The Kindness of Strangers (38 page)

Mom took a long drink of coffee and looked down into the bottom of her cup for a while, turning the cup around and around. Then she leaned on one elbow, her chin in her hand, and watched Nate finish his cheesecake. The silence felt okay again. “You done?” he asked her, pointing to her few remaining bites. She nodded and laughed when he finished hers off, too. Damn, this stuff was so good. Nate could probably eat a whole cake himself. He opened the dishwasher and put the plates inside.

They stood there leaning against the counter, surrounded by cheesecakes. Nate felt that his mom wanted to say more. He wanted to say more, too, but he didn’t know what.

He sat back down on his stool at the island and watched her wash her hands and begin to cover each cheesecake with a plastic top and label it.

“You know Reece is coming to dinner next weekend,” she said.

Nate’s spine stiffened. “Why?”

Mom looked over at him, pen poised over a label as if startled at his tone of voice. “You know—a home visit, just a required check-in. Why? What?”

Nate shrugged. “Nothing.” Jesus, what was wrong with him?

Mom looked at him a moment, her cheeks red. She opened her mouth to say something but then shut it and began stacking the cheesecakes in the storage refrigerator, the big one that was only for the Laden Table stuff and not for the home Laden table. “What should we eat when he’s here?” Mom asked into the awkward silence.

He got a crowded feeling in his chest. Why did she care what they ate? “Nothing special—you always go over the top. Why can’t we just order something in?”

She closed the fridge and looked at him as if he’d suggested they serve ramen noodles. “I will not go ‘over the top.’ I was thinking something casual, like pizzas.”

“Mom, your idea of pizza is something with a rye crust and . . . and some weird green sauce and anchovies. Why don’t we just order real pizzas? You know—what everyone else in the world considers ‘casual,’ a pepperoni pizza delivered to your door.” Mom made everything from scratch. Everything. If she made a pumpkin pie, she started with a whole, for-real pumpkin. Even though it tasted great, it took forever. Dad used to buy box cake mixes and premade piecrusts and canned chicken broth and put them in Mom’s pantry as a joke. She reacted the way Mackenzie did when
someone
(hello? Mowaza was her lab partner) put a dissected frog leg in her science binder.

Dad.
Ever since Mom’s reaction to that “do you have a boyfriend?” question, Nate didn’t want his mother cooking for this man. Any man.

Mom put her hands on her hips. “All right, Mr. It’s-a-Mitzvah, tell me what’s wrong with a pepperoni pizza?”

“Please! We’ve never kept kosher.” Mom opened her mouth to protest, but Nate teased her, “Except maybe in a noncommittal, half-assed sort of way.”

Mom laughed. “See, when I was growing up, that’s what your grandmother worried about—would I eat kosher when I went out on dates. She didn’t worry about whether I was having sex in the back of the van.”

“Whoa. Hey, I’m
not,
okay?”

Danny appeared in the doorway with his empty plate, eyes wide. “What are you guys talking about?”

Nate and Mom laughed. “Nothing,” Mom said, busying herself wiping off the counters.

“Actually,” Nate said, fighting to keep a straight face, “we were talking about keeping kosher.”

Danny wrinkled his nose. “We’re not going to, are we? That’s such a pain at G.G.’s house. I thought you were talking about sex.”

Nate stared at his brother. So did Mom. Danny blushed. “I heard you say it!” he protested, like he felt the judgment in their stares.

“I was just talking about the differences in what your grandma worried about and what I worry about, with the world changing so fast,” Mom said. “That’s all.” She looked around the kitchen and said, “It’s almost midnight. You guys need to head upstairs.”

Nate wondered if Mom’s weird rule would always apply, even when he came home from college someday. If she went to bed, everybody had to be upstairs in their rooms, or she said she couldn’t sleep. He felt a sudden stab of guilt, picturing her when he did go away to college. Would she be able to sleep at all? A lump formed in his throat.

By the time Nate brushed his teeth and washed his face, Danny was asleep in the room they now shared, his breath gravelly. Nate undressed in the dark. Danny seemed better lately. He and Jordan were friends again. But twice now Nate had found his desk and dresser drawers rearranged, like Danny had snooped through his stuff. It wasn’t as if Nate was some neat freak and always put his stuff in exactly the same place, but tiny differences made him notice it. When he’d mentioned it to Danny, Danny denied it but looked so panicked that Nate knew it was true.

He pulled down his covers and lay on his back in bed. Shit. Some nights he could just tell he wasn’t going to sleep. Before, it was no big deal, but now that he’d moved into Danny’s room, Nate couldn’t just turn on lights and read or listen to music.

He tried to focus on the distant traffic on the main road one block away. He tried to copy Danny’s breathing, but it was too slow and his own mind too awake to focus on that for long. He tried to focus on
anything
besides Mrs. Kendrick. Where was she? Could
she
sleep? What did a person out on bail
do
? Could you walk around, go to the grocery story? He kept catching himself looking for her at the movie tonight.

The movie. He tried to think about Mackenzie, then stopped himself. No point in going there. Another reason sharing a room sucked.

But then he couldn’t
not
think about her.

Cursing under his breath, he got out of bed and pulled on a pair of sweats to head to the bathroom.

“Hey,” Jordan whispered as Nate stepped into the hall. Jordan’s small form was silhouetted in his doorway, a reading lamp on behind him. “I can’t sleep either.” He opened his door wider, and Nate went in, sort of relieved, sort of disappointed to be interrupted. He was glad that even though Jordan and Danny were friends again, Nate and Jordan still kept having their talks. The kid was cool. Nate knew he wasn’t half as strong a person as Jordan.

Nate sat on the end of Jordan’s bed, leaning against the wall.

Jordan sat in a chair, facing him, propping his feet up on the bed.

“So are you happy they caught your dad?”

Jordan looked at him like he was an idiot. “What do you think?”

“Well, I don’t know. You don’t act very happy. You haven’t said anything about it.”

“What do you want me to say?”

Nate sighed. He hated when Jordan was this way. This was obviously not going to be one of those great talk nights that Nate wrote about in his English journal.

Jordan drew his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. “How soon do you think he’ll be here in Dayton?”

“I don’t know. If they fly, he could be here tonight. Maybe he’s here already.”

Jordan chewed his lip. He looked stressed.

“Jordan, chill. He’s in police custody. He can’t hurt you.”

Jordan shot Nate a look of disdain but didn’t comment on what he said. “Was it on the news? Do you think . . . other people know he’s coming back?”

“Yeah. It was all over the news. Why?”

Jordan shook his head, then tucked his chin in between his knees. Without looking at Nate, he said, “Sorry about before, on the porch. I wasn’t mad at you.”

“That’s cool.” Nate looked around his old room, at all of Jordan’s drawings now hanging on the walls. Most of the drawings were of a cat or of Klezmer. A long silence fell, but in the sleepy quiet of the house, it was comfortable. “I figure you’re, you know, kind of nervous about seeing your mom tomorrow.”

Jordan frowned. “I’m not nervous. I . . . I just . . . I watched you and Mackenzie, but I was already out there when you guys pulled up. I wasn’t spying on you.”

Nate laughed. “It’s okay. We were on the street, for Christ’s sake. We weren’t really doing anything.”

“So . . . so you do more than that sometimes?”

Damn, what was next,
Danny
drilling him on his sex life?

He looked at Jordan, who eyed him warily. Nate thought about what Mom had said about sex bringing up powerful emotions. What emotions had Jordan felt? Nate took a breath. “Yeah. We do more than that sometimes.”

“Like what?”

“Jordan, this stuff is kinda personal. It’s supposed to be private. It’s—” Nate stopped. Words like “private” and “personal” seemed like a joke after what those people had done to Jordan.

Jordan crossed his arms and turned his head to look at the curtain blowing in the breeze. “I just . . . I don’t get it.”

“Look, man, the stuff that happened to you, that’s not anything close to what I do with Mackenzie. It’s totally, totally different. It can be really good. It can be a way to show you love someone.” He felt stupid. He sounded as cheesy as his mom had a few minutes ago. He saw those photos on the disks and wondered if it would ever be possible for Jordan to understand what he meant.

Jordan made an impatient move with his legs, kicking the bed.

“I’m sorry,” Nate whispered.

Jordan got up and stood at the window, his back to Nate. “Why should
you
be sorry?”

Nate didn’t know what to say. He leaned against the wall again and waited. He watched the kid’s back, between the two blowing curtains. Nate yawned.

Still looking out the window, Jordan said, “I know where my mom is staying. I saw the address on Reece’s desk.” He turned around and pulled a piece of paper from his back pocket.

Nate felt his insides drop down into the bed.

Jordan stared at him, holding out the piece of paper. “It’s not that far. I looked on a map.”

Shit. Nate closed his eyes a moment.

“Would you take me?”

Hell, no,
Nate wanted to say, but he made himself be kind. “No, Jordan. I’m sorry. I . . . I don’t think—”

“You took the van to see me, and you weren’t allowed.”

“Yeah, but I
wanted
to see you, and a hospital is a pretty safe place . . . and . . . you know . . . you’re supposed to be supervised when you talk to her.”

Jordan still held out the paper. “Please? You could take me tomorrow after therapy.”

Dread settled into Nate’s muscles. “No. Mom’s dropping us off. And even if she wasn’t—”

“I
need
to talk to her.”

The kid’s desperation made Nate’s stomach ache. “You
can
talk to her. At the agency, tomorrow at two.”

Jordan dropped his arm and his eyes flashed hatred. “You’re afraid of her.”

Nate let that slide off of him. “I’m not afraid of her. But I should’ve told someone about your mom. Maybe then you wouldn’t have ended up in the hospital.”

Jordan sneered. “Told someone
what
about my mom? That you wanted to do her?”

Blood rushed to Nate’s face. “She kissed me, Jordan.”

Jordan rolled his eyes.

“That’s not normal,” Nate insisted. “A grown woman shouldn’t be kissing some high-school guy, okay?” He saw those pictures in his head again and thought how laughable that must sound to Jordan. Jesus, the kid must think Nate was flipping over nothing.

Nate felt
sick
when he thought about the jerk he’d been. What if he’d told his mom, way back after that first kiss? That was two years ago. The kid could have been out of that house, away from those psychos. But . . . really, even if he’d told, would it have stopped anything other than Mom being friends with Mrs. Kendrick? Nate had known that Mrs. Kendrick was whack, but he’d had no real clue.

Jordan whispered, “Please? She never hurt you.”

“But she hurt
you
.”

“No she didn’t. You all think you know what happened, and you don’t know shit.”

“I know this much,” Nate said. “I don’t think you want me to go to therapy with you at all. I think you only wanted to arrange it so we’d have the van and could go see her.”

Jordan stared down at the floor.

“So that was all bullshit? All that crap you told Bryn about trusting me?”

Jordan lifted his head. “No! I meant that. I . . . do. I do trust you.”

“Yeah? Good, because I’m trusting you: You better not lead your mom to this house.”

Jordan shook his head. “I promise,” he said. He sat on the bed. “She doesn’t know I’m here.”

“She better not,” Nate said, giving himself chills with his own icy-sharp voice. “She better not come anywhere near my family.”

He felt something give way inside him as he watched the kid’s face shift into a look so lonely he seemed to shrink before Nate’s eyes.

“But she’s
my
family,” Jordan whispered.

Jordan’s eyes blurred and his nose stung, but he didn’t cry. Jordan brought his legs up on the bed and curled into a fetal ball, staring across the room with blank, dry eyes.