He grins at me. “Why would I?”
Josh brushes his brown hair out of his eyes. He needs a haircut, which, if history is any indication, will be done in the bathroom over the sink. But he’s definitely getting a haircut before school starts. Every day, the kid looks a bit more like his father, and with his hair shaggy like that, the resemblance is enough to make my chest ache.
A timer goes off in the kitchen, and I head in that direction as the smell of baking chicken intensifies. God, I miss home-cooked meals. My mother used to cook most nights, but I hadn’t lived under her roof for a long time before I moved here for good last month, following her death.
I approach the kitchen just as Margie is pulling a tray out of the oven. Margie is a local grandma who is going to be watching Josh when I am working. He tried to protest that he didn’t need a babysitter, but I’m not comfortable with him being alone for hours while I am forty-five minutes away—at a prison. Besides, Josh is only ten years old. And he’s not exactly a mature ten.
“That smells incredible, Margie,” I say.
Margie beams at me and tucks an errant strand of gray hair behind one ear. “Oh, it’s nothing. Just roast chicken pieces with butter garlic sauce. And of course, rice and asparagus on the side. You can’t just eat chicken.”
Hmm, you can’t? Because I am pretty sure that over the last ten years, there have been plenty of nights when Josh and I have eaten nothing but chicken. From a bucket with a smiling colonel on the side of it.
But that’s in the past. Things are going to be different now. This is a fresh start for both of us.
Josh takes an overly exaggerated whiff of air. “It smells too saucy.”
I stare at him. “What does that mean? You can’t smell too much sauce.”
Margie winks. “I think he’s smelling the butter garlic.”
He crinkles his nose. “I don’t like garlic. Can’t we just go to McDonald’s?”
I don’t quite understand how you can love somebody so much, yet so frequently want to throttle them.
“First of all,” I say, “there’s no McDonald’s in Raker, so no, we can’t go to McDonald’s. And second, Margie made us a delicious home-cooked meal. If you don’t want it, you can make your own dinner.”
Margie laughs. “You sound like my daughter.”
I’m hoping that’s a compliment. “Thank you so much for coming today, Margie. You’ll be here to meet Josh after school on Monday? The school bus is supposed to be here around three.”
“It’s a date!” she confirms.
I walk Margie to the door, even though she’s got her own key. Just before I bid her goodbye, she hesitates, a groove between her gray eyebrows. “Listen, Brooke…”
If she tells me she’s quitting, I am going to curl up in a ball and cry. She was the only available sitter even remotely in my price range, and I can barely afford her as is. “Yes…？”
“Josh seems really nervous about starting school,” she says. “I know it’s hard being in a new town and all, especially at his age. But he seemed even more anxious than I would expect.”
“Oh…”
“I don’t want to worry you, dear,” she says. “I just wanted to let you know.”
My heart goes out to my ten-year-old son. I can’t blame him for missing McDonald’s. McDonald’s is familiar. Raker is not familiar, and neither is this house. In his entire life, my parents would never let us visit—they always came out to us in the city, until I told them they couldn’t anymore. This town is home for me, but to Josh, it’s a town full of strangers.