Page 6 of Stand

He sighed. “I tell them you love them every day. And they love you.” This was true, but she would never believe it. And forgetting to come get her kids from movie theaters or yelling at them if they didn’t like the food at a fancy restaurant she insisted on made it hard for Ty to defend her. “I’m going to hang up now. You know this timeshare is a waste of money. You’ll see them next weekend. Same as always.”

“Yeah, inyourtown, withyoubreathing over our shoulders the whole time! Fuck you, Ty.”

As he had finally taught himself, he pressed the button on the steering wheel and ended the call. He turned the car off, pulled the key out of the ignition, and lowered his head to rest on his hands on the steering wheel.

Why hadn’t he seen it? How had she so completely snowed him?

Ach, he knew why. She’d looked up at him, big brown eyes all soft and wet, and told him how much she wanted him. Ty, raised on a steady diet of no dad, a poor, busy mom, and school bullies, had felt like a million bucks for the first time in his life. When she’d taken him to that little hotel their first year in college, he’d hardly thought twice about following her lead.

And the result, as he kept reminding himself, was Matt. Then Alyssa. And that made it all worth it. Shrugging off a feeling of being in a vise, he got out of the car and followed the kids into the kitchen.

They were at the freezer, the door open, tubs of ice cream sitting on the countertop. Two pairs of worried eyes locked on him.

“She said to say she loves you,” he said. She did love them, in her own way. As long as they didn’t get in the way of her social life or her next obsession.

“Is she really buying a house in Florida?” Alyssa asked.

“No. It’s a timeshare. You buy a couple of weeks a year. Usually, the good weeks are all taken and you get… well, you get now. And if you think Massachusetts is humid in the summer, you should try Orlando.”

Alyssa dug into the vanilla with the biggest spoon in the drawer. “Get a bowl,” Ty said automatically, though right now he could hardly care.

“It’d be cool, though,” Alyssa went on. “We could go to Harry Potter every day.”

“Can she afford it?” Matt asked more shrewdly.

“Probably,” Ty said. He closed the freezer door and got bowls out for them all. Julia came from money. Money and two parents who’d cut him and the kids off as soon as Julia had left town. Now she’d come back, and they still hadn’t called. Too embarrassed, Ty hoped, knowing how they’d enabled her to avoid her responsibilities. “Load me up there, bub.”

Ice cream as compensation for an absent and unstable mother. It was the best he could do.

♦

When the kids were in their rooms for the night, Ty went to his workshop. Squeezed onto a wooden table at the back of the one-car garage, the small collection of tools and blocks of wood hardly deserved the word, but he could feel his blood pressure drop the moment he closed the heavy door from the house.

He pulled his latest project off the shelf, hooked his foot around the stool, and sat. His working glasses were right where he’d left them, as were his leather finger guards and the strap of fine-gauge tools he’d carefully oiled the other day. He regretted, in a way, that he was almost done with this sculpture, a ruby-crowned kinglet for Alyssa to add to her collection. He would have liked to hack away at a new lump of wood with sweeping strokes that tired him out and helped him sleep.

Still, the kinglet’s feathers required concentration and control, and Ty loved the feel of the chubby little woodcarving in his hands as he worked. Julia, the kids’ worries, and Florida all faded away.

His phone, predictably, rang. He swiped it and hit speaker. “Hey, No.”

His best friend, Noah, had a deep voice made deeper from all the experimental “healthy” substances he’d smoked over the years. “Tyler. What’s going on?”

Ty picked up the narrow, sharp blade and kept on whittling. “Same old same old.”

“You carving?”

“Uh-huh.”

Noah snorted. “I tell you, man, you should be down here. You’re an artist at heart.”

“And a capitalist at mouth. I have kids to feed, remember?”

They’d been having this argument since Noah had moved to Taos five years ago. “Costs a lot less to feed them down here,” he pointed out.

“Enough,” Ty said, hoping the smile on his face translated to his voice. “You wanna tell my mom her only grandkids are moving two thousand miles away? Quit bugging me. Why d’you call anyway?”

“Just catching up.” Ty heard a long drawn-in breath and a held-in cough. Another reason Ty wasn’t about to move nearer to Noah’s lifestyle.

“How’s the gallery?”

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