anything wrong. Once again he’d answered all the questions: Yes, he was fine when he came back from Maui with his mom after New Year’s. No, his father hadn’t been there; he’d gone to Grand Cayman with his new wife and their baby. No, it didn’t bother him that his dad hadn’t gone to Maui with them—in fact, he was glad his mom had dumped his dad, since his dad seemed to like hitting both of them when he got drunk, which had been practically every night the last couple of years before he finally left. No, he didn’t hate his dad. He didn’t like him much, and was glad he was gone, but he didn’t hate him.
What he hated was the way he felt.
The doctor had said maybe he should see a shrink, but he wasn’t about to do that. Only geeks and losers went to shrinks. Whatever was wrong, he’d get over it by himself. But over the last two days the pain had become almost unbearable. He was having nightmares, and waking up unable to breathe, and his whole body had started hurting all the time.
This afternoon, when he started feeling like maybe it might be better just to die if he couldn’t get away from the pain, he’d cut out after school and driven around for a while, until a cop stopped him and gave him a ticket for having a broken muffler. So now what the hell was he going to do? He couldn’t afford to pay for the ticket, let alone get the damn muffler on the car fixed. Besides, what was the big deal? It didn’t make that much noise, and hardly stank up the inside of the car at all. But his mom was going to give him hell for the ticket anyway, and his dad would only launch into an endless lecture about how much it costs to raise two families if he asked to borrow the money to fix the muffler.
What a mess!
Turning into the tree-lined block on which he’d lived all his life, he pressed the button on the sun visor that would activate the garage door opener while he was still two houses away, and turned into the driveway just as the door opened fully. Automatically starting the game he played against himself every afternoon, he pressed the button again, trying to gauge it so the descending garage door would just clear the back end of his car as he pulled it inside.
Today he missed, and the car jolted sharply as the garage door glanced off the rear bumper. So now there would be scrapes on the car and the garage door, as well as the ticket and the bad muffler.
And he still hurt.
Maybe, instead of going into the house, he’d just sit here awhile.
Sit here and see what happened.
A feeling of warmth began to spread through him, washing away the pain he’d been enduring, and suddenly everything began to seem better.
Maybe he’d finally found the answer to his problems.
Without his mother.
Without his coach.
Even without his doctor.
The boy closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and for the first time in weeks felt no pain.
For the woman, the day had been no better than it had been for her son, starting with an early call from her ex-husband suggesting that they renegotiate his child support payments. Translation: the bimbo he’d run off with wanted more money to spend on herself. Well, she’d disabused him of that idea pretty quickly. At noon she’d discovered that an associate who was a full year junior to her was going to get the partnership slot that should have been hers. So now she was faced with a decision: Sit it out for another year, or start job hunting? But she knew the answer to that one: she wasn’t going to be made a partner, ever, so she might as well start checking with the headhunters.
Then, when she’d decided things couldn’t get any worse, the doctor called to recommend a good psychiatrist for her son. Well, before she sent him off to a shrink, she’d have him checked out by someone else. Except the HMO probably wouldn’t pay for it, and the trip to Maui at New Year’s had strained the budget as far as it would go.
Still, she’d figure out something.
Turning into the driveway, she jabbed the remote on the visor, bringing the car to a complete stop as she waited for the garage door to open.