Page 93 of Whistle

“Yeah. You have any questions? You want to talk about it?”

Charlie shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You must be wondering how it happened.”

“Not really,” Charlie said.

That gave Annie pause. “Nobody can figure out how it happened.”

“He must’ve tripped,” he said, like it was simple.

“Well, yeah, he did, but how he tripped is kind of hard to figure out.”

“Sometimes people just trip.”

“That’s true. I just want to be sure you’re okay. I’m worried you might have bad dreams or something.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Why don’t you bunk in with me tonight.”

“I’m not a baby.”

Annie wasn’t sure whether to feel hurt or relieved. But if her son was strong enough to deal with this, well, that was a good thing, wasn’t it? And considering what he’d already been through in the past year, maybe he was tougher than she gave him credit for.

“If you change your mind, that’s okay.”

He glanced at the muted TV. “Can we watch a movie?”

“I guess. Was there one in particular you wanted to see?”

“Doesn’t matter.” As she went to pick up the remote, he said, “What are we going to do?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are we going home?”

She put the remote back down on the coffee table.

“I... I don’t know. What do you want to do? Do you want to go home? Because if you’d like that, that would be okay.”

Make it seem like his idea, she thought,even though I’m ready to leave right this second.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow?”

“Sure. We could do that. Sleep on it.”

Charlie nodded. “And can I take home the bike?”

“Uh, let me think about that.”

“And the trains?”

Annie thought about the lie she had been formulating earlier. About how to get rid of those fucking toy trains.

“I don’t think we can do that,” she said.

“Why not?”

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