime.

“It’s good that Quentin is pushing back. You don’t want him to be a kid who’s always afraid, who chooses to live his life in bubble wrap.” The fire illuminated his face, showing me the concern haunting his eyes. “Russ, you gotta take it down a notch.”

I thought of Malcolm. I thought of Quentin and everything going wrong. That fear was always present, looming in the background of my life like an ominous Greek chorus.

“You don’t know what could happen.” I inhaled a staggered breath, trying to keep myself from breaking. I never talked about this. I was used to keeping it on lockdown. But Cal was so easy to talk to. It was dangerous. “I used to think like you. Kids could get bumps and scratches, but it was part of life. But then my husband was driving home from work like any other day, and he was…”

Our last conversation was so mundane. We went over the grocery list and whether to grab a few extra cans of beans since they were on sale. I thought about it all the time, like maybe there was some hidden special meaning in there, like maybe Malcolm had a secret last message for me. But he didn’t. His life ended on a whim. An unmomentous, inglorious whim.

“I’m sorry. I am so sorry about what happened.”

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