“You don’t have to like me,” he said quietly, not moving to pick it back up. “But your mother worries when you walk near the road traffic after school.”
I ignored him and kept walking, telling myself his concern was just another trick, another way of stealing a little more of my mother’s attention for himself.
As far as I knew, Cole had no parents, no home, no job. Mom never once explained, in all those years, why she seemed to feel personally responsible for a stranger’s teenage son. I stopped asking eventually, the way children stop asking questions they’ve decided will never get a satisfying answer.
I stopped asking eventually.
He vanished from the dump sometime before I finished high school. Mom wouldn’t say where he’d gone, and by then I’d stopped caring enough to push.
The moment I graduated, I moved three hours away, took the cheapest apartment I could find, and called home only when guilt outweighed the effort. Mom and I spoke on birthdays first, then holidays, then eventually only on the occasions when one of us finally felt bad enough about the silence to break it ourselves.
