Chapter One - Since We Started Trying


“Since we started trying, Nick’s been a little….” Lauren looked at me, then turned back to Dr. Walden, “...gun shy.”

I felt the blush start in the base of my neck and crawl it’s way up my skin, darkening my cheeks and heating the tips of my ears. I looked down at my lap, where I had my hands clasped, and counted to ten. I couldn’t believe she was just telling this strange dude this. Didn’t she know how fucking embarrassing this was for me?

Dr. Walden chuckled, “Feeling a little stage fright, maybe?”

If he thought he was making it better, he wasn’t.

Asshole.

“It’s perfectly normal for a man to face a little… erectile dysfunction… when they’re faced with the pressure of starting a family,” Dr. Walden said in what I bet he thought was a comforting tone.

Asshole, asshole, asshole.

I balled my hands into fists.

Lauren’s palms touched my shoulder, “Hear that, honey? It’s perfectly normal.” She smiled at me. She could feel the tension in my muscles. I knew she could because she let her palm slide away and turned back to Dr. Walden almost immediately. “I think the main concern here is how do we remedy it?”

Dr. Walden hummed, “I suppose there’s a lot of ways to remedy it. Making sure you engage in foreplay designed for the male pleasure centers…”

I took in a sharp breath.

My brain couldn’t handle it.

This old man was giving us sex advice like he was a column out of Cosmopolitan or Playboy. If the problem had been my being too erect this would most definitely have cured it. As it was, I’d be lucky if I ever got it up again. I knew I’d be battling mental replays of his wheezy old voice saying words like clitorious, masturbation, and scrotum.

If I could’ve sunk right into the floor tiles of Dr. Walden’s office, I would have.

Lauren was taking notes.

“You didn’t seem like you were much interested in what Dr. Walden had to say,” Lauren accused as we got into the car a mind-numbing forty minutes later.

I thrust the key into the ignition.

No, not thrust. Never again would I thrust anything anywhere without hearing Dr. Walden’s strange way of forming the word on his lips.

Thhhhrust.

Like he was thrusting the word out of his mouth.

“That was fucking traumatizing,” I replied.

“Traumatizing?” Lauren looked over at me. She was closing her notebook, sliding it into her totebag.

Ugh. Sliding.

Another word I’d never be able to use again.

“Uh, yes,” I said empathetically. “Did you not hear that? It was like fuckin’ sitting through sex ed all over again, except with a very personal slant, as taught by a man who was probably around when they invented sex.”

Lauren tilted her head to one side, “Are you sure this isn’t just you being frustrated about the situation?” she asked, “I know this is a touchy subject for you.” She reached out a hand and put it on my forearm. “Don’t you feel a little better, at least, knowing it’s totally normal?” she asked, rubbing my skin gently.

In my head I could hear Dr. Walden’s voice telling her how to reawaken the nerve endings in the penis should we re-encounter the problem during future attempts.

I pulled my arm away and turned the car on.




Basically, we’d been trying to make a baby for five months before seeking the professional opinions of Dr. Walden, the Over Friendly Sex Ed Dinosaur.

And it wasn’t entirely my fault we were having… issues.

See it all started back in, I dunno, June, I guess. Lauren looked over at me one day while we were sitting on the tour bus in like Cincinnati or some place -- yeah, it was Cincinnati ‘cos it was Father’s Day and Kevin and AJ and Howie and Brian all had these awesome videos to play during the show and me I’m over here like… yep -- and she says to me, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a baby?”

That’s how it started.

Since we’d been trying, obviously we’d given up on condoms, but also Lauren had read somewhere on the internet that commercial lubricants could contain spermicides that would decrease fertility chances and since then we’d been buying a lot of extra canola oil. (Holla, Mazola!)

Trojan and KY were probably both wondering what the hell happened that made their sales suddenly decrease so much over the summer. We were pretty regular customers until then.

But I mean she didn’t get pregnant immediately so we were like, okay, well let’s try to increase the odds, so…

We’d been doing everything we could: I’d been wearing boxers and was banned from the hot tub, while Lauren was carefully measuring her BMI everyday, avoiding coffee, and tracking her ovulation cycle with an obsessive flare that I’d only ever seen in BSB fans prior. She had a pocket calendar, a white board calendar, and a reminder set on her phone. For six straight nights every twenty-eight days we had the most intense sex you’ve ever seen. We were like marathon sex addicts, going at it until we literally couldn’t move.

I’d started out during months one through three bragging to Chris and Shadrick about how fucking awesome it was trying to have kids. “Let me get this straight,” Chris had said, leaning forward, and looking at me with hungry, excited eyes, “You get to have sex every single day for like a whole a week?”

I nodded.

“Fuck,” he said, leaning back and looking at Shadrick, who also looked impressed, “I wanna fuckin’ try to have kids, too, man,” Chris had declared.

Now though, honestly, sex was becoming something more like a monthly chore than something I looked forward to.

Month four was when it started getting old. And frustrating. I felt like we were doing all this stuff and not gettin’ any results and I started wondering if maybe there was something going on up in there on one of us and the more stressed I got about it, the less Thor wanted in on the action and pretty soon he just wasn’t even bothering to show up for the party.

By month five, Thor was pretty much dead on arrival.

“Maybe we should see a therapist,” Lauren had suggested, a little bit of an edge to her voice. She turned off the lamp beside the bed. “I’ll call and see if I can get an appointment with the the guy Leigh was telling me about last week.”

“Leigh was telling you about a guy?” I asked, looking over at her in the dark.

“Yeah,” Lauren answered.

“How does that even come up?” I asked, “Like, what’d she say, I know this great sex therapist?”

I dreaded the answer.

Lauren shrugged.

I dreaded it more.

“I just told her we were trying and that it wasn’t going so well,” Lauren said.

I pictured them giggling in the kitchen, watching Howie and I grilling last weekend out on the deck, while they sat in the house, sipping their virgin cocktails and talking about how I couldn’t keep my game on long enough to get Lauren pregnant.

And to think I spent years worrying what would happen if I got a girl pregnant.

Apparently it’s a lot harder to do than they make it sound like in sex ed.

Dr. Walden, of course, had been the doctor Leigh had suggested and of course Lauren did indeed get an appointment with him. And of course that appointment went horribly wrong in every way that I never could’ve expected. But even with all the notes Lauren took at his office that day and all the research she did trying to find like the best sexual positions for baby-making and all that, we still weren’t pregnant.




I woke up on the morning of the month six pregnancy test in an empty bed. Lauren’s side was already cold. I rolled to look at the clock. It was almost eight. She’d have gotten up at six to take the test. I already knew the result without even having to ask. I rolled onto my back, letting my arms spread out and staring up at the ceiling. I lifted the sheets and looked down the length of my torso. “You gotta get your act together man,” I told my penis. I sighed and dropped the sheets back to my chest and closed my eyes. Lauren was gonna be in a bad mood. She always was on testing day.

Lauren was sitting in the center of the living room carpet, the furniture all pushed back, in a yoga position, her legs crossed so severely that she looked like a human knot. On the floor beside her was a big bowl of almonds, blueberries, soybeans, and kale. Fertility food.

“Morning,” I said.

She didn’t open her eyes, “One line.”

She meant on the test. Two would’ve meant we’d finally scored a touchdown.

I was having a more pathetic season than the Buccs.

And that’s pretty pathetic.

“I figured,” I answered, and I ducked out of the living room, headed for the kitchen.

“Don’t forget to take your vitamins!” she yelled after me, “And I cooked an omelet for you, it’s on the stove, just reheat it! It has spinach in it!”

Spinach is high in zinc. Zinc helps produce sperm.

I stared at the omelet in the pan. It was flecked with green spinach leaves and red peppers and steak. I turned on the heat and let it warm up, grabbing a K-cup from the drawer and sticking it into the machine. Breakfast was ready in just a couple minutes and I carried it out to the deck and put it down on the table, staring out to the ocean as I sat down.

It was pretty chilly outside for Los Angeles, low sixties, but it was almost December so that was to be expected. I had a sweatshirt on. I enjoyed the sound of the ocean too much to go back inside. I ate my omelet slowly, watching the water break against the rocks that lined a jetty a little ways down the beach.

Lauren came out, pulling her hair down from the high pony tail she’d been wearing while working out. She settled herself into the chair next to me and leaned back without saying a word. I kept eating. The ocean kept rolling in and out with the tide. When I finished, I put my fork across my plate and pushed it away and leaned back in the chair.

“Was it good?” she asked.

“Yeah, it was fine,” I answered, “Thanks.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

We sat there in silence again, both of us watching the waves.

Lauren looked over at me, “I’m gonna volunteer somewhere,” she declared. “For Thanksgiving. Like maybe a food bank or a soup kitchen or something. Remember we did it that one time a few years back, remember how good it felt? I think I need to do something like that again,” she said. “I need to feel good about something again.”

I nodded.

“You don’t have to do it,” she said, “But I’m going to.”

I nodded again.

“I mean, you can if you want to, but you don’t have to.”

“It’s okay, it can be your thing,” I said. “Everyone needs a thing. That can be yours.” I shrugged.

We were both trying to avoid having the good try this month, we’ll try again next month pep talk that inevitably came every month on testing day. I didn’t want to hear it, though, and I got the feeling she was tired of reciting it to me.

Chapter Two - It Was Like Jordan Was Yoda


Nick

“Jesus, who pissed in your Cheerios, little brother?” Jordan Knight, my current copartner in crime, looked up from some weird card game he was playing on one of the little tables in front of the so-called couch on the tour bus we were taking north for the last leg of the Nick & Knight tour into Canada. His Boston accent was getting thicker the colder it got outside, like his body temperature barometer directly tied to his place of birth.

I shook my head as I walked by and threw my backpack into my bunk. I sat on the edge of the weird little mattress and took a deep breath.

“I know you better than this,” Jordan said, “You’re being sullen and that can’t mean anything good.” His playing cards made clicky-thwappy sounds as he hit the table with them.

It was the day after Testing Day and Lauren had decided at the last minute not to come along on the last leg of the tour. She’d sprung this information on me twenty minutes before we’d been supposed to leave to get on the bus.

“But why?” I’d whined, “I need you.”

“You don’t need me, what do you need me for?” she’d asked.

“So I won’t be lonely on the tour bus,” I whined more.

“Are you kidding me? You and Jordan will be so busy fucking around you won’t need me there to keep you busy. You’ve got other things that’ll keep your mind preoccupied. And I’ve got stuff I need to do, too.”

“What stuff?”

“Just stuff, Nick, I have friends I need to catch up with and I need a mani-pedi like nobody’s business and I gained a few pounds, I need to focus on getting some serious workouts in so my BMI doesn’t climb. I need to figure out where I’m going to volunteer on Thanksgiving and all that, too. That stuff doesn’t do itself, you know.”

But I had this feeling like maybe it wasn’t anything to do with all the stuff she had to do as much as it was to do with wanting to be apart from me. Tension had been rising slowly one Testing Day at a time, but this one had been especially rough. I think mainly because we’d been kind of half expecting a miracle of sorts for the holiday. We’d half discussed this idea for doing a baby announcement for Christmas and this had been our last chance for that. It was like just one more dream that had slipped out the window because my sperm didn’t wanna crawl up inside her uterus the right way or whatever.

And I was afraid maybe me letting her down was hurting us more than she was letting on.

Jordan leaned over his table, one eyebrow raised, looking down the length of the bus at me. “C’mon Nicky, you can talk to me,” he said in a beckoning tone.

I got up and walked out to the couch and sat down next to him.

“How long did you and Evelyn try to have kids before you knocked her up?” I asked.

“Jesus, Carter, let’s get personal, shall we?” he laughed, nudging me. I gave him a pleading look. All I wanted was an answer, not a giggle. He got the message and settled back into the seat, rubbing his chin. “Aw man, I mean, let’s see. I don’t know if we ever really tried, I mean, we weren’t actively not trying. Just… you know, Dante was a pleasant surprise, I guess.” Jordan patted my leg in a guy-friendly way, “You guys thinking of trying?”

I sighed, “We’ve been trying since fuckin’ June.”

Jordan blinked in surprise. “June? You know you gotta stop wearin’ condoms to make that work, right, Nicky?” he smirked.

“Dude, we have been doing everything.”

Jordan pouted out his lower lip, thinking. “You seen one of them sex doctors?”

I nodded. “This older than dirt guy who gave us a way too detailed description of how to do a hand job,” I answered. “I’m still having nightmares of this guy, Jor.” I shook my head, “And I’m really gettin’ nervous about it, like what if I’m, like, broken down there somethin’, like I got low grade sperms or somethin’? What if I ain’t never gonna get her pregnant? What if we can’t have kids? What if she leaves me ‘cos she wants to have kids and thanks to my defunct sperms I’m basically a pretty, but useless, meat stick?”

A smirk danced on the corners of his lips.

“It ain’t funny, dawg,” I whimpered.

“Well, first of all, I’m pretty sure Lauren loves you for more than your -er- pretty meat stick,” he said.

“You forgot useless,” I grumbled, leaning back and folding my arms over my chest.

“What’s the issue?” he asked, “Can’t get it up?” He used his index finger to illustrate the ‘getting up’.

I took a deep breath. I wished Howie was around I could talk to him. Jordan was cool and stuff but I’d looked up to him for years and years, even before I met the guy, so it felt kinda weird talking to him about my sexual dysfunctions. But Howie was clear across the country, getting ready for Christmas with his family, enjoying some much needed, and well deserved, time off before we got back into the Backstreet Working Schedule at the end of January. Jordan was all I had. And he did have the advantage of being old and wise, like Kevin kinda.

“I think… I think it might be… like… bored.”

“Bored?” Jordan raised an eyebrow.

“Well ‘cos, like, okay. So. When we first started, it was like… I was gettin’ lots and lots of sex and it was awesome ‘cos… I like sex. But then it was like I was gettin’ too much sex, and it was really predictable and like, I dunno, I thought it’d work quick. Like the first time, maybe. And it didn’t. And I kinda felt like a failure and then I was worried about it, like maybe my dick doesn’t work right, and now it’s just like I’m scared to try again ‘cos I’m scared to have it not work and confirm that I’m broken down there or something.” I stared at Jordan.

He nodded. “That makes sense.”

“Does it?”

He nodded again, “You got so much damn pressure on you, you’re stressin’ your wiener out. You need to calm the fuck down. That’s way too much thinking to be doing when you’re trying to have sex, man. Way too much thinking. Your boner’s gonna get tired thinkin’ that much.” Jordan swept the cards up off the table and stood up, sliding them into a box he’d left on the counter. He turned to face me, shaking the closed deck at me with emphasis, “You need to have a good lay where you ain’t thinkin’ about it and once the pressures off you, you’ll be a’ight, man.”

“But the pressure’s always on,” I said, “We only have sex to make babies these days.”

“So you gotta change that.”

“How?”

“When we get back from this leg of the tour, you walk into the house and you grab her by the hips and you tell her you’ve done nothin’ but dream about her naked body all the time you’ve been gone and you say you gotta have her right now and fuck ’er brains out.”

It was like poetry.

It was like Jordan was Yoda and I was learning how to use my Lightsaber.

“And then what? After that I’ll be able to keep it up long enough to make a baby for real?” I asked.

Jordan shrugged, “I ain’t got a clue. But at the worst you get laid. It’s worth a try.”

“Yeah.”

He opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of Sam Adams. He held it up to see if I wanted one, but I shook my head, so he popped the cap on the edge of the counter - a talent that I’d tried to copy a few times with no luck. He closed the fridge door and sipped the beer. “Here’s the thing, though,” he said, lowering it, his hand wrapped around the neck of the bottle, pointing at me as he spoke, “You gotta stop being so stressed out about it. Even if you can’t get her pregnant, it ain’t the end of the world. There’s other ways to have kids, man. There’s like in vitro and all that Star Trek medical type shit you could do, and then there’s always good old fashioned adoption.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean hell, you can have one of my kids if you want,” he said, “I got two of’em.”

I laughed.

Jordan grinned, “You like that, huh? You’ll be sorry when I give ya Dante. He’s been a little bitch lately. Driving Evy nuts. He’s gettin’ to that whole I’m-fifteen-and-the-world-owes-me stage. I don’t remember being that much of a little bitch when I was fifteen. Do you?”

“Yes,” I replied honestly, nodding. “I was obnoxious as fuck when I was fifteen.”

Jordan sipped his beer, “Good then, it’s settled, you take Dante and we’ll be good.” He smirked. “Nawh seriously, though, man, there’s always adoption.” He shrugged. “There’s plenty of kids out there need a family. Maybe there’s a reason you and Lauren can’t bomp-de-bomp-de-bomp one out, maybe it’s ‘cos you’re meant to help some kid that ain’t got nobody else.”

“Maybe.”

“Either way, though, you gotta stop pressuring yourself. It ain’t good for you.” He put the beer down on the counter.

I sighed.

Jordan smiled, “Now you gotta relax. We’re about to wrap up this tour and we don’t need it ending on no sour note, we’ve had way too much fun for that shit.” He held out his hand, looking for a fist bump. I bumped and he did the jazz-hands-explosion thing. I raised my eyebrow. “See Dante hates it when I do that. Says I look ridiculous. Like a dork, he says.”

“You do look like a dork when you do that,” I replied.

“Jesus,” Jordan shook his head. “Ain’t no respect.”

“It’s a’ight, old man,” I said.

Jordan chuckled, his eyes sparkling, “Hey don’t you be callin’ me old man, limpy, or you’re gonna find your bad self in trouble. I know where your bunk’s at.”




I tried to push the thoughts of babies and pregnancy tests and all that out of my head for the next week as Jordan and I did our last few dates on the tour. Every stop of the way the air seemed to get colder and colder ‘til we’d crossed the border into Canada and I was making jokes about icebergs and penguins. Jordan’s Boston was so thick he couldn’t even pronounce his own name right.

Jawd’n.

On the very last day of the tour, we were gettin’ ready to leave Calgary, me headed back to LA and Jordan to Boston, when he pulled me aside at the airport. “Good luck tonight,” he said, fist bumping me again.

“Thanks,” I answered.

“You need to talk, you gimme a call, a’ight?”

“I will,” I answered. “And thanks for the advice.”

“The shit you learn after you turn 40, I swear.” Jordan grinned. “Anyways, hopefully next time we chill you’ll have a lil potsticker to introduce me to.” He winked. “Happy holidays, man.”

“You, too,” I answered and I waved as he walked on to his gate. I sat myself down by my own gate, Mike across from me in the waiting area, reading a magazine. I sighed and put my feet up on the seat next to Mike. “You gonna protect my kids, when I have’em, Mikey?” I asked.

Without even looking up, he asked, “You gonna pay me extra?”




I was nervous as I climbed out of the car that was dropping me off at home. I grabbed my bag and started walkin’ up the driveway to the house, my stomach kind of flippety-flopping around. I’d talked myself up into a mood the whole way home, thinkin’ about Lauren’s skin and the smell of her and all the things that got me excited and now I could feel Thor stirring, ready to join the party, and I pushed open the door of the house. “Baby, I’m home,” I called out.

“Hey,” she called back.

I followed the sound of her voice. She was in the kitchen, standing at the stove, watching a pot of water that was just below the boiling point, a fistful of pasta in her hand. I dropped my bag at the doorway and stepped up behind her, my arms snaking around her and pressing my face into her hair. “Mmm, you smell like heaven,” I mumbled into her ear, nibbling the skin at the top.

“I smell like cleaning chemicals is more like it,” she replied. “I just finished doing the bathroom. You need to do some target practice, mister.”

I ignored the comment and slid my hands down her sides to her hips. “The whole time I’ve been gone I couldn’t stop thinking about your naked body… I gotta have you right now.” I tried to spin her to face me, but I only succeeded in making her trip a little and she dropped the spaghetti in her palm and one of the pieces hit the burner and lit on fire.

“God damn it,” she grabbed a pair of tongs in the utensil drawer next to the stove and pulled the piece of spaghetti off the burner, blowing it out, and quickly started gathering up the other wayward pieces. “Nick, what the hell?”

“I just was sayin’ I missed you and I wanna have sex,” I whimpered. “I didn’t mean to start a damn fire.” I paused. “At least not a real one. I was trying to start one… you know… without bodies.” I said the last part in a Barry White kinda voice.

Lauren tossed the pasta into the pot and turned the heat down. “It’s not time yet, I have another couple days.”

“I just wanna have sex,” I said, “Not like for business, just for pleasure.” I pouted.

Lauren sighed. “Nick.”

“Lo,” I said in the exact same tone she’d just said my name in.

“Baby, I love you, I’m glad you’re home, but I don’t feel like it today. Save it for the weekend. We’re gonna have plenty of sex then.” She grabbed a spoon from the drawer and stirred the spaghetti gently, then leaned it on the chicken shaped spoon rest on the stove. I was pouting, so she took a couple steps towards me, ran her hands across my cheeks and said, “Don’t you wanna make a baby?”

“Yes, but, Jordan said --”

“Shhh,” Lauren whispered, and she kissed my chin. “We’ll have plenty of sex this weekend. For now, did you take your vitamins I packed you?” She stepped around me and opened the fridge, pulling out the spinach and some cream and other stuff she needed to make a white pasta sauce. I grimaced at the spinach. “Because it’s really important that we both stick to the regimen or else the chances go down really quick and the next thing you know we’re looking at steep odds of conceiving this month and I don’t know about you but the negative tests are really starting to be disheartening…”

I watched as she mixed the stuff together, adding extra-extra spinach and I thought about all that zinc and all the disheartening pregnancy tests and I felt my resolve starting to melt away, like snow in sunlight.

“...and I found a soup kitchen,” she added, as she stirred the pasta and my brain tuned back into the stuff she was saying. “It’s downtown. I told them I’d do the early dinner shift, so they scheduled me from like ten in the morning until like four. I figured that’d be good because then I could get up early and make the turkey and everything before I go, then I’d be home around five to reheat it and you and I can have Thanksgiving together for dinner. Is that okay?”

“Sounds good,” I answered.

Lauren smiled and put some pasta in a dish for me, “Sit down, baby,” she said, putting the bowl down on the table. She reached in the bag of spinach and garnished the bowl with it, winking, “Lots and lots of zinc!” she said like she was giving me chocolate. She put a finger on my chest, “We’re gonna do it this month, baby. I can feel it.”

“Yeah,” I answered and I sat down.

If I never ate spinach again in all my life I’d be okay with it. Just saying.

Chapter Three - Slice of Sbarro



Thanksgiving morning, Lauren’s alarm clock went off at four in the morning. I groaned as I felt her moving, shifting, getting ready to get up. “No, Lolo, it’s too early,” I mumbled into the pillow I was face-down in.

“You can sleep,” she whispered, “I just gotta go get the turkey in.”

“At four in the morning?” I groaned.

She kissed my forehead, “Mhm. I gotta get all our things ready so I don’t have to think about it when I’m at the kitchen, remember? I gotta be there at ten.” She sat up, rolling her feet off the side of the bed and started putting her hair up.

I crawled GI Joe style across the bed and wrapped my arms around her waist from behind, my cheek pressed to her spine. “Don’t go,” I whined, “It’s a holiday, you ain’t supposed to be up this early. Spend the day with me. I miss you.” I clutched onto her.

Lauren laughed and rubbed my arms, “Aw, Nicky.” She shook her head, “I gotta do the soup kitchen. I already volunteered.”

“That’s right, you’re a volunteer, so just, like, un-volunteer and it’ll be all good, then you can be lazy with me.”

She wiggled out of my clutches and got up. “I can’t un-volunteer,” she said.

“Why nooot?” I asked, dropping onto my back and hugging a pillow onto my chest. I stared up at her as she got a shirt out of the closet.

“Because we don’t want the universe thinkin’ we have bad juju.” She made a face like that was the end-all argument.

“Bad juju?” I asked.

“Yeah, like… karma. Like maybe we don’t deserve certain things that we both want very much,” she added, eyeballing me.

“You mean like for the Buccs to win?” I joked.

Lauren smirked, rolling her eyes and reached for her sweatpants, which were at the foot of the bed.

“Lolo, pleaaaaaase,” I begged. “I can juju you.” I moved the pillow so it was straddling me, like it was riding me, and I thrust my hips up into it. “Uhh.. uh… uh…” I grunted

Lauren laughed, “That is not an approved baby making position, Mr. Carter,” she said, tugging the sweatpants up her legs and tucking her shirt into the waistband.

“Well Jordan says I need to have some less stressful sex ‘cos my wiener’s overthinking,” I said with a nod.

Lauren raised an eyebrow, “Oh is that what Jordan said?” she asked with a giggle, “And Jordan’s a licensed sex therapist since… when?” She put her hands on her hips.

“I dunno he’s smart. And he’s gotta dick, too, which is more than I can say for that Dr. Waldork dude. His penis prolly turned to dust and fell off centuries ago.” I dropped the pillow onto the bed and sat up as Lauren pulled her hair up into a high ponytail.

“His name is Dr. Walden,” she said, “And he helped Howie and Leigh when they were having problems after James.”

“Okay, I’ma stop you there, ‘cos I don’t wanna know no details about Howito and his wonky peepee.” I was on my knees on the bed by now. “But Lolo, I wanna have sex. Please? Non-baby makin’ sex?” I gave her the very best begging puppy eyes I could muster.

She sighed, “Don’t you wanna save it for when we could possibly be making a baby, though? All the sex we have off the schedule could be one less time we feel like it when we’re on schedule. And what if we do it and you waste the sperm that was meant to be our baby?” She looked genuinely worried, like she was imagining a poor lonely sperm crying because it couldn’t find an egg to become a baby in.

I pouted, “But Jordan says it’ll help.”

“Again, is Jordan a therapist?”

“No…”

“Well, maybe we should stick to what the therapist says, and just… improve our karma.” She turned toward the door, “Maybe you should do something nice for humanity sometime, something that has nothing to do with your fans. Bank some juju. The universe will give us a baby if we earn it.” She smiled and headed out the door.

I dropped back onto the bed and listened to her steps on the stairwell. I closed my eyes, frustrated. She didn’t understand what it was like to be a man and have a penis, a penis that was made to make babies and find out after years of thinking you had the most manly penis of all the penises that your penis is actually quite pointless. It couldn’t even do it’s one stupid actual function. I rolled onto the pillows, despondent as a kid having been sent to his room, and I stared at the clock on Lauren’s bedside table, grumpy.

I knew Lauren wasn’t trying to make it difficult for me, she wasn’t trying to make it frustrating. It’s just she was focused and really wanted to have a baby and I did, too. Which made it even worse that I was the reason we weren’t havin’ one yet. I felt guilty and I read more into the things she was saying than she was probably really putting into them.

But that didn’t mean it hurt my feelings any less.

I laid in bed until I managed to talk myself out of thinking that Lauren hated me and my pointless penis, and finally got up and got dressed, headed down stairs, just praying that there wouldn’t be any spinach at the Thanksgiving table.




Later that night, I was laying on the couch, watching Black Friday ad after Black Friday ad parade across my TV. The most repeated one featured a big turkey running off the Thanksgiving table to get to some department store before the door busters were all “gobbled” up. I’d stopped glancing at the clock back when it was five and Lauren should’ve been home, and that was hours ago. I’d tried calling, but to no end, and now all there was to do was sit and wait and watch the ads go by.

This isn’t what it’s supposed to be like anymore, I thought to myself as the Target ad repeated itself for the nine millionth time this hour. It’s the first year together, we should be making memories and starting traditions and being, you know, together.

I sighed.

This was bad juju just as much as anything else, I thought sarcastically. If the universe is watching what it’s seeing is that we don’t value family. Why give more family to someone who doesn’t even value what they got?

Why didn’t I think of that argument hours and hours ago? I wondered.

My phone vibed.

Hey, I’m gonna be late. They were a volunteer short for the dinner service and I offered to stay a few extra hours. xo.

I stared at the text.

I tossed the phone onto the couch cushion without answering and turned my eyes back to the TV. I shouldn’t have felt as angry as I did. I knew it even as the heat boiled up in my neck and face. But I couldn’t help it. However irrational I was being, I felt like I was the toy being cast aside because my subpar sperm. I ran my hands into my hair, clutching my hair desperately. The Target ad was back again. “Fuck this,” I snapped, turning the TV off as I got to my feet.

It was after seven o’clock and a ton of stores were already open, according to their ads. I drove up Franklin Road to Cool Springs Galleria, running into traffic the closer I got. I didn’t really give a shit about any of the stuff that was on sale, I just needed to get the fricking hell out of that house. The walls had started to mock me there and the last thing I was gonna do was spend the entire night alone, staring at the ads talking about all the deals to be gobbled, feeling less and less like a man with every tick of the clock.

My knuckles curled around the steering wheel.

At the galleria, I found a parking spot pretty much as far away from the building entrance as possible and I walked through single-digit degree weather in just my sweatshirt, dodging cars with frustrated drivers who insisted they were gonna find a closer parking spot than what was available. “Happy fucking Thanksgiving,” I muttered as one car came frighteningly close to running me down.

As I walked through the doors to the Macy’s, surrounded by madly dashing old women that smelled like too much perfume, my mind wandered and somehow ended up recounting this old memory from one of the first years the Backstreet Boys had been together. We’d been in Germany for the holidays and we spent Thanksgiving in a dingy ass hotel outside of Berlin, where Lou had put all five of us up in one room while he had another room all to himself. We had soggy ass leftover pizza that wasn’t all that good because - well, it was fuckin’ Germany, I mean, c’mon - and Brian stopped us from digging right in (not that any of us was overly excited to anyway) to go around saying what all we were thankful for. “It’s tradition,” he’d insisted when we’d hesitated. And so we’d done it.

I’d planned to do that today with Lauren.

I’d pictured us saying we were thankful for our family, while running our hands over her stomach.

I’d had a lot of plans for the holidays for us. But the whole not-pregnant thing had fucked with a lot of them.

The mall was ridiculous, people everywhere, screaming and running every which way, scrambling for deals that they didn’t even particularly give a crap about. I stood in the middle and watched them fight all around me, running up escalators, pushing each other out of the way, cursing loudly, pulling on opposite ends of sweaters like some kind of polyester blend tug of war. I sat down on a bench near to the food court and closed my eyes, just listening to all the madness around me.

Maybe in some really screwed up way Jordan Knight was right. Maybe the answer was in Lauren and I adopting a baby from someone else’s family, someone who didn’t want their baby. Or maybe Lauren was right. Maybe it was all that karma shit. Maybe the universe knew I would be such a colossally bad parent that it didn’t wanna even give me the chance to fuck up.

I rubbed my forehead with the heels of my hands.

“Would I really be that terrible?” I whispered.

Suddenly, someone sat down next to me on the bench. I looked over. And honest to fuck it was Santa Claus. Obviously, it was just one of those mall guys, but it was weird ‘cos, like, that’s how it happens in the movies, right, like the anguished character asks the universe a question and the answer comes by, like, Santa or an angel or something showing up, right? He wasn’t even all that good of a Santa. You’d think a place like Cool Springs mall could get a better Santa.

I cleared my throat.

Santa looked at me, his beard on a little crooked. He shimmied it off so it hung around his neck like a big white tie. “This seat taken?” he asked.

“Alls I want for Christmas is to knock up my wife,” I blurted out.

Santa stared at me. “Okay…” he said slowly. “You know, I think my break’s over actually. You have a, uh, Merry Christmas.” He got up and hurried back through the crowds.

I’m such a dumbass, I thought. Scaring off Santa. That’s definitely not good juju. I sighed.

“HEY!....KID!.... You gotta pay for that! Get back here!”

I looked up just in time to see a teenager, clutching a tray of Sbarro pizza, run through the crowded hallway right past me, a wild look in his eyes. He dodged through the holiday shoppers like he was the little spaceship in the Asteroid. The guy workin’ the Sbarro counter was running after him, several people stopping to watch. I dunno what made me do it. I guess like the thoughts of the juju. I stood up, pulling out my wallet and cut the Sbarro dude off before he could follow the pizza thief any further. “Hey I’m sorry about my kid there,” I said, reaching into my wallet. “He’s probably trying to find me, I told him I’d be right there with the money…” I handed the guy a twenty. “Keep the change. I gotta go catch up with my son. He’s probably scared to death, all alone in a crowd like this… Merry Christmas.” And before the guy could respond, I rushed off into the crowd, too.

I ducked through a gaggle of old women fascinated by a blown glass kiosk and past a line waiting at Game Stop. I figured I’d walk just far enough that Mr. Sbarro would think I’d gone after the kid for real. Maybe I’d even just go home, but I wasn’t positive I was ready to yet. I was still upset. I was still ducking and dodging my way through everything when I realized someone was watching me.

You know that feeling you get when someone’s staring at you?

Normally, I wouldn’t think anything of it. There usually are people staring at me. I mean I’m me. But this felt different than that somehow. So I stopped walking and looked around. And that’s when I spotted him. He was standing on the other side of the kiosk to my left, peeking around it, like he’d been following me, ducking kiosk to kiosk to stare at me. It was the kid with the pizza, his floppy brown hair all messy and in his face. When I looked at him, he stood up and tossed a couple pizza crusts into the trash bin in the center of the aisle then tried to rush on through the traffic of shoppers.

I dodged around the kiosk and trash bin, past a young middle eastern girl asking me if I wanted to try a dead sea salt hand scrub, and caught up to the kid. “Hey,” I said, tapping him on the shoulder.

He stopped and turned to face me. People jostled by us.

He stared at me. He had these big doe looking eyes and this really recognizable jawline, like some sort of modern James Dean meets Elvis Presley. Only, like, a teenage version of that. But he was messy as fuck. He had on this super old, worn brown leather bomber jacket and jeans torn at the knee and striped with grease and dirt. His hair was floppy but kinda dirty and he had either a fading bruise or dirt on his cheek bone. I couldn’t tell which in the light of the mall.

“What’cha stealin’ pizza from Sbarro for? They ain’t even good,” I said.

He shrugged.

“Well… I paid for it… Merry Christmas.” I said.

He blinked up at me like he didn’t know what to say.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Fifteen,” he answered, like that was an achievement.

“What’s your name? Where’s your mom?” I looked around the mall.

“I ain’t here with my mom,” he said with disdain.

“Your father?”

“I gotta go. Thanks for the slice.” He turned and walked away.

I sighed as he disappeared into the crowd. “Whatever,” I mumbled and I headed on toward Macy’s. I was tired. Lauren was surely home by now, though she hadn’t texted, and alls I wanted was to go home, get undressed, try to get my wife to have sex with me, and forget that Thanksgiving even existed because as far as I was concerned there wasn’t much to be thankful for ‘cos the universe was a bitch.

Fuck good juju, I thought.

Outside, it was even colder than when I went inside and I was walking across the lot to my car, rubbing my hands together, regretting the choice to park so damn far away from the building. I was almost to my car when I saw the kid walking past the line of cars. Curious, I jogged to my car and got in, then followed him.

I only followed him for a couple blocks, though, before he stepped off the road and walked across a Starbucks parking lot, disappearing into the woods behind the trees.

I drove home, wondering where he’d been going and why he’d followed me halfway across the mall only to be so rude when I’d talked to him.

Lauren’s car still wasn’t in the driveway when I got home.

It was after ten.

I fell asleep on the couch.

Chapter Four - Thanksgiving After Midnight


I woke up on the couch a while later as Lauren was putting a blanket over me. I stirred and she sat down on the floor by my head and gently ran her fingers through my hair. “I didn’t mean to wake you, I’m sorry,” she said in a hush, just above a whisper.

I blinked at her, the shape of her head haloed by the glow of the hall light. She was messy, hair hanging out of the pony tail on both sides in clumps, and she smelled like a mixture of cigarettes and turkey. “What time’s it?” I murmured.

“A little before eleven,” she replied quietly. “I’m sorry I’m so late.”

I snuffled and shifted my weight, “S’ok,” I mumbled.

“Are you hungry?”

I nodded.

“I know it’s really late, but… will you have midnight Thanksgiving with me?” she asked, an apologetic look on her face.

I nodded.

“Ok. I’ll go get it ready.” She smiled, kissed my forehead as she got up, and left the living room.

I gave myself a couple minutes blinking at the light and reorienting myself to everything that’d gone on earlier before getting up. When I went out to the kitchen, Lauren looked up. “You could’ve stayed resting, sweetie, I was gonna bring it out to you.”

I shrugged and leaned against the door frame as she put an acorn squash into the microwave and opened the cupboard for a couple plates.

“Do you think I’m gonna be a bad father?”

She put the plates down on the table. “What?”

“Do you think the universe thinks I’m gonna be a bad father and maybe that’s why the juju isn’t working?” I asked.

Lauren’s eyes softened. “Nick… No. No. I think you’re gonna be a wonderful father.” She put the bowl of spinach down on the table and came over, running her hands over my shoulders. “You’re going to be the best father.”

I took her hands in mine and held them against my chest, staring down at them. They’d been manicured while I was gone with Jordan, back in LA, but the night had been rough on them and one of them was chipped. I liked her like that, though, just a little bit less than perfect. It was endearing. Like extra endearing. I took a deep breath, “Are you mad at me?”

“Mad at you? For what?”

“For not being able to make you pregnant or whatever?”

“Baby.” She said the word like it was absurd I even thought such a thing. And I guess it was, but it’s hard to tell sometimes between when someone’s disappointed about something and when they’re disappointed in someone. I’ve never been particularly good at that. I’ve always thought that if someone was upset, it was because of something I’d done. That was something I’d learned to believe when I was a kid because I got blamed for everything under the sun. I still do by my family. Lauren shook her head, though, and her eyes searched mine, “Honey, no. I’m not mad at you for that. I could never be mad at you for that.”

“Disappointed?”

“Not by you.”

“Promise?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not why you stayed late at the food kitchen?”

Lauren shook her head, “I honestly just lost track of time after a bit. It was so busy. I wish you’d come with me. It was really nice, the people were so thankful for a hot meal and they’re such sweet people.” She rubbed my arm, “You would’ve liked it a lot.”

“Maybe next year.”

The microwave beeped, signaling the squash was done, and Lauren trailed her hands off my chest and went to fetch the squash. I watched as she pulled it out and cut it into halves and put one on each of the plates before sprinkling cinnamon and nutmeg over them and going into the fridge for the turkey breast she’d cooked and had me carve earlier in the day. When she opened the fridge and pulled out a spinach salad, though, I couldn’t stop myself.

“Baby?”

“Hmm?” She looked up.

I took the bowl of spinach from her. “Can we skip the spinach tonight?”

She stared up at me, “But the zinc is good for --”

I held up my hand to stop her from talking. “Lo… we need to talk.”

The instant the words were out of my mouth, her eyes started to glisten. She took a deep breath. “I had a feeling this was coming,” she said thickly. She paused. Then said, “Ok.”

I took a deep breath too, put the bowl of spinach on the table. “I think… I think we need to take a break. You know. From trying.”

Lauren’s eyes filled with tears.

“Don’t cry,” I pleaded. But she did. Those big tears slipped over her lashes and streamed down her face and she seemed to crumble right there in front of me. I caught her up in my arms, pulling her into my chest as she fell apart, pressing her face into my shirt and her shoulders shook. “Baby, it’s okay, don’t cry,” I said, patting her hair. “I just… I think it’s too much pressure. On both of us. And I just think maybe it’ll be better if we just… take a month or two off.”

“I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I didn’t mean to pressure you and make you think I was mad at you or disappointed in you. I just wanna have a baby with you. I wanna make you happy and I wanna - I wanna be a mom so much.” I could feel her tears through my shirt.

“I know,” I said. “And I wanna be a dad and have a baby with you but I think we need a break.”

Lauren nodded against my chest. “Okay,” she choked.

“Okay.” I replied. I rubbed her back.

“Okay,” she said again, and she gingerly pulled away, turning quickly to stay busy with getting dinner ready.

I sighed. “Do you need me to do anything?”

“You wanna get the cranberry out? It’s in the fridge,” she answered, voice still thick from crying.

“A’ight,” I answered. I pulled it out and started putting it on the plates. She sniffled. I felt bad I’d made her cry. I hated it when Lauren cried. So, to make her laugh, I said, “So… while you were gone, I went to the galleria, like for Black Friday. It was batshit crazy up there.”

“I’m sure it was,” she said, nodding.

“I scared a Santa.”

“You what?”

“Santa sat next to me on a bench, I was watching these two chicks bitchfight over an ugly sweater at the Gap, and this Santa sits next to me and I just looked at him and I blurt out, Alls I want for Christmas is to knock up my wife! And the poor guy, he looked traumatized, he gets up and runs off,” I laughed.

Lauren laughed, too, and swiped her eyes. “Poor Santa.”

“Yeah. Then this kid like stole pizza from Sbarro, and I paid for it ‘cos he looked hungry or whatever.” I put the lid back on the cranberry sauce.

“Really?” Lauren came over and put freshly warmed turkey on each of the plates, then turned to pull a little sauce pan with peas off the stove. “That was nice of you.”

“Yeah,” I said, “Banking juju.”

She laughed. “Nawh, you’re just sweet is all.”

“I try,” I answered.

She spooned the peas onto the plates and rubbed my back as she turned to put the pan back onto the stove. Stuffing, potato, and gravy and we were in business. We carried the plates out to the dining room and she got a bottle of sparkling pomegranate juice and we lit a couple candles and put little mini-plates of Thanksgiving down for the dogs, and then we sat down at the table.

She lifted her fork, but I put my hand over hers. “Wait,” I said, “We gotta say what we’re thankful for. I’ll go first.” She put her fork down, and stared at me, a little smile on her face. “I’m thankful for the Buccs, even if they don’t win,” I said, “And Nacho and Igby and Mulder and the Boys and Jordan and the fans and everybody in management and Mike and --”

Lauren laughed, “We’re gonna be here all night.”

I grinned, “But most of all, I’m thankful that I am blessed by having such a beautiful, caring, wonderful woman like you in my life, who makes me have Thanksgiving at twelve-o-fucking-clock at night because she’s busy feeding the hungry and saving the world like fucking Wonder Woman.”

Lauren blushed, “I’m not Wonder Woman.”

“No but we need to get you that costume ‘cos I’ma need to get me laid by Wonder Woman sometime. Add that to your list of things I want for Christmas.”

“Okay,” she laughed.

“Anyways… yeah. So. I’m thankful for you and for the years I’ve had with you already and the years I’m gonna have with you. Whatever they bring us, as long as there’s an us, we’ll be okay. I’m thankful for the knowledge of that. Okay. Your turn.”

Lauren laughed, “I don’t know if I can follow that up.”

“Give it a whirl,” I said.

“Okay. Well. I’m thankful for the furbabies and the security that keeps you safe and the Boys and my friends and my Daddy and Alex and everything we have. And, like you, I’m most thankful for you. Because you understand when I get crazy about things and you bring me back to earth when I need to be, and I’m thankful that when we do have a family, however we form our family, that I know I can trust you to be a good parent and role model, that you’ll be gentle and sweet and kind. And I’m thankful that you’re thankful for me.” She smiled.

I smiled back. “Okay,” I said, “Now we can eat.”

So we dug in, and it tasted amazing. Something about eating at midnight made it extra magical and it felt like it was a holiday for just Lauren and I, like we were the only people in all the whole world. I held her hand in mine through most of it, using my left hand to eat just so I could feel the warmth of her fingers wrapped between my own.

“We should get a Christmas tree tomorrow,” I said when we were almost finished eating.

“Okay,” she replied, nodding.

“Like a real one.”

“Okay,” she nodded again.

When we finished up eating, we carried our plates out and shoved them in the dishwasher and put away the food in the fridge. She was washing out the wine glasses we’d used for the pomegranate juice; they special ones that were from our wedding and therefore were extra special and we always handwashed. She looked beautiful, washing them, her hands covered in soap suds and her hair hanging down the side of her face where she’d undone the remnants of the ponytail at last. I stepped up behind her and wrapped my arms around her waist, pressing my mouth against her neck softly.

“Hmm,” she hummed as I left a little trail of kisses up her neck to her ear and took a deep breath of the smell of her.

“I love you,” I said quietly into her ear.

“I love you,” she replied.

“I’m thankful for the way you smell,” I said in a husky voice, the words rumbling from deep in my throat. “And the softness of your skin… and I’m thankful… for… your breasts...” I ran my hands up to them, cupping them gently, rubbing them with my palms. She melted into me like butter, a little moan escaping her chest, and she put the wine glasses down in the sudsy water. “And I’m thankful for… the way you taste…” I whispered, and I kissed her neck again. “And…” my voice was extra heavy now, I kissed back up her neck again to her ear, sucked gently on her earlobe, “I’m thankful for… the way it feels when I’m inside of you and our bodies are all tangled and there ain’t nothin’ between our souls but our skin and bones and...”

She turned to me quickly, our mouths meeting as she engulfed me hungrily, silencing me mid-sentence.




About an hour later, we were laying in the dark in the bedroom, sprawled across the bed, our bodies covered in sweat. “Oh my God,” she gasped, “That that incredible.”

“I know,” I agreed. I pulled her into me, running my toes up her legs, still wanting to feel her skin with my own. Like I was craving her after months of having routine, predictable, boring sex. “I missed this,” I said.

“I did too,” she answered. “God you’re amazing.”

“So are you.”

She snuggled into my chest. “You know… I was scared, too.”

“What?” I was starting to feel sleepy.

“About being a mom,” she said. “You asked me earlier if I thought you’d be a bad father, if that was why I was talking about the bad juju. It’s not you I was worried about. I’m worried I’ll be a bad mother.”

I shook my head, “It’s impossible for you to be bad at anything.”

Lauren laughed. “You’re silly.”

“It’s true. You’ll be a great mom.”

“I just worry because it’s not like I had a great example growing up, I never really had a mother, you know? I’m not even sure how moms are supposed to be. Like, I don’t want to be June Cleaver.”

“You’re way too hot to be June Cleaver,” I mumbled.

“Barbara Billingsly had a bangin’ body for her time,” Lauren commented.

I laughed. “This is exactly why I love you.”

“What?”

“You… we’re laying here talking about The Beav’s mom’s bangin’ body.”

Lauren laughed, “You know who else’s body was bangin’?”

“Who?”

“That girl from I Dream of Jeannie. What’s her name?”

“Barbara Eden?”

“Yes!” She exclaimed. We both laughed.

We continued on, chatting about hotties from old sitcoms until we both fell asleep.




The next morning when I woke up, Lauren was already out of bed, her side of the bed cold. I blinked in the sunlight and wandered into the bathroom. In the trashbin was an unopened pregnancy test, the one we’d bought for the next testing day, and beside it was the planner she’d been using to keep track of her cycle. I turned to the door to see the whiteboard calendar had also been erased. I closed my eyes and exhaled long and slow. I could feel the pressure melting away, but also something else… something sad; a deep ache, like something inside me had broken.

Chapter Five - Christmas Tree


Lauren had rearranged the living room when I went downstairs. I almost tripped over the ottoman for the big easy chair Dick Van Dyke style as I walked into the room. I stood there, looking around at all the furniture in new places and cringed. I hate when things change and this change was a big change. “Shit,” I muttered, scratching my arm with anxiety. “Lauren?” I called out.

In reply, Nacho came running down the hallway and a moment later he was followed by Igby and then Lauren, carrying a big box marked Christmas, which was all dusty. “Hey!” she sing-songed over the box, “Good morning, sleepy head.”

“Morning,” I said. I watched as she carried the box expertly around the newly placed furniture, like it’d been there like that for eons, and put it down on the coffee table.

“What’cha think?” she asked, looking around the living room, “I thought it’d be nice for Christmas.” She grinned. “Look, we can put the tree over by the window and the fireplace has a big open space now for… you know… nice evenings together…” Lauren winked.

I liked the sound of that. Maybe this whole rearranged living room thing could work. “Yeah, it looks good,” I agreed. But I was still scratching my arm. Probably would be for a bit. Nacho jumped up on the arm of the couch and stretched, trying to reach me. I picked him up. “You did all this this morning?”

“Yes,” she sang out, “Sure did.” A big grin was on her face.

“What time did you get up?”

She shrugged, “A few hours ago.”

Lauren opened the box of Christmas stuff and started rooting around in it, pulling out the garland that went on the stairs banister and the Elf on the Shelf and the plastic light up star that went on top of the tree, putting everything down on the couch around Igby, who’d curled up and fallen asleep on the end pillow. “I was thinking, if you want to go get the tree this morning, we could decorate it tonight after it settles and maybe we could get the outside of the house done this afternoon…”

“Okay,” I nodded.

She grinned. “Are you hungry? I can make you breakfast before you go.”

I was, but she was elbow deep in the box and the living room was still making me anxious. “Nawh,” I answered. “I’ll go get the tree first. Maybe I’ll get like Starbucks while I’m out. You want anything?”

“Yeah, I haven’t had a coffee in ages,” she replied. “Since we started trying.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. It’s true. She hadn’t. She’d read somewhere on the internet that women shouldn’t drink coffee when they’re trying to get pregnant. “A’ight, coffee and a Christmas tree. I got this.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“I’m gonna take Nacho with me,” I said, since I was still holding him. “You wanna go for a ride, Nacho?” He wiggled excitedly.

“Have fun, Na Na,” she said to Nacho, who wiggled even more. “Bye sweetie.” She turned back to the box of decorations.

I carried Nacho out to the foyer, discovering along the way that she’d rearranged the dining room, too, and the placement of stuff on the table in the foyer. I put Nacho’s leash on and carefully put the stuff back where it belonged on the table, glancing down the hallway like switching places of a lamp and a keybowl was a horribly rebellious thing. I grabbed my jacket out of the closet and shrugged it on. “C’mon Nacho, we better get outta here before she rearranges us,” I muttered and we headed out to the Jeep.

“You doing okay through this whole rearranging the house bit, Nacho?” I asked him as he peed on a bush on the way to the Jeep in the driveway. He didn’t respond, of course, but sometimes it was peaceful talking to him. “I hate changes, you know? I know she’s only rearranging ‘cos, like, that’s what she does when she’s frustrated… You remember how many times she rearranged when Lori was buggin’ about the prenup and I was trying to get a wedding date?” I asked. I shook my head at the memory. I’d ended up fighting for a date just out of the pure anxiety that all of the rearranging had given me.

When he’d finished doing his business, I loaded Nacho into the Jeep and we started on our big Christmas tree adventure. Nacho bounced excitedly around in the back as I drove north to downtown. I’d seen a Christmas tree lot the night before on Franklin Road north of the town on the way home from Cool Springs and I figured that was as good a place as any to get the tree. It was brisk and a little rainy outside, and the traffic was light on the backroads for a Black Friday. I figured they were probably all still down at the Galleria or up in the city crammed into one of the other malls and super centers.

At the lot, they’d constructed a makeshift fence, like one of them things that come in a big bundle that you just unroll, and hung Christmas lights off it. There was a big tent and a blow up Santa Claus on top that looked like he should’ve had a V8 that morning. “You wait here,” I said to Nacho. We’d be in there forever and all the trees would be covered with doggy whiz if he’d gone inside. A whole tent full of trees was basically Nacho’s every dream. The dog loved to pee. He bounced around, slobbering on the windows, watching as I walked across the lot from the car, my hands buried in my jacket pockets.

Inside the tent there were trees everywhere. I wandered through them, looking at the different types of branches and heights and fullness.

“Can I help you?” A man with a big round head that reminded me of Mr. Spacely on the Jetson’s came up. He had a Santa cap on.

“Yeah, I’m in the market of buying a Christmas tree,” I said.

He smiled, “Awesome because I’m in the market of selling one.” He held out his hand, “Name’s Carver, nice to meet you.”

“Nick,” I said, shaking his hand, and thinking that all I wanted was a Christmas tree, not a friggin’ new best friend. I wondered if I shouldn’t have just gone with a nice plastic one from the K-Mart.

“You got a particular kind and height in mind?” he asked.

“Green. Maybe seven or eight feet?”

“I got just the tree.” He led me through a maze of them, like I’d described a very particular tree and none of the others between where we’d started and where he led me had been it. Fact was, we passed about twenty seven or eight foot green trees, but that’s okay. When we reached the tree he meant, he waved his arms at it with bravado. I mean it was just another tree, but he’d dragged me halfway to Kingdom Come for it so I felt like it had to have some sort of special feature, so I walked around it, inspecting it, trying to figure out what exactly had been worth the walk across the entire tent. I mean the branches were really full and stuff, but there’d been other really full trees. “She’s a beaut, ain’t she?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I replied. I still didn’t see anything particularly special about it, but whatever. It was a good tree, and Lauren would be happy ‘cos it didn’t have any gaps or anything so it’d be good, especially if we were apparently putting it in the window. “How much?”

“Thirty a foot,” he replied.

I did the math. Thirty a foot times...looked to be about eight and a half high… Fuckin’ $250 for a tree that was gonna end up dead on the curb in a month. The plastic tree was sounding better and better. But I’d made such a big deal about getting a real tree the day before I didn’t wanna take it back, so I pulled out my wallet, “You take American Express?” I asked.

“I got a Square on the iPad,” he replied, “I’ll take anything.” He grinned. “Let me go get the iPad and we’ll get you loaded up…. Ethan!” he called the name out, “Ethan, can you wrap this tree while I get the iPad?” He disappeared between the trees, leaving me there waiting for Ethan.

Then around the corner, carrying a web of netting and some rope, came the Sbarro kid from the night before.

“Hey. It’s you,” I said when I saw him.

He stopped short, looking surprised to see me. “Yeah,” he said.

“You work here?” I asked.

He shrugged. Then he cleared his throat and threw the netting down onto the ground, stealing glances at me as he shuffled the tree onto the netting and pulling it up toward the top, tipping the tree onto it’s side as he did, the branches pulling against the trunk under the netting, which he pulled closed and tied a piece of rope around.

Carver came back a moment later with an iPad and one of them little square things plugged into it, grinning, “I love this new technology, ain’t it somethin’?” he held the iPad out, “Just swipe your card there and it does all the work. Even emails you a ticket.” He grinned.

Ethan the Sbarro Thief was dragging the tree out of the tent.

“What car’s it going on?” Carver asked.

“The, uh, the Jeep.” Mine was the only car out there, but that’s okay.

“Goes on the Jeep, Ethan,” Carver called.

“No kidding,” Ethan muttered as he disappeared into the lot.

I swiped my card and all that on Carver’s iPad. “So, is he your son?” I asked.

Carver shook his head, “Some kid. Showed up the other day asking if I needed some help, if I’d pay in cash. Figured he seemed like he’d be okay lifting some trees onto the roof of some cars for a couple bucks a day, you know? My back’s been killing me the last few years doin’ the lifting, so it was a blessing.”

I nodded, “Sounds it.” I handed back his iPad, “Well. Thank you. Merry Christmas.”

“You enjoy that tree now, y’hear?” he said, grinning and he waved, tapping the iPad as I headed out to the Jeep.

Ethan had the tree on top and was tying it to the rack. Nacho was bouncing off the window, barking as Ethan balanced on the runners by the back door. “Sorry about Nacho, he’s crazy.”

“It’s all good,” Ethan answered as he knotted the rope a couple times, tight, and cut the rest off with a pocket knife.

I pulled my wallet out and pressed a ten dollar bill into his hand. “Thanks for getting it loaded up,” I said as I gave him the tip.

“No problem,” he answered. He hesitated as he watched me walk around the Jeep to the driver’s side door. Then, “And thanks. For the pizza.”

“You’re welcome,” I answered, surprised he was thanking me.

He hesitated again. “I don’t usually steal.”

“That’s good,” I replied.

He nodded. “Well, anyway. Merry Christmas.” He turned and headed back into the tent quickly, leaving me there by the Jeep. I stared after him, then I sighed and got into the Jeep.

Nacho practically flew over the seats to the front, leaping onto my lap and lapping my face, like he was making sure I was okay. I rubbed the scruff around his neck, and started up the Jeep, headed home.

At the Starbucks, I got our coffees and the barista handed out a doggie biscuit for Nacho, who ate it like it was going out of style, scarfing it and all the crumbs he’d dropped on the seat with a few loud snorts before we’d even pulled away from the drive thru window, which made the barista laugh and call a couple co-workers over, and Nacho got a couple extra biscuits for the road. The dog knew how to do it.

When we got home, Lauren had put a wreath on the door already and on the patio furniture was a big ball of outdoor lights that we’d be putting up on the trim of the house that afternoon, I guessed, judging by the staple gun that was sitting on the table. I carried the coffees in first, then went back out to get the Christmas tree from the roof of the Jeep as Nacho ran off to bury the one remaining biscuit that he had from the Starbucks.

Lauren was sipping her coffee as she watched me fit the tree into the stand she’d put by the window. “God I missed coffee,” she commented as she took a long sip, holding the cup in her palms with excitement, breathing in the coffee steam.

“It missed you too,” I joked.

Lauren laughed. She always laughed at my lame ass jokes. I smiled.

Once the tree was in the stand, I cut the netting Ethan had put on it free and the branches dropped, needles going everywhere, but it started settling nicely and I took a couple steps back and sat down next to Laur on the couch. We stared at the tree. “It looks beautiful,” she said. “You picked a good one.”

I didn’t tell her Carver had picked it for me.

“Nacho, get outta there,” I called as he went over to inspect the tree, a particular interest on his mind. “We’re gonna have to keep him out of there somehow,” I said.

Lauren snuggled into me as a response, so I wrapped my arms around her and we sat there drinking our coffee, staring at the tree, Igby laying at our feet, and Nacho back off, running around with the leftover biscuit in his mouth, digging at the carpet to hide it in plain view in the corner. I leaned my cheek against Lauren’s hair.

“So… you wanna hear somethin’ weird?” I asked.

“What’s that?”

“Remember I told you about the kid that stole the Sbarro at the galleria?”

She nodded.

“Well he’s workin’ for the tree guy. His name is Ethan. He’s the one that put it up on the roof of the Jeep and stuff.”

“Huh,” Lauren said. “Well. It’s a small world. Did he say anything about the stolen pizza?”

“He thanked me.”

“That’s good,” she said.

I nodded, “Yeah. It is.” We fell silent for a moment, then I said, “He said he doesn’t usually steal.”

“That’s good,” Lauren repeated.

“Yeah,” I agreed, “It is.” Again, we fell silent.

“What do you want for Christmas?” she asked.

I shrugged, “I dunno.” I know we’d agreed to stop trying, but what I really wanted was still for her to get pregnant and for me to find out my pipes weren’t broken. I wanted to know the universe didn’t think I’d be a bad father, that it trusted me with a kid. I wanted to be a dad. But I didn’t wanna say all that. So I left it at that and asked, “What do you want?”

In the same tone I’d said it in, Lauren answered, “I dunno.”

Chapter Six - Into the Woods


Later that evening, Lauren and I were getting ready to decorate the tree and I had strung the lights all on the branches only to find out that they weren’t working right once I plugged them in. The ball of lights we’d dug out had already been stapled to the edge of the porch roof and there were no back up tree lights so Lauren suggested a quick trip out to the 24-hour Wal-Mart to get some new lights, which turned into a two-hour shopping excursion as we wandered around the store arguing about whether or not I needed to take advantage of the buy-three-get-two-free sale on the Hanes underwear 12-packs.

I was glad we’d gotten the porch lights done already. It was freezing outside, about twenty-five degrees and a little rainy with a snappy wind that would creep up your back. I had the Jeep’s heat turned up as high as it would go and the seat heater on, toasting my buns. “Frig it’s cold out,” I muttered, “Colder than it was in Calgary.”

Lauren nodded. “Next year, we do Christmas in Key West,” she said with a shiver.

We were driving home with our spoils (no new Hanes for Nick, in case you were keeping score), admiring the lights that downtown Franklin had put up for the holidays, glowing all festive and merry from the light posts and the big tree in the center of the huge roundabout. I came to a stop at the red light at the corner of 5th and Main and was looking at the big lit up NOEL blocks on the roof of the Starbucks when one of the pedestrians passing by caught my attention.

It was Ethan the Sbarro thief. He had a guitar strapped to his back and a messenger bag on his hip, wearing the same threadbare jeans and worn bomber jacket as he’d been wearing both the other times I’d seen him. But the difference was he looked like he was frozen half to death, his lips tight, fists balled up in his pockets, hunched over like he was trying to retain any shred of heat he could manage. “Hey,” I said, pointing out the window as he reached the far curb, “Hey, that’s the Sbarro kid.”

Lauren leaned forward to look. “He looks cold.”

“Yeah,” I said. I looked at her. “Should we offer him a ride?”

“Yeah,” she agreed.

So when the light turned green, I put on my blinker and hung a left and slowed as he was walking past the Frothy Monkey. I unrolled my window. “Ethan,” I called. He didn’t look up. “Ethan!” I said louder. That time he did look up, looked toward the coffee shop, then turned back to look at me. His eyes lit with surprise. “You need a lift, buddy?” I asked, leaning out the window.

He hesitated, “I’m okay…” he said.

“You sure?”

He’d paused on the sidewalk, fists still buried in his pockets. His nose was all red.

“You look like you’re frozen half to death,” Lauren shouted, leaning forward to see him, “Please let us give you a ride sweetie.”

Seeing Lauren, he shrugged and walked over, pulling the back door open and sliding in, leaning the guitar against the seat beside him. “Thanks,” he said as he pulled the door shut.

“Not a problem at all,” Lauren smiled.

I pulled away from the curb.

“I’m Lauren,” she said, “Nick’s wife.”

“Cool. You must be Nick, then,” Ethan said, looking at me.

I realized I hadn’t even told the kid my name. No wonder he’d hesitated at the offer for a ride. “Yeah,” I said, “I’m Nick.” I wasn’t used to having to tell people who I was. I mean, most people already know when they met me so when someone actually didn’t have a clue it kind of threw me off a bit. “Nick Carter,” I added.

Ethan nodded. “Cool.” He looked around. “Nice Jeep.”

“Thanks,” I replied. “So where are we headed?”

Ethan hesitated, “I… uh… you can turn up here at Margin to Murfreesboro Road. If you wanna drop me off at Pinkerton Park, that’s cool, I’m just up Eddy Lane a bit, I can walk from the park.”

“Don’t be silly,” Lauren chimed, “We’ll bring you home, it’s not problem.” She turned in her seat to look back at him. “That’s a long walk for so late at night,” she commented, “Do your parents know you’re walking all that way in the dark?”

Ethan shrugged, “I mean, I’m fifteen, not five.”

“Yeah,” Lauren nodded. She looked at me.

I got the feeling she was trying to get me to say something the way she was looking at me, so I glanced in my rearview mirror at the kid. “Nice guitar,” I said.

This wasn’t what Lauren had been aiming for. She looked frustrated.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You play? I asked.

Lauren was looking out the window now.

“Yeah, some,” he answered. He paused, “Wait. I know you from someplace.” He squinted his eyes.

I smirked, “Well, I’m told I look like one of the Backstreet Boys,” I quipped.

“Nawh that ain’t it,” Ethan shook his head.

I looked at Lauren, who was stifling a laugh.

Ethan tilted his head. “Wait. I know. You look like that one dude in that movie -- that movie with Kaley Cuoco. The Sleepy Hollow rip off.” He nodded, “Yeah… yeah, he was like an asshole jock. That was on ABC a couple weeks ago for Halloween.”

“Yeah. That was me,” I answered, “And also I’m a Backstreet Boy.”

“No shit.” Ethan nodded, “Cool. You never know who you’re gonna bump into ‘round here.”

I was pulling up by Pinkerton Park, and I put my blinker on for Eddy Lane. He reached for his seatbelt. “Seriously guys, you’re okay, you can drop me here. I can walk from here.”

“I want to make sure you end up home okay,” Lauren answered, her voice firm.

Ethan ran his hands over the neck of his guitar. “Okay…” he murmured.

“Which house is it?” I asked.

“Uh… just… keep goin’, I guess,” Ethan replied. “It’s… it’s up here on the, uh, right.”

But there wasn’t any houses on the right. Only a giant corporate building.

We were just about to the end, where Liberty cuts off Eddy, when Ethan said, “Okay there. Sorry, I meant the left. Just… you can stop here. Thanks for the ride.” I put my emergency flashers on and pulled to the side of the road. A car that had come up behind us passed us as Ethan climbed out and grabbed his guitar.

“Merry Christmas,” I said.

“Merry Christmas,” Lauren added.

Ethan smiled and nodded, “Thanks. Y’all too. Later. Nice meeting y’all.” He closed the door and started walking towards a squat green house on the left.

I started to shift into drive, but Lauren’s hand shot out and stopped me.

“Wait,” she commanded. “I want to see him go inside.”

“What? Why?” I asked, letting my hand drop away from the stick.

“He doesn’t live here.”

“What do you mean he doesn’t live here?” I asked, confused, “He just said --”

“I don’t care what he said, Nick,” Lauren answered, “He doesn’t live here.”

“Then why would he have us drive him here?”

“I don’t know. But this isn’t his house.” She leaned forward, watching.

Ethan walked slowly up the driveway, hands on the strap of his guitar. He glanced back as he reached the walk way up to the door and waved. Lauren waved back. He smiled and walked up to the stoop, where he stopped and looked back again. He waved again. Lauren waved again, too.

“See?” Lauren asked. Ethan was digging in his messenger bag, glancing up every couple moments to see if we were still there.

“He’s looking for his keys,” I said.

“He doesn’t have keys, Nick,” she said. “I’m telling you, that kid doesn’t live here.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t want us to know where he lives,” I suggested. “I mean, we’re strangers. He doesn’t know us from Adam.”

Lauren shook her head.

Then, as we watched, the front door of the house opened and a big guy was standing in the door frame. “See, look, there’s his dad or something to let him in. Maybe he just lost his keys.” But I’d no longer got the words out of my mouth than it became clear the guy was yelling at him, and Ethan bolted, running ‘round the side of the house, across the neighbor’s lawn and down the limited access road that led into Pinkerton Park to the Harpeth River.

“I told you!” Lauren said. “Drive down there. We gotta make sure he’s okay.”

“Lo… we can’t stalk the kid.”

“Nick, we can’t leave him out in the cold, either. Did you see that jacket? It wasn’t heavy enough for cold like this. He’s going to freeze to death!”

I pulled a Y-turn in the road, and turned down the Harpeth River access road until we met the closed gate and I put the Jeep in park. “Now what?”

“C’mon.” Lauren undid her belt.

“Jesus, you dunno what’s out there, that’s the woods,” I said.

“What are you afraid of? Running into a wild rabbit or something? It’s not like there’s bears and wolves in downtown Franklin, Nick.” Lauren climbed out of the Jeep, slamming the door shut and tugging on her coat and scarf as she climbed over the little access gate.

“Fuck,” I muttered, and I grabbed my own coat and skull cap and jumped out, yanking the skullie over my head, locking the Jeep behind us. I jumped the gate and jogged to catch up to her, because she’d already made some headway. “What’re we gonna do, search the woods ‘til we find him?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Then what?”

“I dunno.”

“I’m glad this plan is fully thought out,” I said.

Lauren paused walking. “Nick, we can’t just leave a kid out in the cold. We’ll bring him home tonight if we have to. We have extra rooms.”

“He could be a serial killer rapist or something.”

“Nick. He’s fifteen,” Lauren said.

“Dexter started when he was like eight,” I pointed out.

“Dexter was a TV show.”

“I’m just saying.”

“He isn’t Dexter.” Lauren started walking again.

I sighed and followed after her.

The Harpeth River access road goes down a slight hill before splitting in a fork, one way leading to the walking bridge that crossed over the river on a trail that followed the train tracks out to First Ave downtown, and the other followed the Ewingville creek out to the Pinkerton Park playground area. Lauren headed toward the tracks.

“He could’ve gone either way,” I pointed out.

“There’s nothing down that way other than the playground,” she said, “I’ve jogged this trail before. I mean it’s been awhile, but I know there’s no shelter of any kind that way, unless he’s camping out in the play castle.”

“And there’s something this way?”

“I mean, there’s all kinds of little buildings along the tracks,” she answered.

I hate being in the woods to begin with, but being in the woods at night is even worse. I know we weren’t really in the woods, more like among some trees, but it still felt like the woods and I found myself looking around into the shadows, uneasy. “Lo, he could be anywhere.”

“Ethan!” she called out.

I sighed. She wasn’t going to give up ‘til we found the kid. “Ethan?” I joined her, pulling out my phone and turning on the flashlight feature so we at least had some light to see where the hell we were going with. We walked and called his name, stumbling over rocks and roots in the path ‘til we got to the spot where the tracks crossed the river. The path dropped down to one side of the bridge that supported the tracks, down to the river level, and there was a small, worn out-looking foot bridge there that didn’t look like it’d been replaced since the flood in 2010. Lauren’s sneakers slid on rocks as she went down the drop in the trail, and I hesitated to follow her. I hate that unsure footing feeling, a massive part of why I hate hiking - besides just the whole being in the woods bit, that is - but finally I slid down the little hill behind her. She was standing at the foot bridge. “C’mon, Laur. Use your head. That thing doesn’t look safe at all,” I said, catching her wrist to stop her. “Wherever he is, he obviously doesn’t want us to find him or knowing where he went.”

“I just hate the thought that he’s out here all by himself,” she said.

“I know,” I answered. “But you aren’t his mother. We aren’t going to find him if he doesn’t wanna be found at this point, Lo, we could’ve passed him a hundred times going through those woods,” I shrugged.

Lauren stared out across the river, at the trees and the dark over there, and sighed, frustrated. “You’re right,” she said.

We turned back to the little hill and started back up the path.

“What do we do now, though?” she asked.

“I dunno, we’ll call the police, maybe they can come out here and help him somehow,” I suggested.

“Don’t call the cops,” came a voice behind us, making us both jump. I turned, illuminating Ethan with the cell phone’s glow. He came out from behind some trees to the side of the tracks carrying his guitar, “Please. Not the cops.”

Lauren and I looked at each other.

Chapter Seven - Between Situations


We were sitting in the Jeep, idling at the gate on the Harpeth access road, the heater blasting. “So where do you actually live, Ethan?” Lauren asked, rubbing her hands together.

He stared down at his lap, “I’m, uh, between situations right now,” he said.

Lauren looked at me.

“What’s that mean? Between situations?” I asked.

Ethan picked at a loose string on the knee of his jeans. “Look, it ain’t a big deal, really, okay? I’m just not particularly staying anywhere right now.”

“Where are your parents?” Lauren asked.

He sighed, then shrugged.

“You don’t know?” Lauren’s voice pitched with worry.

“Not really, no.”

“How do you not know that?” I asked.

“Because, my mom’s gone and my father’s in a program right now. The house got taken by the state, like a foreclosure thing, and I didn’t feel like getting shuffled around in the system so I took off. I stayed with a buddy for a bit, but his ma finally gave me the boot and I’ve been staying in the old grain mill on Liberty. The back door to the thing’s busted and I got a sleeping bag I keep in the back of a closet there during the day.” He sighed, “I’m fine, really. The money Mr. Carver’s been paying me at the tree lot’s been enough for food and it ain’t all that cold in the mill.”

I looked at Lauren.

Ethan’s eyes traveled nervously between her and I. “Look, please, don’t report me. You guys seem cool and stuff and I really do got this under control. I don’t wanna end up in the stupid foster system or whatever. My dad’s gonna be out of the program eventually and he’ll get us an apartment or something. I’ll be okay. I just gotta wait it out. Probably only until Christmas. I’m sure he’ll be out by Christmas.”

Lauren raised an eyebrow at me.

The look was an entire conversation. It was all we took to know we’d had the same thought, and that we agreed. “You can stay with us,” I said.

Ethan looked hesitant, I could tell he was trying to figure out a way to talk us out of it. “I really am okay,” he said. “Just… drop me off at the grain mill. Seriously. I have everything I need there.”

Lauren shook her head, “It’s too cold for you to be sleeping in an abandoned grain mill,” she argued. “You either come stay with us, at least for the night, or we’ll have to call the police so they can help you.”

Ethan still didn’t look particularly comfortable with the suggestion, but it was clear that between us and the police department, he rathered go with us, so finally he shrugged and said, “Okay, I guess.”

“Okay.” Lauren looked relieved, “Good. That’s settled then.”

“Do you need to stop by the mill to pick anything up?” I asked.

“I got everything I own with me, ‘cept the sleeping bag,” Ethan replied, patting his messenger bag.

“Okay then,” I said. All I could think was that there was no way he had much in that bag. Probably not even extra clothes. The bag wasn’t all that big to start with and it didn’t particularly look very full, either.

As I started driving home, Lauren asked, “So you said your father’s in a program,” she said, “What sort of program?”

“He’s at Cumberland Heights,” Ethan replied.

Cumberland Heights. I knew of them. I knew a little too much of them, actually. When I’d first moved to Tennessee, it’d been to rehab myself from my LA lifestyle and escape the drugs and alcohol that I’d become so strongly addicted to. Cumberland Heights was the place that some of the meetings I’d attended, very irregularly might I add, had been held. It was up on the west side of the city, tucked away in a mostly rural area only just barely in the Nashville metropolitan district. It was the kind of place that I probably should’ve actually spent a month or two myself, to be honest. If Ethan’s dad was at Cumberland then he had a pretty serious addiction.

I glanced at Lauren. She reached over and curled her hand into mine. She knew the significance for me and she squeezed my fingers, a silent reminder that the past was the past and she was there for me.

“And he’ll be out by Christmas?” she asked conversationally.

Ethan nodded, “Should be pretty soon. Maybe a week or two.”

“Well that’s good, he’ll be home for the holidays,” Lauren said.

“Yeah, should be great,” Ethan said, though he said it more in words than feeling.

As we pulled up to the community Lauren and I live in, Ethan fell silent, staring out the window with wide eyes at the brilliant Christmas displays that my peacocking neighbors had erected on their lawns and up their houses. The lights glowed in the dark with that romantic, magic sort of air that Christmas lights throw off. “Holy shit,” Ethan mumbled as he looked around, “You weren’t kidding about being one of them Backstreet guys, were you? This place has got the Benjamins.”

Lauren’s eyes twinkled with amusement at this.

“Course I ain’t kidding!” I said, “Why would I be kidding?”

Ethan shrugged, “I just thought that the Backstreet Boys were like, old guys by now. I mean my mom liked Backstreet Boys. She listened to Backstreet Boys when I was a baby. You don’t look old enough to have been working when I was a baby is all.”

“I was younger than you are now when I started is why,” I replied as I navigated through the streets to the house.

“Shit, no kidding?” he asked.

“No kidding.”

I pulled up to the house and he looked out the other window at the lights Lauren and I had hung up which, compared to some of our neighbors’ displays, looked pretty pathetic. I made a mental note to hire professional lighting people come do the house next year. Or this year when Lauren wasn’t looking, even.

Ethan stared up at the house as we all climbed out of the car and made our way up to the porch. Inside, Nacho and Igby were waiting. Nacho jumping excitedly to see Ethan, who rubbed Nacho’s rolly-polly neck wrinkles with a laugh. “Wow,” Lauren commented, watching as Ethan knelt on the floor for better access to Nacho as he rolled onto his back, legs sprawled wide open. “He never gets friendly with strangers,” she commented. “Especially not one that’s so close to Nick. He’s really protective. But he seems to like you.” She smiled.

Ethan shrugged, “I dunno why, but animals and I have always had a good relationship.”

I tossed my keys into the bowl on the table in the foyer and carried the Wal-Mart bag into the living room and dumped the lights onto the big easy chair by the tree. I started pulling the old, non-functional lights off the tree.

“Are you hungry?” I heard Lauren asking Ethan.

“Yeah,” he answered, “I could go for some food.”

“You mind Thanksgiving leftovers?” she asked.

“Not at all,” Ethan said, his voice excited.

“Nick -- you want Thanksgiving leftovers?”

“Yes,” I called back.

“Why don’t you head into the living room with Nick and I’ll get the food. Do you like squash, cranberry?”

“Anything is great,” Ethan answered her as Lauren waved him into the living room. Nacho followed Ethan and Igby followed Lo as she disappeared off to the kitchen. Ethan walked into the living room, kind of hanging back by the doorway, watching as I fought with the Christmas tree to surrender the broken lights I’d administered to it earlier. “Aren’t you supposed to be putting those things on?” he asked.

“They’re broken. I put’em on before I knew. We went and got new ones.” The strand got caught up on a branch and I shook it free, sending little pine needles everywhere.

Nacho ran around my feet, jumping up at the branches as they wiggled every time I moved the tree.

When I’d gotten all the lights off, I tossed them into a big pile of needles and bulbs and grabbed the first box of new lights out of the Wal-Mart bag. I waved the box at Ethan, “You wanna help?” I asked.

“Really?” he asked.

“Yeah, why not?”

He shrugged, “Just thought that the tree lights were kind of the man of the house sort of job is all,” he said. “My dad wouldn’t let anyone else touch the tree lights.”

I held out the strand to him and Ethan came over and took it, holding it across his palms like it was a snake. “See you just drape it kinda,” I said, flopping the rest of my cord over the branches, walking around the tree to the window. I grabbed the end of his and plugged it into the end of mine. “Here, if you wanna flop over there then hand me the rest, we’ll pass it around the tree, make it easier.”

Ethan started carefully arranging the strand over the branches, then handed me the fistful of bundled lights at the end. He looked pretty proud of himself.

“So your old man usually does the lights, huh?” I asked conversationally.

“Yeah. When we had Christmas anyway. It’s been awhile.” Ethan took the bundle from the other side of the tree and started arranging the way the strand fell again.

“You haven’t celebrated Christmas?” I asked, “Why?”

He shrugged, “It was more my mom’s thing than dad’s I guess. He’s not much into the holidays. Other than the Fourth of July, but I think it’s more the barbeque and the beers he likes.” Ethan handed me the bundle.

“So your dad drinks a lot, huh?” I asked.

“To say my dad drinks a lot is like saying fish kinda like to swim,” Ethan answered.

I concentrated on the lights for a moment. His dad sounded like an asshole, I thought.

“He never used to, when I was real little, I mean. Really only since my mom left.”

“She left?”

“Yep. Left.”

I handed Ethan the lights on the opposite side. “Where’d she go?”

“Who knows,” Ethan shrugged, “Alls I know is she didn’t take us with her.”

“Do you have any siblings?”

“No.”

“Just you and your dad, huh?”

“Well. Just me now.” He handed the strings back to me. We were almost to the bottom of the tree now. “I mean ‘til he gets out of Cumberland Heights and whatever.”

Lauren came in the room at that moment, which was probably good ‘cos I had a feeling Ethan didn’t wanna answer any more questions and I had about a hundred million. “Nick, are you making him work? Poor kid. Here’s your food, honey.” She put it down on the coffee table.

“I wanted to help,” Ethan said.

“Well, come eat,” Lauren said.

“I got it from here,” I told him. “Only like two more loops anyways.” Ethan eagerly handed me the remaining lights and went for the food. I had a feeling he hadn’t eaten much since the stolen Sbarro, and God knows that place only just barely counts as food anyways.

Lauren sat down, watching me circle the tree and Ethan scarf down leftovers like they were going out of style. When I finished putting the lights on the branches, I plugged the end in and they all lit up, making the tree glow like magic. Ethan grinned around a mouthful of gravy soaked dinner roll, looking up at it like a little kid would.

“Ethan said he hasn’t had a Christmas tree in awhile,” I told Lauren.

Lauren smiled, “I’m glad you’re here to help with ours, then.”

Ethan smiled as he shoveled mashed potatoes into his mouth.

“Do you want seconds?” Lauren asked, seeing Ethan’s plate was already almost gone. He nodded eagerly and she smiled, “One second.” She took his plate and walked out of the room, back to the kitchen, as Ethan sucked the flavor of the turkey and rolls off his fingertips.

“She’s a really good cook,” Ethan commented.

I smirked, and said loudly enough I knew she’d overhear it, “You ain’t here on tofu and spinach day, that’s why.”

Ethan laughed. “Even tofu and spinach sounds good to me. I mean I ain’t really got a kitchen or nothin’ in the grain mill. If I never see another Big Mac again in my life I’d be okay with it.”

“You say that now but give it six and a half years and you’ll miss them. Trust me.” I nodded. “That’s about how long it’s been since Lo let me get one.”

Ethan smiled, “I dunno. You ever have a Big Mac every day of the week?”

“Yeah, when I first went on tour with Backstreet back in the 90s,” I answered. “Then we did a commercial for Burger King and it was a Whopper everyday for like a whole summer.” I paused. “I weighed like a thousand pounds by the time it was over.”

“So you really have been in a band longer than I’ve been alive?” he asked, interest in his eyes.

Lauren came back with his plate as he was asking.

“Yeah,” I answered. “Pretty crazy. You’re an awful big person for that to be true about, but it is what it is. Started in 1993.”

“Wow. I was born in 1999. In October.” Ethan eagerly jumped back into eating with a grin at Lauren, “Thanks,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” she replied, and she sat on the arm of the chair I was in. “That’s the year Never Gone came out, right baby?” Lauren asked.

“Millennium,” I corrected her. Even after all these years, she still couldn’t remember anything about my career. I still had problems believing she didn’t know this stuff. I mean, what rock was she under in the 90s?

Ethan nodded, “I think my mom had that one. Tell me why, ain’t nothin’ but a heartache, tell me why, ain’t nothin’ but a mistake, tell me why, I never wanna hear you say… I want it that way,” he sang out. His voice was deep, kind of countryish, and warbly. It wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t get-this-kid-a-record-deal-great, either.

“Hey, you do know me!” I laughed.

“Guess I do,” he agreed.

When he’d finished his second plate of food, Lauren got the ornaments out of the box and we turned on John Denver and the Muppets and decorated the tree, which mostly consisted of Ethan putting up ornaments while I threw them at the tree to see if they’d stay and Lauren fixed them in my wake. After the tree was finished, we turned on the TV and watched the sports and news highlights and a couple episodes of The Walking Dead, which Ethan had never seen so we started from the first episode. He started falling asleep after a bit, though he was obviously fighting it, and Lauren snuck upstairs to change the sheets in the guest bedroom. Once it was ready, I nudged Ethan’s foot to wake him up. “Hey bud,” I said quietly, “You look pretty tired, c’mon, I’ll show you the spare room.”

Ethan followed me up the stairs to the guest room. He stared at the bed with a hunger not entirely unlike that which he gave the food before.

“You get some sleep,” I said.

He nodded, started toward the bed, then paused. “Hey, uh, thanks,” he said shyly.

“Night Ethan,” I said, and I pulled the door closed behind me. The second the door was closed, I heard the springs on the mattress squeak and a muffled sound of exhilaration.

Chapter Eight - Sex Interrupted


“Did you set the alarm downstairs?” Lauren asked, coming out of the bathroom in a pair of my boxers and an old t-shirt. She was brushing her hair, her glasses on.

“Yeah,” I nodded.

“Okay.” She went back in the bathroom. “I mean, it’s not like he’s going to steal anything so there’s nothing to worry about anyways,” she added, her voice muffled by the partially closed door.

I leaned over the nightstand, plugging in my phone. “Oh now you’re worried about him being Dexter, now that we’ve got him home. What happened to all that he’s fifteen, he’s not Dexter shit you were talkin’ in the woods?” I asked.

“I’m not saying he’s Dexter, I’m saying you have a lot of expensive gaming equipment downstairs and I don’t wanna hear it when you can’t play because you forgot to arm the perimeter of the house, Lord Balgrott,” she said. “And yeah, I didn’t fully think it through when we were running through the woods. Shit just got real.”

“He said he doesn’t usually steal,” I answered as I pulled the covers down on the bed and crawled in, snuggling myself into the blankets and kicking my feet around to loosen the sheets at the foot. When I was sufficiently comfy, I let myself sink into the pillow and let out a deep sigh.

“Usually,” Lauren came back out of the bathroom again, just finishing braiding her hair. She turned the light off behind her this time and went over to her side, kicking off her socks as she finished up her hair. “You know, when I told you to bank some juju yesterday, I totally did not have bringing home a teenager in mind for something you could do.”

“Go big or go home, right?” I joked.

Lauren climbed into bed next to me and shifted until her head was in the crook of my shoulder, her hand on my bare chest.

I took a deep breath. After a couple moments’ silence, I said, “How come people who can fuck their kids lives up without batting an eye always seem to be able to reproduce but the ones who want to actually try have to fight so hard for it?”

Lauren sighed. “I don’t know,” she replied. “Because life isn’t fair, I suppose.”

I put my non-Lauren’s-pillow arm up behind my head as I stared up at the ceiling.

After a few moments, Lauren rolled over, hugging my arm, but her back against my side. I laid there in the dark, my arm slowly going numb as she fell asleep, trying to find the strand of reason the universe could possibly have in who it chose to allowed to have children. There didn’t seem to be any.




It was a few hours later when Lauren woke up with a start, sitting up quickly. The movement woke me up. “What’s wrong?” I asked thickly. She was leaning forward. I reached my hand up and ran it down her back, “Baby, you okay?”

She nodded and rolled off her side of the bed and went into the bathroom.

I stared at the bathroom door, a little nervous. She was taking forever in there. “Baby?” I called.

She came back out a few minutes later. I was sitting up by the time she came out, checking my email on my phone. I put the phone down the second the bathroom door opened. “You okay? What was that all about?” I asked.

Lauren shook her head, “Nothing, I had a weird dream is all.” But her eyes were red, like she’d been crying, and I hated the thought.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” she answered.

Our eye contact seemed to say a million words to each other. I dunno the words exactly because sometimes stuff like that doesn’t have words when it says things. But she came over and I guided her to straddle my lap and I ran my hands up her legs from her knees where she’d bent them to sit astride my hips. Up her thighs, onto her stomach… I pushed the old t-shirt off over her head and she tossed it onto the floor, her braid hung over her shoulder to the front. She didn’t have a bra on under the shirt, and I slid my hands from her shoulder to her chest and she mirrored the motion on me. Her fingernails trailing across my skin and I could feel that one chipped nail, the one that made her manicure imperfect after all that food kitchen volunteering on Thanksgiving and the thought of it turned me on even more.

Through a feat of gymnastics we managed to get the boxers she had on off of her and get mine off as well. A little bit more adieu and foreplay and she rose above me, and she -- I tried very hard not to think of Dr. Walden’s way of pronouncing this word -- thrust herself upon me. I ran my hands along her hips, guiding her, my heart racing.

This was the kinda sex Jordan Knight had suggested, I thought. There was no lack of Thor tonight. He was alive and well, eager to make Lauren feel better, like a superhero, running in to save the day.

We both pushed against each other, like we couldn’t get close enough to satisfy either of us. It was a little rough because of how hard we were going. I felt blinded by the experience of it all. Or maybe un-blinded. Like I’d been blinded before. I mean the sex we had the night before had been great and all but this -- this was insane.

Whatever the fuck she dreamed about, I hoped she had the same dream every friggin’ night if it was gonna get me laid like this after.

We’d gotten right to the edge, every muscle in my body was coiled like a spring about to let go, my fingers clutched her hips, pulling her down as I pushed my hips upward and she pushed into me, and --

The bedroom door opened.

My eyes only just barely focused on Ethan in the doorway.

“Oh shit.” He ducked back out and pulled the door shut.

I couldn’t react, I’d already gone over, and with a groan that started deep in my gut, we got to the big finish and Lauren slid to my side in the bed, her breathing heavy. She yanked the blankets up over her chest, her braid laying across the pillow. She looked at me, gasping, and I raised my eyebrows as my muscles relaxed.

“Did he see --?” she asked between breaths.

“I think so,” I said.

“Oh God,” she panted. “Fifteen isn’t like young enough that he wouldn’t have had - you know, the talk?” Lauren whispered nervously.

“I dunno when they learn that stuff these days,” I admitted.

Hell, I didn’t know it until Kevin explained the ins and outs -- er, that was probably not the best phrase to use there, huh? Anyways, I was like fourteen and on tour in Germany and had this really bad ass dream about this big breasted woman washing the tour buses with lots and lots of sudsy water and not a whole lot of clothes and I’d woke up to a surprise and freaked out thinking I had some kind of disease of the dick only to be laughed at by the other guys and brought out to a very educational breakfast with Kevin the next morning.

Waffles have turned me on ever since.

We laid there, recovering for a few moments, but once I caught my breath and my heart rate had evened out a little bit, I got up and grabbed my boxers from the floor, tugging them on. I had damage control to do.

Out in the hallway, there were a couple other doors open slightly, leading up to the bathroom, which the light under the door told me was where Ethan was. “Shit,” I mumbled, realizing I’d forgotten to show him the way to the bathroom in the hallway. I was so used to having one right off the bedroom that I didn’t even think about the fact that he’d need to know where the general use one was. I ran my hand over my forehead and reached for knobs on the doors he’d left slightly ajar in the search.

I paused at one of them, my hand lingering on the knob.

I pushed it open a little bit and looked inside.

Back in September, I had a week or so off between the Backstreet tour and the start of the Nick & Knight run and since the first date on the tour had been in Nashville, I’d been home for most of that time and Lauren and I had agreed that, in good faith that we’d succeeded in the August tries, we’d start working on a nursery. This was back when we were still confident and the sex was still exciting and Test Days hadn’t become the worst days of the month. Back when the pep talks were encouraging and there was no Dr. Walden, no questions in our minds if we’d ever have a baby. No, back then it had been when... only when.

I turned the light on.

We’d gone with giraffes because those were cute for boys or girls. It was all pastel yellows and a chocolate brown wood. We’d gotten a crib and a changing table and a dresser and a rocker. There was a quilt we’d bought during an art crawl downtown that some little old lady from the mountains had hand sewn with all these different animals and patterns in the fabric and the softest, most fluffiest underside you ever felt. A mobile with every safari animal you can think of, and a big stuffed giraffe that stood in the corner like a sentinel, keeping guard over the room.

I stared at the stuff, my heart felt heavy.

Eventually, we’d have to come in here and take it all apart, I thought.

The bathroom door opened and I turned the light off on the nursery and pulled the door shut as Ethan came out into the hallway. He stopped and stood there awkwardly when he saw me.

“I’m, uh, I’m sorry,” he said, “I was just looking for the toilet.”

“It’s okay,” I said. I didn’t know how to ask if he was, like, okay, if he understood what he’d seen, or if he needed me to call Dr. Phil to administer immediate emergency therapy or what. I shifted my weight from foot to foot. “I, uh -- Are you -- I mean, did you -- Are you… you know… okay?”

Ethan nodded, “Yeah, I’m okay.”

“You sure ‘cos… I mean… you know like… you know… about sex?”

“I’m fifteen not five,” he said.

He liked that phrase, I thought. It was the second time he’d used it.

“Okay,” I said.

And there we stood all awkward-like in the hallway, neither sure how to transition from the sex to something else.

“Are you guys having a baby?” Ethan asked, pointing at the nursery door.

I pressed my lips together.

“I saw it by accident,” he said, a slight panic to his voice, like he thought I was pissed off at him for mentioning it or for looking in the room or something, “I was just trying to find the bathroom and I tried all the doors and --”

“No man it’s cool,” I said, diffusing his panic. “We were trying to have one for a long time. But we’re not now.”

Ethan looked from me to the nursery door, “Oh,” he said. “I’m… sorry, I guess?”

I shrugged.

He looked around, casting for another subject in the awkwardness that followed yet again, and pointed to the platinum and gold records hanging up on the walls around us. “Those are cool,” he said. “Are they like awards?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “They’re for sales. Like when an album sells five hundred thousand copies, it’s certified Gold. A million copies is Platinum, and ten million is Diamond. These are the plaques the record company gave us.”

Ethan’s eyes travelled down the wall at all the plaques. I’d hung every last one up. Lauren used to tease me that I needed to stop making hit records because it looked kind of tacky, like my own mini Graceland. He walked slowly down the hall, looking at all the certifications, mouthing the word platinum at each. “Wow, diamond,” Ethan said, pausing at the fifteenth plaque for the US debut CD. He looked back at me, “You sold over ten million copies of this?”

“Fourteen million estimated in the U.S. alone. It’s multiplatinum and gold in other countries, too,” I answered. “We’ve sold over 130 million albums worldwide.”

Ethan turned to look at me. “So you’re like… for real. Shit.” He turned back to the plaque again, “No wonder your place is so nice.”

I chuckled and he kept looking at the certifications.

“So you been carrying that guitar around,” I said, “You play?”

“Some,” he answered. “Not good. Not like this level.” He was looking at a plaque for Millennium. There was a huge cluster of those. “Doubt I could ever be this good at anything.”

“Sure you could,” I answered, “Everyone’s this good at something, just they don’t issue awards for everything is all.” I shrugged, “Besides, a lot of this is testimony to our fans as much as it is to us. They’re batshit crazy, but I love’em.” I smiled. Then I jumped back, “Did you take lessons? On the guitar?”

Ethan shook his head, “Watched a YouTube video. The guitar I got at a yard sale for like thirty bucks. I can’t play any actual songs, I just mess around, really. Well, I mean, I can play the first couple bars of that Green Day song, Good Riddance, you know that one that’s like I guess I had the time of my life?”

“Yeah, I know that song,” I nodded.

He shrugged, “That’s about it, though. It’s just comforting, the noise of it, especially at night in the grain mill. Sometimes there’s these sounds and you just know there’s like an animal somewhere in there or something and I play the guitar to drown out the noise. And I dunno maybe it scares the animals off, too. It sounds pretty cool though, you know them big silo things on there? They’re empty, right, so it kinda echos, it’s like an amplifier.”

“That’s pretty cool,” I said.

“Yeah.” Ethan had reached the end of the plaques and he turned to me. “Those are awesome.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Is Lauren a singer too?”

“No,” I answered, “Never, ever, ever ask her to sing. It’s like mermaids screeching.” I shuddered. “I love her, but shit she cannot sing. No.” I cringed, shaking my head. “Just don’t do it.”

Ethan laughed. “So what does Lauren do?”

“I mean it’s basically a full time job keeping up with me,” I answered, “But she does personal training, too. She’s a licensed nutritionist and stuff. Remember I told you I weighed like a million pounds from all the Big Macs? She’s the one that fixed me.”

Ethan nodded, “That makes sense. She’s super --” he paused and his face turned a little red.

“Hot?” I supplied. “Yeah, trust me, I know. I got real lucky. So. Uh, you gotta girlfriend?”

Ethan shook his head, “A girlfriend? Me? No.”

“That’s surprising,” I commented. He had that look to him that was in right now, that One-Directiony-floppy-haired-brown-eyed-baby-face look.

Ethan snorted, “Surprising? No. I don’t even have friends, not to mention girlfriends.”

“No friends? Why?” I asked.

He shrugged, “I don’t like talking to people.”

“You’re talking to me,” I pointed out.

He laughed. “Well, you’re really easy to talk to,” he said.

I shrugged. “Am I?”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “I don’t usually talk to people but I keep finding myself talking to you.”

“Well,” I said, “You’re cool, so I dunno why you wouldn’t talk to people.”

Ethan shrugged, “I just don’t usually.”

“Maybe you should more.”

“Maybe,” he answered.

“You know what you need is confidence,” I said.

Ethan laughed, “Do they sell that at the galleria?”

“You can learn confidence,” I said. “It’s just a matter of believing in yourself and in what you have to offer the world. Confidence can be something you’re born with, I guess, but it isn’t always. More often, it’s something you learn about yourself. It takes a long time sometimes. Years. I’ve only learned it since I met Lauren in the last few years.”

Ethan looked at the wall, then back at me. “This looks a lot longer than the last few years,” he said.

“There wasn’t a whole lot of confidence in those years,” I said, “There’s a difference between confidence and what I was then. I was more like balls out stupid and hyperactive and attention seeking then. I wanted attention so much I’d have done anything for it. Then there was a brief period of drug induced not giving a fuck and a bout of arrogance and finally, finally at the end of a pretty massive, also mostly drug induced, breakdown, there came this time where I realized all the shit I’d been through was just that. Shit. And it was over and I met Lauren after that and she taught me confidence and made me realize I ain’t the person I was and I ain’t the person a lot of people want me to believe I am and I’m worth something to somebody.”

“I wish I was worth something to somebody,” Ethan said.

“You are,” I said.

He shrugged.

I put my hand on his shoulders and looked him right in the eyes, and my voice was firm: “Ethan,” I said, “You are.”

He nodded and turned away, looking back at the multiplatinum plaques.

“Hey,” I said, “You know what, if you stick around here, instead of going back to the grain mill, I can give you some guitar lessons.”

“I don’t have money to pay you,” he mumbled.

“I didn’t say I was charging you anything,” I answered.

“You’d just teach me how to play the guitar and let me stay in your house and eat your food and all that for nothin’?” he asked, raising an eyebrow and turning back to me.

I shrugged. “It is Christmas. Isn’t shit like that what the holidays are all about and whatever?” I asked. He looked skeptical, though. “Tell you what,” I said, “You sleep on it and get back to me when you decide. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said.

“Alrighty then. That decided, I better get back to bed and let Lauren know we didn’t traumatize you for life, I was all ready to go bangin’ on Dr. Phil’s door to get some emergency therapy for you after that,” I joked.

“Dude. You know Dr. Phil?” he asked, eyes wide.

“Yeah,” I answered, “I wrote a book with his son.”

“Jesus,” Ethan muttered.

“Night Ethan.”

“Night Hollywood,” he said, and he wandered into the guest bedroom, closing the door behind him.

When I walked into the bedroom, Lauren was still laying on the bed, but the wrong way, her head at the bottom of the bed and her feet up on the headboard, hips inclined.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked her.

She turned her head to look at me, “Nothing.” She rolled over and sat up. “Is Ethan okay?”

“Yeah,” I replied.

She made a sympathetic face, “Did you have to have waffles?”

“No waffles,” I answered. “He thinks you’re hot, though.”

Lauren blushed.

Chapter Nine - An Early Christmas Present


I woke up before Lauren did the next morning, at the very crack of dawn, and I got dressed in sweats and stuff and headed downstairs. I peeked into the living room and breathed a sigh of relief seeing all my gaming systems exactly where they belonged. I felt guilty for even checking. Mulder and Nacho had followed me downstairs, but Igby had opted to stay under the covers at Lauren’s feet, where he’d snuck in after we’d fallen asleep. I went out to the kitchen and poured a smelly can of catfood into Mulder’s bowl and picked Nacho up before he could eat it. Mulder glared at him from under the table, then darted for the food the second I carried Nacho away, hunching over the bowl like some kind of laser-eyed mafia man. In the hallway, I strapped Nacho’s leash on him and pulled him, disabled the alarm, and stepped out into the brisk Tennessee morning.

It was gray outside, the threat of rain in the air, and leaves from the neighbor’s tree had made their way onto our lawn. But I wasn’t too concerned, I could hear the far-off hum of the landscaping crew’s leaf blowers and weed whackers and knew it wouldn’t be too long before they’d come and cleared them off. Across the street, a neighbor’s house was being Christmas-fied by a professional decorating company. A man was straddling the roof of their garage, affixing the third of the eight tiny reindeer to the peak.

Nacho followed me down the driveway to the sidewalk and I turned and took him jogging down the road. His nails clicked on the pavement as we ran. A couple blocks away, we passed the landscapers, who yelled good morning and waved, one of them laughing at little Nacho’s legs rushing to keep up with my strides. We took a pretty good jog before heading back to the house as the sun was starting to come out between the clouds.

Ethan was just crossing the lawn as I jogged up. “Hey, where ya going?” I asked him, coming to a stop, breathless. Nacho ran over and jumped on his leg to be patted.

“Carver’s,” Ethan answered. “He said he’d pay me double if I worked Saturday afternoon.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s a good deal.”

“Yeah,” Ethan nodded.

I looked up at the house, “What time you gotta be there?”

“I dunno… after noon,” Ethan answered with a shrug.

“It’s only nine.”

He shrugged again, “It’s a long walk.” He bent down to pet Nacho, who wasn’t giving up on trying to get Ethan’s attention.

“Come back inside,” I said, “I’ll drive you later.”

Ethan looked up, his hands stroking Nacho’s ears, the little pug curly-tail sweeping in loops. “I don’t mind walkin’ if you got other stuff to do,” he said, “I don’t wanna be a pain in the ass.”

“You aren’t a pain in the ass. Get inside, we’ll get breakfast. Is Lauren up?”

“I didn’t see her,” Ethan replied, standing up. Nacho started bouncing at his legs again.

“Get down, Nacho,” I said, tugging his leash and leading the way into the house, “Well if we can beat her up, we can have bacon,” I said. “There’s some in the drawer I bought and I don’t think she’s found it yet.”

Ethan laughed.

Inside, I unleashed Nacho and he ran for the cat food bowl but Mulder had made quick work of it and left only a few crumbles for Nacho, who licked the bowl eagerly, regardless, as Mulder sat on top of a nearby bookshelf, his tail flicking like he was plotting the future demise of the dogs of the world, if only he could get his hands on some poison-laced cat food.

I pulled the contraband bacon out of the fridge and winked at Ethan as I laid it out on a microwavable plate and shoved it in for the required thirty seconds. “It’s not as good as the pan fried stuff but I don’t trust myself even with that,” I admitted.

“How did you eat before Lauren?” Ethan laughed.

“A very impressive amount of take out and delivery menus stashed everywhere,” I said, “And an assortment of breakfast cereals, microwavable meals, and the previously discussed Big Macs.”

“Sounds like a lot more work than cooking,” he said.

I shrugged. “Do you cook?”

“Enough to live,” he replied.

I opened the fridge, “You know how to make an egg?”

“Scrambled.”

I took out the carton.

Ten minutes later, we had an eclectic selection of breakfast foods on two plates: scrambled eggs, microwaved bacon, peanut butter smeared toast, and those little tubs of apple sauce. We sat down and I picked up a piece of bacon, shaking it at Ethan, “Very impressive scrambling skills,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said, “I’ll add it to my resume.”

I laughed. “So, did you think on my offer to stay here?” I asked, “Because we could really use a good egg scrambler around here.”

Ethan chewed his peanut butter toast, “You really don’t mind?” he asked.

“I really don’t,” I answered.

“Okay,” he said. “And I can leave anytime if you decide it’s too much hassle and I’m in the way or whatever,” he added quickly, “I’ll leave like the second you tell me to, I promise.”

I smiled, taking a bite of my eggs, “Great. Welcome aboard, then.”

“Is that bacon I smell?” Lauren wandered into the kitchen, her nose held aloft.

“Not at all,” I lied, pretending to cover my plate with my hands so she couldn’t see it. She laughed and took a piece off my plate and took a bite. “Hey now, if you’re against buying it then you’re against eating it.”

“Mmm,” she exaggerated as she chewed the rest of the piece, teasing me. “Good morning Ethan, you sleep okay?” she asked as she turned away and got the orange juice out of the fridge.

Ethan nodded, “It was like sleeping in a giant marshmallow.”

“Good,” she smiled, “I’m glad you were comfortable.” He was staring up at her. I could tell she was trying not to think about the fact that the kid had walked in and seen her naked the night before. She was clearly compensating for it, too, because she had on like three layers on top - a tank top or something that peeked out from below a long sleeve shirt and a vest over that.

She grabbed another piece of my bacon.

“Ethan’s gonna stay with us,” I said, “Until his dad gets out of Cumberland Heights.”

Lauren looked at Ethan, her smile reaching her eyes, “Awesome! I’m glad. I was having a fit thinking of you staying in that old grain mill. That place has got to be filthy.”

Ethan shrugged, “It ain’t bad. I clean it.”

Igby waddled into the room and Lauren gave him the last bite of the piece of bacon she’d snagged from my plate.

“Hey now, if you aren’t gonna buy bacon, you definitely can’t give it to the dogs,” I said as Nacho came running over, seeking his own bacon. “See what you’ve done, now the unending gut wants some.” I sighed and broke a piece off for Nacho, who scarfed it down so fast there’s no way he tasted it. “Damn, at least savor it, bro,” I told him.




I dropped Ethan off at Carver’s with the promise to return at eight to pick him up. Lauren had packed him a lunch and we watched as he disappeared into the tent to start work before backing out of the driveway. “So since he’s going to stay with us, I was thinking we should probably get him some clothes or something,” Lauren said as I pulled out of the parking lot.

“I was thinking that, too,” I answered.

So I drove over to the galleria and we went in the Belk entrance and spent awhile holding up jeans and looking at the waist bands, trying to decide if they were the right size or not. We ended up taking three different sizes in a range we were fairly sure he’d fit into, and grabbed a bunch of t-shirts and boxers and sweatshirts and a pair of flannel pajamas. We even bought some socks. “You’ll have to take him again for shoes,” Lauren said as we hauled our stuff to the register.

“Yeah I have no idea how big his feet are,” I agreed. I grabbed a couple knit caps and a pair of gloves from a display by the register. “Do you think we should man up the guest room too? I mean the bedspread in there is girly and it’s kinda plain otherwise.”

“Okay,” Lauren agreed. So once we’d paid at Belk and stuffed the bags in the back of the car, we went to Bed Bath & Beyond and argued over whether or not Ninja Turtles were appropriate for a fifteen year old’s room. We ended up buying Lauren’s choice, a blue and green plaid comforter that looked like a shirt I think she tried to get me to wear to a dinner party once. We dark blue sheets to match and I found a poster with guitar chords. We got a radio with an iPod mount. “Do you really think he has an iPod, though?” Lauren asked when I was arguing for the pros of buying the radio, which is the question that led us going to Best Buy to buy a black iPod mini, which somehow led to Barnes & Noble to get some books and magazines fifteen year olds might like, and on to Guitar Center, where I got a couple more books on guitar playing and all the stuff I’d need to show him how to play, plus some extras, like a book of chords from Journey’s Greatest Hits that was actually for me.

Lauren stared at the stuff that had taken over the back of the Jeep. It was almost five-thirty by then. I had no clue how we’d managed to spend the entire afternoon buying all the shit, but we had. So since we had a couple hours before we had to go pick him up, we went home and set it all up in the room. When we were done, we stood by the doorway, looking at our handiwork.

“Well, it’s not perfect but it’s better than it was,” Lauren said, looking around.

I pre-loaded the iPod with my own music library, since I wasn’t sure what he liked, and left it on the dock of the stereo where it could charge.

When it came time, I drove down to pick Ethan up at Carver’s. He came out, folding his money into a worn out wallet, and climbed into the Jeep. “The seats are heated, too?” he asked as he got in the front passenger seat, “This thing’s tricked out, huh?”

“Yeah, Lauren got it for me as my wedding gift,” I answered, “It’s souped up.” I grinned.

“This was a wedding gift?” Ethan’s eyebrows raised, “Y’all get each other cars as gifts?”

I shrugged, “She uses it, too,” I said.

I drove back to the house, barely suppressing my excitement. I really wanted to tell him what we’d done, but I also wanted it to be a surprise. When got home, Lauren was sitting on the couch, reading, but she put the book down as soon as we walked through the door. “I made dinner,” she said chirpily, “Why don’t you boys go upstairs and wash up and we’ll eat?” she suggested.

“Sounds good to me,” I said. “Doesn’t that sound good?” I asked Ethan.

“Yeah,” he agreed. He looked a little weirded out because there was an awful lot of enthusiasm being pumped his direction. We followed him up the stairs, Lauren right on my heels, and hung around in the hallway. He started for the hall bathroom.

“Wait, why don’t you put your coat up in your room first?” Lauren asked eagerly.

Ethan paused, gave her a funny look, and shrugged his coat off slowly, then turned and opened the bedroom door. He paused in the doorway, looking around.

“We figured since you were gonna be staying a while that you’d need some stuff to make the room better,” I said, swooping in because Ethan looked like he wasn’t sure what to make of the changes in the room.

“Y’all did this… for me?” he asked, looking back at Lauren and I.

“Yeah,” I answered, “Look, we got you a poster with the guitar chords on it. And look,” I grabbed the iPod off the dock, “Let me know if there’s some music you want on it that I didn’t add, I’ll get it on there for you.” I handed it to him with excitement.

He blinked at it in his hands and then looked around the room, wide eyed, “What…? Wait. What? Y’all really did all this for me?”

“Yes,” Lauren chirped. She was peeking around my shoulder, holding onto my arm. “Do you like it?” she asked.

Ethan looked like we’d done the ice bucket challenge to him without warning. “I… literally don’t know what to say,” he said.

Lauren leaped out from behind me and opened the closet door, “We weren’t sure what size jeans you wear --”

“There’s clothes, too?” Ethan’s eyes swung to me, even wider than they’d been a moment before. “But… why?”

“The spirit of Christmas again, I guess,” I answered.

Lauren handed him three pairs of pants, “Whatever ones don’t fit we can return,” she said, folding them into his hands. She grinned, “We just wanted you to be comfortable,” she added.

“I mean… thank you,” Ethan said, “I guess that’s what I’m supposed to say. I just… I don’t know what to say other than that. I’m speechless.”

Lauren came back over and hugged my arm.

He stood there holding the iPod and the jeans, looking around from the bedspread to the lamp and the poster and the radio and the clothes and back to me and Lauren. “Nobody’s ever done nothin’ like this for me,” he said.

“It’s just an early Christmas present,” Lauren answered.

“Yeah, I don’t usually get Christmas presents,” he replied, “Not since my mom left.” He turned and put the jeans and iPod on the bed and ran his hand over the comforter’s material. Lauren looked up at me and mouthed, no presents? and I shrugged. Ethan turned back to us. “You guys are… either really crazy or really awesome or maybe kind of both.”

I laughed.

Lauren gave him a hug.

Chapter Ten - In a Galaxy Far Far Away


Sunday morning, Lauren went out to go Christmas and grocery shopping first thing in the morning. “You sure you don’t want me to go with you?” I asked. I was standing in the kitchen in boxers and one sock (Nacho had stolen the other one when I shuffled out of it by accident on the stairs), pouring milk into a bowl of Cheerios.

“How can I go Christmas shopping when you’re with me?” Lauren asked, raising an eyebrow.

I shrugged. “I dunno.”

“Also, no offense or anything bu grocery shopping is way easier without you there,” she said.

“Pfft, well fine then,” I said, “Leave me here.”

“You have Ethan to play with you,” she replied, “You two can… do whatever boys do when girls aren’t around. Fart, play with your balls, that sort of thing.” She grabbed her purse off the counter. “Don’t forget to feed Meow Meow.”

“I already fed him.”

“And your dog ate all his food. So feed him again.”

It was true. Mulder hadn’t been fast enough on the food eating front that morning and Nacho had scarfed half the cat food down before Mulder had hissed and swept at him with his claws out.

“I won’t forget,” I said.

Lauren left the room to go, then came back a moment later with my second sock. “This was by the front door,” she said, putting it in my hand.

I leaned down and kissed her. “Thanks. My toes were getting cold.”

“Mmhm,” she kissed me back. “You two stay out of trouble today.”

I wandered out to the living room to eat my Cheerios and turned the TV on, tugging my sock on once I’d put my cereal bowl on the coffee table. I flicked through the channels until I found a documentary about asteroids on Discovery TV and settled back to watch while I crunched. Now most people find documentaries really boring but I really enjoy them. It doesn’t really matter what the topic of them is, I watch them all the time regardless. I’ve learned some pretty random shit, like the meaning of a bunch of Yiddish words and where the phrase Red Neck came from and the layers of the Earth and about solar systems and books I’ll never read and how earthquakes happen and the scientific reason for why the Titanic sank (and believe it or not it’s not just because they hit an iceberg, there was way more to it than that). Today on the documentary, they were talking about this one asteroid, Ceres, that was caught in the sun’s gravitational pull at the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres is apparently a microplanet, like what they ended up deciding Pluto is basically, and they’ve been working on putting a spacecraft on it since 2012, and it was apparently supposed to happen in the next year or so.

“With it’s vast array of minerals, water, and hard surface, Ceres is considered a possibility for human colonization in the future. Though Ceres is considerably cold - negative 105 degrees celsius - it’s still an exciting thought that we could one day have a miniature earth,” the narrator was saying as the camera panned a computer model of the distance between Earth and Ceres.

Suddenly Ethan dropped down beside me on the couch. “Hey,” I said.

“Morning,” he answered. He was dressed in new jeans, a sweatshirt, and had pulled one of the knit caps I’d gotten him over his fluffy locks.

“Nice clothes,” I said.

He smiled as he leaned against the couch and Nacho climbed up and settled on his lap.

On the screen, they shifted to talking about the asteroid belt that Ceres was located in. “The asteroid belt is over 2 astronomical units from the sun, and one astronomical unit thick. Scientists use astronomical units to measure things in space because the numbers are - well, astronomical. Each astronomical units equals out to just about one hundred million miles - 92,955,803 miles to be exact.”

“That’s a lot of miles,” Ethan said.

“I know, right?”

“It’s like that song.”

“Song?”

“You know. I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more…”

“Dah da lat da, dah da lat da,” I sang, and Ethan laughed. “The Proclaimers. Hell yeah.”

“Despite the density of the asteroid belt, the distances between celestial objects within it are actually quite a good distance apart. In fact, if you were to stand on one asteroid and look out, the next closest asteroid would be extremely difficult to see because it would be so far away. Distances between asteroids in the belt are similar to the distances between Earth and the other rocky planets, or even further.”

I pointed at the TV, “You ever watch these things?” I asked.

“Not a whole lot, sometimes.”

“They’d be better if James Earl Jones narrated all of them.”

“Who’s that?”

“Darth Vader,” I replied.

“The plastic guy in Star Wars?”

I stared at Ethan. I took a deep breath, put my Cheerios bowl down and turned to him. “Tell me you’ve seen Star Wars,” I said.

“I have a feeling I’m going to,” he said.




Lauren came home many hours later as the movies were about to end. Chewie was giving his final howl at the awards ceremony, in fact, as she dropped her keys in the bowl and the dogs went charging out to see her. Granted, we’d only watched the classic trilogy, not the newer episodes movies. A virgin Star Wars viewer need never have their cherry popped by Jar Jar Binks, I figured.

“Okay, I have a new favorite movie,” Ethan declared as the credits started rolling and Lauren walked into the room and looked around. On Ethan’s lap was a bag of popcorn. The coffee table was littered with empty Zevia cans - they looked like a little city skyline. We’d ordered a pizza and the remaining slices of that were still in the open box on the table, a couple crusts that I’d tossed in there. Igby was laying on the floor eating another crust, Nacho had already buried his under the throw pillow on the easy chair. Ethan continued gushing about the movie, “That was awesome.”

Lauren’s eyes roved over the mess, “Well, you guys had fun while I was gone, I see,” she said, carefully stepping over Igby and going for the chair Nacho had buried his crust on.

“There’s a pizza crust under the pillow,” I told her and nodded at Nacho, whose ears had gone up with panic as she’d neared his hiding place.

“Nacho,” she said, a hint of annoyance to her voice. She pulled the pillow off the chair and he leaped up and over to grab the crust and run off, “Eat it, don’t hide it,” she told him. She sat down. She looked exhausted.

“You need help carrying in the bags?” I asked.

She looked confused.

“The grocery bags? From the car?”

“Oh. Oh no. No, I didn’t end up grocery shopping. The, uh, the galleria took too long and it was a colossal stress,” she answered.

“Oh,” I said. “It must’ve been if you been there all day. We watched the entire Star Wars trilogy.” I laughed.

“Yeah,” she said, “It was crazy.” She stood up, “I’ll be right back.” And she went upstairs.

I looked at Ethan and he shrugged.

“I’m gonna go check on her real quick,” I said and I got up and went after her, leaving Ethan in the living room with the still scrolling Star Wars credits and the remains of the pizza.

Upstairs, I went in our bedroom, but Lauren wasn’t in there. I took a deep breath and went back out to the hallway and over to the closed door of the nursery. I knocked gently. “Uh huh,” Lauren called, her voice thick.

I pushed the door open and went inside, closing it behind me. She was sitting in the rocking chair, hugging one of the stuffed animals we’d bought - a monkey we’d made at Build a Bear. “Hey,” I said. I went over and sat on the floor at her feet. Her eyes were puffy and red, tear stains still on her face. I ran my hand over her knee, “Why are you crying?” I asked.

She took a deep breath, “Dr. Walden called, and I answered, I was going to tell him that we decided to take a break from trying but then he said that he had the test results for your sperm sample from last time and that you’re perfectly healthy and that it may be my fault we’re not having a baby. He said my uterus might be hostile but he’d have to run a test and I told him I didn’t wanna take it right now because we’re not trying and he told me to come back when we were again and he’d help us figure out what the best route of action would be and --” she was bawling.

I got up on my knees and pulled her forward to wrap my arms around her. My head leaned against her chest because of the angle we were at and she rested her teary face in my hair.

There was this weird mixture of emotions happening inside me. As painfully awkward as it had been being given a plastic cup and told to go sit in an exam room and whack off ‘til it was full, I was kinda glad now that I’d done it because it had cleared Thor’s name. It wasn’t Thor that was the issue. His sperm were good. He was just getting too much pressure was all. So in a way, I was really glad at the results from Dr. Walden. In another way, I knew how it felt to be the one thinking it was your fault that there wasn’t a baby in the crib that loomed behind me. I felt bad for Lauren.

“I’m sorry,” she said after a few minutes, snuffling and pulling away. She ran her hands over my hair where her face had smooshed it down. “I’m sorry, I know you don’t wanna talk about this stuff right now.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

She shook her head, “After the appointment, I just… wandered kind of aimlessly around town. I didn’t get anything much done.”

“I understand, baby,” I answered.

She swept her hand over her eyes. “How can I want something so much and my body be so against me?” she asked thickly.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Biology, I guess.”

“Fuck biology,” she mumbled.

“Yeah, fuck biology,” I agreed.

Lauren’s face was all teary and smeared. I rubbed my hand on her thigh soothingly. “I’m gonna take a shower,” she said.

“Okay,” I nodded, “I’ll get the mess cleaned up downstairs.”

“Did you and Ethan have a good time?”

“Yeah, he’d never seen Star Wars before.”

“Wow,” Lauren said, looking surprised even through the teary eyes.

“Yeah.”

She paused, “Does he have, like, I dunno, school or something in the morning?”

“I… have no idea,” I replied. I realized I hadn’t asked him about school yet. “I’ll find out.”

“Okay,” she answered. “Thank you baby.” She kissed my forehead and I got up. She left the monkey on the chair and we closed the nursery door shut behind us as we went out to the hallway.

Back downstairs, I walked into the living room to find Ethan had already cleared all the soda cans and the pizza box off the table. I found him in the kitchen, opening cupboard doors. “What’cha lookin’ for?” I asked him.

“A plate to put the leftover pizza in the fridge on,” he answered.

“Two cupboards toward me,” I said. He opened it and got out a plate and came back to the counter where the box sat open still. He lifted the pizza slices out and onto the plate. “Thanks for cleaning up,” I said.

“No problem,” he answered. “Is Lauren okay?”

“Yeah, she’s okay.”

“She looked sad,” he said.

“Yeah, but she’s okay, we talked.”

“Was she upset about the mess?” he asked.

“No,” I answered, shaking my head.

Ethan put the plate in the fridge. “I thought maybe she was upset we made a mess,” he said.

“Nawh, Lauren doesn’t care about stuff like that, as long as it gets picked up after,” I answered with a shrug. “And even then she just nags about it, she doesn’t really get upset. Like I leave my clothes laying around a lot, I’m bad at throwing them in the hamper, and she’ll be like why don’t you use the hamper instead of the carpet for once, but she’s not really angry or nothin’.”

Ethan laughed ‘cos I’d imitated Lauren when I’d said the hamper bit and it’d sounded more like Elmo or a seagull than Lauren’s voice.

“So… anyways. She wanted me to ask you if you have school or something tomorrow?”

Ethan looked down, “No.”

“No school?”

“No. I don’t go to school.”

“Why?”

Ethan hesitated. He looked up at me after a long pause and answered, “Because. The guys there are jerks.” He rubbed his arm, “I mean, they’ve always been jerks. They used to make fun of me ‘cos my clothes weren’t as cool and sometimes I didn’t have time to wash them ‘cos I was taking care of everything else at home and also doing homework and everything, and they’d beat me up and stuff. They called me Po’ Boy.”

I frowned.

“Then my dad… when he went to rehab, he drove into a tree on the way home from McCreery’s and of course the stupid tree had to be on one of those guys’ lawn and they knew all about what happened and that my dad was taken away by a police man and stuff and they told everybody at school. And everything had kinda fallen apart for me, so I was out for a couple days when he first went to rehab and stuff and when I got back to school everyone thought all these rumors that jackass had spread around was true and nobody wanted to be near me and they all made fun of me. And then my Dad’s house went into foreclosure and there was this social worker that said I had to stay in the group home they’d put me in, but I didn’t want to, so that’s when I ran away and I didn’t go back to school ‘cos I figured if I did they’d know where to find me and they’d make me go back to the group home.” He shrugged, “School’s stupid anyway, anything I learn there I can learn from a book.”

“School isn’t stupid,” I said. “You don’t wanna grow up without being book smart, trust me. I didn’t finish school ‘cos I didn’t think I’d need to ‘cos I was in the band and everything but I really wish I’d studied more. I mean I don’t really need a degree or anything ‘cos I made it okay, but first of all I got really lucky and second of all it’s not fun being the dumb one in a conversation, you know?”

Ethan nodded.

“I mean, I have my GED now, and I wouldn’t mind taking like some online college courses someday or something, but… Yeah, trust me, you wanna finish school. Maybe you could enroll at a different school, so you don’t gotta deal with those guys anymore,” I suggested.

Ethan nodded again. “I guess so.”

“I mean it’s awful close to the winter break now anyway to enroll now,” I added, because he looked sick to his stomach at the thought. He looked up. “But promise once your dad gets out that you’ll get enrolled at a school and finish. Study real hard, make something great of yourself. Don’t just work retail and burger flippin’ your whole life, ‘cos y’know that’s about all you can do without a degree these days, and I believe that you deserve better than that.”

“Okay,” he agreed. “I will.”

Chapter Eleven - And the Oscar Goes To...


It turned out that there was a lot of stuff that Ethan had never seen before. Like Alien and Ghostbusters and Stripes and Freddy Krueger. He’d never seen Almost Famous or Dumb & Dumber or Elf or It’s a Wonderful Life or --- the list just goes on and on. I don’t know what kind of entertainment that kid had around home, but clearly movies were not it. Each one we watched he proclaimed was his new favorite movie. Although he said that with the most gusto when we watched the entire Lethal Weapon franchise and we were quoting it off and on for the rest of the week.

Seriously, I think we spent basically the whole next two days watching movies and talking and getting to know each other better. It was like this two dimensional idea - this fifteen year old kid that stole pizza from a crappy food court place - was morphing slowly into this whole person that I knew and liked having around. We had similar senses of humor, and when we started laughing and joking, throwing one-liners back and forth, Lauren would roll her eyes with a humored smile on her face. He was becoming 3D, and I was getting really used to having him around. Like it was easy, like maybe it wouldn’t be so bad being a parent if this was what it was like all the time.

I learned his favorite food was quesadillas and that he had a huge crush on Demi Lovato and he was a bit of a computer nerd and knew how to write web code to make simple little video games show up on the browser when we opened the file. He grew up in Nashville, and the furthest from home he’d ever been was Chicago, via bus, to see a hockey game with his dad and uncle - back before his dad started drinking and his uncle had been killed in Iraq.

But what completely, totally blew my mind was that the kid had never seen the ocean.

“You’ve never seen it? Ever?” We were sitting at the dinner table eating an asian-inspired dish Lauren had made, including these tofu dumplings with soy sauce.

“Never,” Ethan answered.

“There’s plenty of people that’ve never seen the ocean, Nick,” Lauren injected. “Most of the country is landlocked don’t forget.” She spun some of the noodles she’d sauteed around her fork.

I still couldn’t believe it, “Never?”

“Well, like, on TV,” Ethan said, shrugging.

“Jesus.” I leaned back. I couldn’t imagine having never seen the ocean. I could barely imagine going a week without seeing it. I was already starting to miss it being right out back. That was the only downfall of Tennessee, really. If I could get the ocean closer to Tennessee, I probably would spend all of my time there instead of anywhere else. But I was literally addicted to the ocean. I needed the ocean. Half the time, it was what kept me feeling balanced. I could forget all my worries just by standing by it a few minutes and breathing deeply. “We should go to the ocean.” I looked at Lauren.

She raised her eyebrows. “Now?”

“Well not like right now, but like maybe this weekend. We could drive down to the gulf. Like a road trip,” My voice sped up with eagerness as I talked. Ethan’s eyes lit up with excitement.

Lauren looked less enthused. “That’s like a twelve hour drive.” She lowered her voice to add dramatic effect. “Each way.”

“Yeah, it’ll be fun. We can stop along the way. Doesn’t that sound fun?” I asked, looking at Ethan.

He nodded.

He was very quickly becoming my minion in evil.

“You only think so because you haven’t spent twelve hours in a car with him,” Lauren told Ethan, pointing her fork at me.

Ethan laughed, “It can’t be all bad.”

Lauren gave a knowing laugh back, “Oh you think that now, but give it three hours in a moving vehicle and see how you feel then.”

“C’mon Lolo,” I whined. “He ain’t never seen the beach before.”

Lauren shook her head, laughing, “We’ll see.”

I grinned at Ethan, who grinned back.

When we were done, we cleared the table, Ethan helping, and put the leftovers away and since Lauren cooked, Ethan and I did the dishes. I was really getting used to him being around. I’d basically forgotten that he didn’t just belong there and that I had this whole other busy life that needed to be attended to.

At least until Lori called.

“So where have you been?” she asked, her voice sharp.

I shook soap suds off my hands and into a dish towel. “Uh, home in Tennessee,” I replied.

“Did you forget you had a phone interview today?” she asked. “Or did you just decide not to do it?”

“Shit,” I muttered. I ran my hand through my hair as Ethan continued doing the dishes. I paced out to the dining room. “I forgot.”

Lori sighed. “Jack had a great time trying to smooth that over, the radio station was pissed.”

“Well, tell them I’m sorry, I just forgot. I’ve been busy here,” I said.

“You’re going to be even busier in January doing promo if you don’t start getting these phone-ins done,” she warned. “Don’t forget, this was your idea back in September when you started saying that you needed some time at home after the Nick & Knight tour was over. It wasn’t a vacation you said, because you’d be working at home.”

“I know,” I said. She was right. It’d been my idea to do some stuff like Skype and phone interviews. At the time I’d expected fully to have a couple-months-pregnant wife at home to take care of during the movie’s promotional run in January and I’d thought that getting some of it done on the front end like this would make it easier. I hadn’t bargained for suddenly having a teenager in the house. “I just got distracted is all.”

Lori breathed like she was probably counting to ten in her head to keep from throttling me. I know I can be really aggravating. I couldn’t blame her. “Nick, when will you be available to do the interview this week? Without any distractions?”

I had a feeling she thought that distractions was, like, code for sex or something.

“Anytime,” I answered.

“I need an exact time,” she replied.

“Uhh… okay, Wednesday,” I said.

“Tomorrow’s Wednesday, Nick,” she said.

Was it? I couldn’t believe it’d been almost a week since Thanksgiving already. We’d been pretty holed up in the house since Saturday. The only time we’d left was to bring Ethan down to Carver’s for a couple hours early that morning, hours during which Lauren and I had gone grocery shopping at Whole Foods. Otherwise, we hadn’t really gone much of anywhere. I’d kind of forgotten that time existed, in a way.

“Tomorrow, then.”

“Time.”

“Nine o’clock. AM.”

“Okay. Wednesday. Nine o’clock. I’ll tell them to expect a call from you then.”

“Alright.”

“You better call them this time.”

“I will Lori,” I answered.

“That’s what you said last time I scheduled this,” she replied.

We hung up and I went back into the kitchen. Ethan was still doing dishes. I grabbed the dish cloth and started drying. I felt bad for missing the interview, like I’d let everyone down. I took my job really seriously, whatever it might seem like when I run late or forget things - like this interview. Lori sometimes had this way of making me feel like I didn’t care enough. I did, though. It’s just I had a “real” life, too, and there had been an extraordinary about of stuff going on in that “real” life.

Ethan obviously could sense the upset in me because he was quiet for a few moments before finally, he glanced over at me, “So, like, when you’re at the ocean, do fish just swim up to you?”

“Sometimes,” I answered.

“That sounds pretty cool,” he said.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“So, like, was that phone call something bad?” he asked.

“Nawh,” I shrugged. “Just I forgot to do this work thing. It’s all good.” I waved it off.

He was quiet again for a moment as he ran the water and rinsed off a few plates before putting them in the strainer. “I had a fish once,” he said conversationally when he was done, “A goldfish with big fat cheeks like this.” He puffed his cheeks out. “I named him Bubbles because I was real original with stuff like names back then.” He drained the sink.

“I had a lizard named Babyface once,” I said.

Ethan laughed, “That’s an original name. Way more original than Bubbles the fish.”

“He might’ve come prenamed, I don’t remember,” I admitted.

“If I had a fish now, I’d name him something totally random. Like Porkchop or Rodger.”

“I’d name him Sushi,” I replied.

Ethan’s eyes crinkled at the corners as he laughed, “Gross.”




The next morning, I got up bright and early and made myself coffee and sat in the studio, tuning my guitar, waiting for nine o’clock so I could call the radio station in Tampa, like Lori wanted. At five of nine, I called. Calling early was my little form of rebellion, the only way I could be like hey screw you, I do care. Even though Lori would never know.

Even though the media had only just started with the questions about the movie, there were already standard questions that they were all asking, things we’d come to expect each and every time we talked to someone. They wanted to know when we’d filmed, what it had been like filming, if we planned to release it in theaters or just straight to DVD, etc. All those questions were asked, and I gave all the standard answers that I had been giving to every interviewer that I’d seen yet. Then the deejay, a young girl with an overexcited element to her voice, threw me a curveball.

“Is the film truly honest, and what is it like making yourself vulnerable to your fans?”

Caught off guard, I didn’t have a fill-in-the-blank style answer for her. I paused. “Well, I mean, yeah it’s honest. We try to stay honest with the fans all the time, but I mean… sometimes there’s stuff we can’t be. Everyone has things they aren’t honest about. But we try to be. And it’s hard being vulnerable. It’s hard to put yourself out there and be like hey this is me. And my fans are really hard sometimes, they forget I’m human, like they think I’d a god or something, like I can’t do wrong but I can and I do. Everyone does. It’s normal. But yes, it’s honest. I strive to be honest.”

“Thank you,” she said. I could hear the smile in her voice. “Okay, now we have a couple caller questions. First caller… Hello, you’re on the air.”

“Nick, I love you. I’ve loved you since I was ten.”

I laughed, “Hi, what’s your name?”

“Brittany.”

“Hey Brittany, thanks for calling, sweetheart.” I pictured the plethora of Tweets and Facebook messages and Instagrams and whatever the hell else were being sent out right this second over my words.

“Do you have a question about the movie?”

“Yes. I was on the cruise and I saw the preview clip you showed and I was wondering if your family is in the movie? Like if you talk about the stuff that happened with your family?”

I hated when I got asked this question.

“Uhh, you’ll have to see.”

The deejay thankfully cut her off before she could probe much further than that, and we sifted through a few more calls before the deejay said, “Okay, last caller. You’re on the air.”

I was just mentally congratulating myself on making it through an interview without giving Lori and Jack any reason to freak out on me when my mother’s voice came over the airwaves. “Hi,” she said, “I’m Jane Carter, Nick’s mother, and I’m calling to talk to my son, who has refused personal phone calls from me since he got married to that woman in April.” Her voice was harsh. “Nick. Why have you cut me out of your life?”

I bit my lips. “This is not the place for this. We don’t need to be having private family matters discussed on the radio.”

My mother huffed her disapproval of this statement. “I suppose I need to call your PR team? Book some time with you? What is it, like ten grand an hour? I’m sorry, I can’t afford to pay you for some family time, which is really odd considering all the money you claim to give me.”

I wanted to hang up. The deejay was probably sitting there salivating; this was radio gold. If I hung up, she’d probably give my mother her own interview time and I’d end up looking like a total dickwad. I scrambled through my brain, trying to come up with something to say.

“What’s the matter, Nicky, are you embarrassed I’m calling you out on the radio after you just finished talking about how honest you are?”

I constructed my sentence carefully, “I’m embarrassed that you feel that this is an appropriate attack you are making.”

“Attack?” she said.

I cringed the moment she’d said it. I’d used a word I shouldn’t have.

“I don’t see how a mother wanting to speak to her son is an attack,” she said with a chilly laugh, “That woman you married has stolen you from me and I am worried about you. I worry for your well being. I worry that you’re on a bad path, that you’ll end up stuck in a relationship, bound by children or something, like I did with your father. I don’t want you to make my mistakes. I don’t want you to get depressed again and take drugs and drink and God knows what else, like your sister and I’ll lose another one of my babies.” She sounded pathetic, like almost believably sad.

My mother should’ve been a movie star.

She could’ve won a fuckin’ Oscar with this performance.

I could feel my stomach turning.

“Then call me, like a real mother, instead of calling in on a radio station,” I said. Then, to the deejay, “Please disconnect her.”

“I would love to call you but I have no way to contact you!” she shouted, just before they cut her off.

I took a deep breath.

“Well,” chuckled the deejay, speaking for the first time since she’d connected my mother through, “That was certainly unexpected.”

I wondered how long they’d known she was on hold, and how excited they’d been when they realized what kind of insane publicity they were being handed.

When I’d hung up, I punched the wall beside the desk I was sitting at, frustration built up inside me.

I heard a gasp behind me when my fist hit the wall.

I turned around. It was Ethan.

“Sorry,” I said.

He stared at the wall where my fist had been. No mark had been made, but he seemed to be able to see the exact place of impact in his mind just the same....

And he looked fuckin’ terrified of it.

I needed to diffuse that, I thought. So I tried to be funny. “I guess I should apologize to the wall,” I said. Ethan just hovered there awkwardly, despite my joke, though. I swallowed, unsure how to kill the weird feeling that hung between us. I noticed then that he had his guitar. “You wanted to learn how to play,” I said.

Ethan nodded slowly.

“Well. C’mon in.”

He hesitated.

“C’mon, Ethan.”

He came in slowly, eyes still flitting between me and the spot on the wall.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have done that. I just got really frustrated is all.”

“About what?”

“My mom. It’s not a huge deal.”

“Okay,” Ethan said.

He didn’t ask any other questions. At least not then.

Chapter Twelve - Lesson One


“Okay so you gotta tune the guitar first,” I said, handing Ethan a pick. I grabbed the pitch pipe from the drawer. “You can tune it by ear, which I just did with mine, but if you’re gonna play with someone, you gotta use a source pitch. That’s what this is for.” I waved the pipe between my fingers at him.

“Okay,” he had his guitar across his lap, and he ran his thumb over the strings, they were all off.

“Here, listen,” I blew the pitch on the low E. “Now we’re gonna turn the nuts here on the headstock…” I brought my hand up to the head and twisted the little bolts on the top, tightening the string. Ethan watched and mimicked my motions, his hands nervous. He was biting his tongue. I strummed the string, and it rang out an E note perfectly. Ethan did, too, and his was a little off still. “Here, listen again.” Again, I blew.

Ethan worked with the string ‘til it produced the note perfectly. I grinned, “There ya go, bud. You’ll get better at it the more you do it, too.” We worked our way through the notes until we had the two guitars ready to go. Ethan’s hair had fallen over his forehead and into his eyes as he tuned the guitar and he flipped it out of his face with a nod of his head. He grinned up at me, proud of his tuning. “A’ight. Now… The scales.” I moved my hand across the neck of the guitar, “Always play the notes with your fingers at the top of the fret,” I said, laying my fingers over the strings to demonstrate where I meant, “It makes a cleaner sound that way, the notes ring better. Of course there’s times you’ll want a softer sound, so you’ll learn when to play top of the frets and when not to.”

Ethan slid his fingers onto the neck of his guitar, touching the frets just like I was.

I ran through the scales, Ethan copying me, our guitars doe-rae-me-ing all the way through together. Ethan’s smile growing as he played, alternate picking and everything already. He had a somewhat natural talent. I felt good because it was rare that I got to share music with someone like that, where they didn’t already know all if not more than I did. It was nice teaching somebody something. Especially the way the learning made Ethan’s eyes light up.

“You’re doing awesome,” I told him.

He grinned. “Thanks.”

“So you said you know a few chords?” I asked.

“Yeah…” His hands swept quickly from the scales into a couple simple chords - the G, C and D majors. He looked up at me, seeking pride.

“Great job,” I told him, smiling and nodding, giving him the approval he was asking for with his eyes. “That’s a good start. There’s plenty of songs you can play with just those three chords.”

“Yeah?” Ethan perked up.

“Yeah.” I transitioned from the scales into Leaving On a Jet Plane by John Denver. Ethan’s fingers slid across the neck of his guitar, sliding his pick across the strings, falling into pattern with mine until we were both strumming through the song. Without warning, I transitioned from that to Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison. “Sha-la-la-lalalala-la-de-dah,” I sang quietly as I played. Ethan smiled into the strings. “Okay...okay, now look how I’m strumming… It’s one and two and three...skip… four and… Up down up down up skip up down up…” Ethan was gnawing his lip, and his guitar let out a couple groans of complaint as he struck the strings out of their sequence, but after a good twenty minutes of alternating between Jet Plane and Brown Eyed Girl, he’d mastered the three chords and the strum pattern.

I’d been so frustrated and stressed before we started, mostly because of my mother, but I could feel the stress melting away, my heart rate slowing appropriately. The healing power of music…

When we finally finished out one of the songs and I lowered my hands from my guitar, he did, too, and the last note faded off and I said, “That was bad ass I ain’t gonna lie. Great job, man.” I high fived him.

“Thanks,” he answered. “That was cool.”

“Next time we do this we’ll go over the minor chords so you can have a wider range, but for now you did awesome. Practice that when you get chance to,” I suggested.

Ethan nodded, “I will. I swear I will. I’ll be awesome at this. You’ll see.” He grinned.

“You will be, I’m sure of it, if you just practice,” I answered.

I put down my pick.

Ethan looked at mine, then at his. “What’s the difference between your pick and mine?” he asked and he reached for the one I’d just put on the counter, but I snatched it off the desk quickly.

“Sorry,” I said, realizing how rude I’d been to snap it out of his hand practically. “I got this one a long time ago. Supposedly it belonged to Kurt Cobain. You know. Like Nirvana?”

“You were alive when Kurt Cobain was?” Ethan looked wide-eyed, like he’d just found out I was alive when Beethoven was alive or something.

“Dude, I was in the Backstreet Boys before Cobain died.”

“Shit. So wait wait. This is his pick?” He stared down at it with reverence in his eyes.

I nodded.

“Shit that’s cool. How’d you get that?” he asked eagerly.

“I went to go see them, one of the last shows before he died, and I wanted to go meet them but I wasn’t much of anybody yet, so I didn’t get to go in and meet him, other than a quick brush-by in the hallway, but one of the people in his entourage gave me the pick.” I smiled and Ethan dropped the pick into my palm.

“That’s gotta be worth some money,” he commented.

“It’s worth way more than money,” I answered, sliding the pick into my pocket.

It was almost lunch time by the time Ethan and I emerged from the studio. Ethan ran upstairs to put his guitar away and I stepped into the living room, where Lauren was sitting on the couch under a blanket on her iPad. “Well good morning stranger,” she said, “You’ve finally emerged from the Music Cave, I see.”

“Yeah,” I said, “Did us some guitar lessons this morning.”

Lauren lowered her glasses, looking up at me over the frame, “Did you pause long enough to do your phone-in before Lori has a heart failure?” Her lips threatened at a smirk.

I nodded. “Yeah.”

Something about the yeah must’ve been too heavy because she raised an eyebrow quizzically. “And how did it go?”

I shrugged.

Concern officially crossed her eyes. “Are you okay?”

Ethan came back in the room at that exact second. “I’ll tell ya later,” I replied.

Lauren nodded, then turned her attention to Ethan, “How was the guitar lessons? Was he hard on you? Do I have to beat him up?”

Ethan laughed, “Nawh, it was good. We had fun. I learned some great stuff.”

“Good to hear,” she said. “I’m musically challenged, so I respect anyone who has the patience to attempt to learn it… and even more respect for anyone who attempts to learn it with this guy as the teacher.” She looked up at me with a twinkle in her eye.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

Lauren laughed, “Just that you aren’t the most patient teacher in the world.” I knew what she was thinking of… the time I tried to teach her how to play Magic the Gathering and gotten frustrated because she couldn’t understand the meaning of the mana cost. ”They’re just fucking trading cards!” she’d yelled at me, throwing several cards at my chest after I’d yelled at her that she couldn’t use a blue spell because she didn’t have enough mana for it in play.

Ethan smiled at me, “It wasn’t all that bad.”

I stuck my tongue out at Lauren.

She laughed. She was just playin’ with me and we all knew it. “So - speaking of Nick and patience… I started mapping out that trip to the ocean we were talking about and ---”

But before she could finish the sentence, there was a strange chiming sound and both of us looked around for the source. Ethan, however, reached in his pocket and produced a cell phone. “It’s my dad!” he said with excitement, then he charged out of the room, flipping open the cell and saying, “Hello?!”

I looked at Lauren. “Did you know he had a cell phone?”

“Nope,” she answered, surprised. We both stared after him for a couple moments. Then Lauren turned back to me. “So what happened with the interview?”

I sighed. Honestly I was still processing it. Or maybe, rather than processing, I was repressing it. Something like that. I shifted uncomfortably. “My mother called in.”

Lauren groaned and rolled her eyes, taking her glasses off and sitting up, putting the iPad and her glasses on the table. She patted the sofa beside her. I went over and sat down and she wrapped me up in a hug. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I hate that woman,” she added.

I didn’t particularly like her, but something inside me flared up protectively when Lauren said those words. Even after everything my parents have put me through over the years, that natural instinct to protect blood doesn’t fade away.

I doubt it fades away in anyone, no matter what they’ve been through. Not on the very most basic level.

We just get better at keeping that instinct quiet is all.

“I wish she’d just leave me alone,” I said. Lauren ran her hand through my hair and I suddenly felt the rims of my eyes heating up again, burning like they were thinking about crying. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, I instructed myself. Don’t let her have this kind of power over you. Just don’t do it.

“I know, baby, I’m sorry,” Lauren said. “What did she say?”

“I dunno, just the usual bullshit you know? But I hate when she does it in public forums like that. It’s not true, and even if it was it shouldn’t be discussed with the whole wide world listening, y’know?”

“I know.”

I shook my head, “Our family looks so trashy ‘cos of the shit they pull,” I said, “I’m just so sick of not being taken seriously by media because of them.”

Lauren sighed.

“And it scares me, too,” I added.

“Why?”

“Because… what if it’s, like, some kind of fucked up genetic thing? What if I’m just as bad a parent as my parents are?” I couldn’t even look at her as I said the words. I was suddenly very, extremely certain that there was not enough juju-karma in the entire galaxy to undo the mar that was my inevitable destiny to become my parents.

Lauren shook her head, “Stop that,” she said firmly. “You didn’t have a great example of parenting growing up, nobody’s gonna deny that. But Nick, you can’t inherit parenting skills. You can emulate them, but you can’t inherit them. There is no DNA code for that. There’s only learned practices, which you can break. You can look at what your parents did and either do or not do those things. When we get kids - whether we adopt or whatever once we start trying again - you will be the best dad, Nick, because you want to be a good father and, sure, you don’t really know what that looks like maybe but there isn’t a cookie-cutter model for it anyway. All you can do is your very, very best, and that’s all you need to do in the end.”

I closed my eyes and let her words sink in.

“Okay?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Okay.”

I stayed like that, just breathing her in and letting everything fade off of my emotions.

Ethan came back in the room and I sat up, breaking the spell Lauren had put me under. It was strange, I felt so much better just by telling her. I mean, that’s how it always works, I tell Lauren something that’s bothering me and instantly I’m better because she always says just the right thing to make my problems go away. I squeezed her hand with mine, like a silent thank you, and she squeezed mine back like she knew I appreciated it.

“So - your dad called,” Lauren said in an inquisitive tone as Ethan sat down in the chair next to the couch.

He nodded.

Lauren must’ve felt like a broken record: “How’d that go, are you okay?”

Ethan nodded, “Yeah. Yeah, I told him I’m stayin’ with you guys and he was really glad y’all took me in and he said to say thanks. He wanted to know if I could go visit him.”

Lauren and I exchanged looks.

“Sure,” Lauren answered with a shrug at me, “Why not?”

Ethan grinned. “He sounds like his old self. Like before he started drinking. He said when he gets out he’s gonna get us a place and we’re gonna have Christmas together. He said he’ll be out on the twentieth.”

“That’s awesome, just in time for Christmas,” Lauren smiled. She looked at me. I was staring at my feet, figuring out how many days it was ‘til the twentieth. “Isn’t that great, Nick?” she asked.

“Yeah. That’s only like a week and a half,” I said, looking up. My eyes met Laurens’s and she raised her eyebrow at me. She was silently telling me to smile for Ethan. I looked at him, “That’s great, bud.”

“When can we go see him?” Ethan asked enthusiastically.

I looked at Lauren. Truth be told, I didn’t wanna go anywhere near Cumberland Heights. The thought of the place scared the shit out of me, just because of my prior experiences there. I’d left behind a lot of shitty memories and emotions within those walls.

“This week,” Lauren answered. I could tell by her voice that she knew what I was feeling about it.

Ethan looked ecstatic, though. “I can’t wait to tell him about the guitar lessons,” he said. His eyes widened, “Do you think they’d let me bring my guitar and show him what I’ve learned?” he asked.

“Probably,” I answered.

It wasn’t like he’d learned much, we’d only just started, but Ethan’s excitement was apparent. “I’m gonna go practice,” he said, jumping up, and with a wave of happiness, he rushed out of the room and we heard his feet thundering on the steps. A few moments later, the very faint sound of the chords I’d taught him echoed through the house.

Lauren raised her eyebrows.

I bit my lips.

“So we’re going to meet his father, I guess,” she said slowly.

“I guess,” I answered.

“That ought to be interesting.”

“Uh huh.” I was staring at my feet, trying to figure out a way to get myself out of having to go to Cumberland Heights without saying I was afraid of facing my past demons.

Lauren picked up her iPad and glasses, laying the tablet on her lap, she chewed the end of the earpiece on her glasses thoughtfully. “You know, I was talking to Ethan the other day while you were in the shower and he said that his dad’s been to jail.”

I looked over at her.

“Otis Paulson,” she said. “That’s his dad’s name. Apparently after his mother left, Ethan was living with his uncle, the one who died in Iraq, and Otis went to prison, but Ethan doesn’t know why. Now he’s in rehab.”

“Sounds like a real winner,” I commented under my breath.

Lauren nodded slowly, still chewing at her eyeglasses. “I was trying to look him up on Google, but all I found was a private Facebook page and the news report from the accident.” She sighed. “Do you think he’s… safe… for Ethan?”

I shrugged.

“I mean, do guys like that change?” she asked.

“I did.”

“You aren’t a guy like that. You were a child star. That fucks with your psychology and influences and all that… that’s different. This guy… he wasn’t a Backstreet Boy at age 10.”

“I wasn’t either,” I commented.

“Eleven. Twelve. Whatever you were. You know what I mean.”

“I know, I just like exploiting your pure lack of knowledge about the group,” I answered, “It amuses me.”

Lauren nudged me with her toes, “Don’t be a bastard.”

“I’m not,” I laughed.

“I’m just worried,” Lauren explained, “I mean, Ethan’s a good kid, but he’s obviously been through a lot, and… I don’t think he deserves to be put through anymore bullshit.” She paused. “And besides,” she added, “This whole Mom disappearance act is really unnerving, too. How can a mother just leave her child without a really good reason? And what did his father go to jail for? What if he was abusive and Ethan just doesn’t remember it or isn’t telling us or something?” She’d clearly been obsessively worrying over this.

I shrugged. I didn’t have an answer. But since she was putting it out there, I knew I was gonna be wondering all these same things now, too.

She sighed. “Well, I guess we’ll see when we meet him. There’s not a whole lot to be done anyway, it’s not like we are his parents.”

Our eyes met a moment.

Then we both looked away.

She looked down at the iPad, then held it up for me to see. She had Google Maps up, and a long snaking line connected Nashville to the coast of North Carolina. “Anyway, I was looking up maps and destinations and all that for that idea you had for going to the ocean, and we could do it, going the North Carolina direction, if we left Friday to be back Tuesday. You have an in-studio at the radio station downtown the next weekend, so you wanna be back here in time to rest up by then, but --” she shrugged, “If you really want to go to the ocean with Ethan we could do it. It’ll be cold, but we could do it.”

“It sounds like fun.”

“We’ll have to go get some more winter clothes,” Lauren said. “Thermal underwear, that sort of thing.”

I grinned, “You’ll be sexy in thermal underwear,” I said, inching closer to her.

“We’ll get you a pair of those wool red ones, like in the movies, with the button close ass,” she giggled.

“You just wanna see my ass,” I murmured, kissing her cheek.

She smiled, I could tell by the way her cheek moved under my lips, “I just figured you’d enjoy the excuse to have your crack showing, like usual.”

“It’s not my fault I got a long crack,” I mumbled against her face.

Chapter Thirteen - Otis


Ethan seemed to be practicing nearly non-stop over the next couple of days. He had the guitar with him constantly, asking me tips and questions and making sure he had his fingers spaced perfectly on the neck of the guitar, preparing for playing for his father, Otis, at Cumberland Heights. When he wasn’t practicing, he was talking about his father, telling us stories about Otis Paulson that sounded as though they were designed to make us think his dad was the coolest thing since - like, ever. But there were several that made Lauren and I exchange awkward glances.

Otis, it turned out, had worked as an auto-mechanic most of his life at a garage in Brentwood. I actually knew the garage - it was a shack, painted bright French’s Mustard yellow with piles of used tires contained by high picket fences. It had an old ad board outside that, minus a few letters, bragged they did oil changes for $29.99 plus tax, which blinked at night as the fluorescent bulb contained inside flickered and threatened to go out. The legend, Ethan said, was that his mother’s car broke down and she walked almost ten miles in the dark and rain before she found Otis, who was working late at the garage and just about to close up, but still went and towed her car in and fixed it, free of charge as long as she’d agreed to go on a dinner date with him. They’d been married and had Ethan within a year after that. Ethan told us about family trips during which his mother and father argued in the car and the way Otis smelled like cigarettes and Jack Daniels. He reminisced about watching football games, perched on the arm of his father’s chair, and this one time that Otis had knocked him off the chair because he’d cheered for the wrong team.

I’d frowned when he’d told that story, disapproving.

“He’s really passionate about football,” Ethan explained. “Kinda like you. He didn’t hurt me or nothin’, it was like I was one of the guys.”

I’d never hit Chris or Jordan or Shadrick off a chair for not rooting for the Buccaneers.

But Ethan was just so damn excited to go see his father that I didn’t really dare to say anything negative about the stuff he was telling us. I just kind of felt like maybe I needed to keep my mouth shut, the same way people say divorced couples need to keep their mouths shut about their exes when the kids are around.

“I don’t like this asshole,” I said to Lauren as I smeared gel into my hair, making it do it’s thing. She was putting make-up on beside me, drawing the dark smeary lines under her eyes with her mouth open in a big O that made me think of her sex face. It kind of pissed me off that she was dressing up all nice for this trip to go see Otis. “Do I have to go?”

“Yes,” she replied, then back to the O face.

“I really don’t wanna go,” I said, “I don’t wanna go back to Cumberland Heights. Just thinkin’ of that place gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

Lauren dropped the eye pencil into her big make-up trunk thing and dug around, “I know, but Ethan wants us both to go. It means a lot to him, you’ve heard him all week.” She pulled out a lip gloss and opened it, dipping it several times into the thick solution inside the little plastic container. “Besides, I want more than one of us to witness this guy so I can’t blow it out of proportion in my head.” She smeared stuff on her mouth, making it all glittery and pink.

“He’s a dick, I don’t need to witness him to know that,” I said with a grumble.

Lauren threw the lip gloss back in her case. “You don’t know him.”

“I know him enough.”

She turned to me and put her hands on my chest. “You’re projecting your father on him.”

I stared at her. I’d been thinking that Otis sounded a lot like my father, but that wasn’t why I hated him. Was it?

I sighed. I had a feeling that, once again, Lauren knew me better than I knew myself.

“C’mon,” she said, “Let’s go.”

Ethan was literally standing by the door with his guitar, ready to go, antsy with excitement.

I kind of felt like maybe he had tapped all the energy I normally had, he was twice as excited about going as I was not excited to be going.

We piled into the Jeep and drove out to the freeway and went up to Nashville via the 65. It was rainy and kind of blah outside, which matched my mood, but we had The River playing and they had some good upbeat music going on the station. Lauren hummed along, and Ethan fidgeted in the backseat, rubbing his arm and looking from me to Lauren to his guitar.

I parked at Cumberland Heights with about as much excitement as a poor gunsman about to head out into the streets at high noon for a showdown. I stared out at the building, flooding with old sense of shame and regret, feelings that I’d long since packed away neatly in a box filling me up from head to toe. I took a deep breath. Ethan was excitedly grabbing his guitar, seatbelt already unbuckled, and Lauren was undoing hers. I found my limbs to be awkward, like they were too big for me or something, and I undid the belt with some difficulty, then climbed out of the Jeep, my stomach heavy. We walked up, through the automatic doors, and Ethan paused to wait for Lauren and I by a display of pamphlets, detailing the services Cumberland Heights offered.

I’d stood there once, staring at the pamphlets, trying to get the courage up to face the woman at the counter.

“Can I help you?”

Lauren took the reigns as Ethan excitedly ran his hands across his hips, drying sweat in his palms, and I tried not to throw up. “We’re here to visit Mr. Otis Paulson,” she said. “This is his son and we’re… Ethan’s… current, uh, guardians.”

“Fill out this form,” the woman replied, pushing the form across the counter. She tapped into the computer. I turned to the pamphlets.

12 Steps to Recovery: Alcoholic’s Anonymous.

Remembering Who You Were Before Addiction.

Your Family Needs You! Finding Your Reason to Overcome Addiction.

The Effects of Drugs and Alcohol on Your Body.

My throat tightened and I turned away.

“Nick?” Lauren was staring at me expectantly.

“Huh?”

“Your ID.” She was holding her hand out. She’d obviously asked a couple times and I hadn’t heard. I pulled it out and dropped it into her hand. “You okay?” she asked. I nodded.

A few minutes of paperwork and a couple calls “upstairs” later, and a nurse came and checked us and the guitar for anything we might’ve been trying to sneak in. Once that was done, we had to walk through this crazy xray device like at the airports and then they led us to a community room.

People were peeking at us from all over the community room as we were walked through what felt like a big living room to a private den off to one side that wasn’t unlike a waiting area in a regular hospital. I was scratching my arm out of nerves. “Mr. Paulson will be right in,” the nurse smiled and left.

“I’m nervous,” Ethan said, jittery.

Join the club, I thought.

“It’ll be okay, sweetie,” Lauren smiled at him, reaching over and touching his hand like she usually did mine when I was worked up. She glanced at me, and gave me this look like she was mentally doing the same to me.

There was this weird mechanical noise and I looked up to see one of those plastic automatic air freshener spray units overhead. A moment later, the room smelled like linen.

Then the door opened and two guys walked in. One was a fat, beefy man with sausagey-looking fingers, who looked like an Otis to me and I instantly assumed was Ethan’s father. He fit every characteristic you could possibly think of for the traditional, stereotypical abusive father type. The other guy was a tall, narrow guy with barely-there blonde hair and deep set brown eyes and a sort of Turkey-skin texture to his neck.

That one kinda reminded me of my father, actually, a little.

I didn’t like either of them.

“Dad!” Ethan jumped up from the seat he’d landed in and rushed over to the skinny guy, wrapping him in a hug.

I blinked in surprise.

Sausage fingers held out his hand, “I’m Dr. Sonder,” he introduced himself, smiling, “I’m the psychologist treating Mr. Paulson.” He smiled at Otis and Ethan. “You’re the family?”

“We’re taking care of Ethan until Mr. Paulson gets out,” Lauren supplied.

Otis and Ethan broke apart and Ethan grinned at his father with this look of admiration that you see in pictures of kids when they meet their favorite sports heros or Spiderman or something. Otis turned to me - not to Lauren, I noticed, even though she’d been the one who spoke - and held out his hand. “Nice to meet you,” he said, “My son had quite a deal to say about you on the phone the other day.”

I reluctantly shook his hand.

“He’s just the sweetest kid,” Lauren said. She held out her hand to him before he’d even finished shaking mine - which he was doing for quite a long time, by the way - “I’m Lauren, and this is my husband, Nick.”

“Hello, Nick.”

I pulled my hand away, and he turned to Lauren and shook her hand, too, though just as reluctantly as I’d shaken his.

No wonder Ethan’s mother had left, I thought, This guy’s a total misogynist.

Lauren smiled at him none the less.

“I appreciate you all taking care of my boy here,” he said, wrapping his arm around Ethan. He smiled. “I ain’t been the best father in the past couple’r months,” he added, “But I plan to make that right real soon, soon’s I can.” Suddenly he did look like an Otis. Or at least sounded like an Otis.

I mean Otis doesn’t exactly sound like a terribly intelligent name.

And this was definitely not exactly an intelligent sounding man.

They kind of fit together.

Ethan looked about ready to burst with excitement, though. “I missed you,” he said, “But you’re better now and we’re gonna do okay again, right? We’re gonna get a place to live and be okay?”

Otis nodded, “Course we are,” he answered, “Gonna be finer than frog’s fur soon as shootin’.” He smiled and turned to find himself a seat.

Dr. Sonder, Lauren, Ethan and I all sat, too, and Ethan grabbed his guitar excitedly. “Dad… Nick’s been teachin’ me guitar. I’m gettin’ real good. Learnin’ how to play songs and everything. I can play John Denver, dad.”

“Good job,” Otis answered. But instead of asking him to play it, despite the fact that Ethan already had the guitar pulled over, an obvious indication that he wanted his father to ask him, Otis turned to me, “Ain’t you a singer or somethin’? I seen you some place.”

I was gonna say no. I dunno why, but instincts in me had reared up when he asked and I was about to deny it but Ethan cut in, “He’s a Backstreet Boy,” he said, “Mom liked them, remember? Maybe we can find where she went, like - oh maybe Nick could like post on Twitter and maybe she’ll come back if she finds out we’re doin’ okay for ourselves, huh dad? Maybe?”

He sounded like a kid.

I mean he is a kid, but he really sounded like one. Desperate to please dad. This strange feeling was crawling over me, slow, like a creeping chill I couldn’t quite find the source of.

“Very impressive,” Otis said, “You’ve been livin’ the luxe life while I been gone, ‘ey boy?” he asked, and he slapped Ethan on the back in what appeared a friendly way, but seemed just a little harder than necessary to me. Nobody else seemed to have noticed. “Nice of’em, these are good people. I can tell. I can see it in their eyes.” He looked at me, then at Lauren and back to me, and he crossed his legs and sat back, “So very glad y’all could help him out like this, watchin’ o’er him ‘til I get on my feet, it’s mighty fine of you.”

“Not a problem,” Lauren answered again, “Like I said, he’s a sweet kid.”

“I love him very much,” Otis replied, and he put his arm around Ethan and pulled him in for a hug, and the look on Ethan’s face was as though Otis had just bestowed him with the crown jewels of England, he was so pleased to hear the words.

”I love you son.” My father’s words had rung in my ears, like fourth of July fireworks, more colorful and brilliant than anything I could ever imagine. And even in the flashback, they were still so solid and bright and crisp. It’d been the first time he’d said them in an extremely long time, possibly even ever. We’d been waist deep in ocean water at the American Power Boating Association Racing World Championship in Florida and Dad had just taken the win after a summer of me pouring millions of dollars into this dream of his. It was worth every penny, I’d told myself, just to hear those words from him. I’d have paid for that whole APBA Championship run a hundred times over if I’d heard it every time we won.

I knew too well about fickle moments and cheap words lighting up the world.

I fucking hated Otis.

I stood up, “I need to take a piss,” I said. I used the most crass word I could muster. It was like I wanted to shock everyone in the room into understanding that this dude was full of shit. Like maybe using a rude word would discolor the memory of those pretty words and reveal them to be as disgusting as the words I’d used. “Where’s the john?”

Lauren looked like she was ready to karate chop me.

“Down the hall to the left,” Dr. Sonder said.

Ethan was still looking at Otis with admiration, no different than it’d been before I said anything.

I pushed my way out into the hallway and went to the bathroom. I didn’t really need to go but since I said that’s where I was going - it was as good as any other place. People stared as I went into the restroom. It was a single unit room, no lock on the door. Probably so psychos couldn’t lock themselves in with drugs or booze or anything. I leaned against the door and closed my eyes, trying to push thoughts out of my head.

I just wanted a blank mind.

A knock on the door stirred me. “Somebody’s in here,” I barked.

“Let me in.” It was Lauren.

I sighed and moved away from the door so she could push it open. She closed it behind her, staring at me. “What the hell?” she asked.

I frowned.

“Nick, could you be more rude? Ethan’s totally excited, and you’re just over there being this grumpy yeti. You’ve been extremely rude to his father and --”

“That guy’s a prick,” I answered dismissively. I paced the length of the bathroom.

“Nick you don’t even know him.”

“He’s a misogynistic assfucker,” I replied. “And he’s a liar. And he’s fake. He’s shallow. I’ll bet you anything he asks us for help getting a place to live once he’s out of here. Anything.” I waved my finger at her.

She sighed.

“I don’t like him.”

“Nick, he’s broken. He’s been through a lot of shit. Don’t you remember how horrible it was being at this stage? The end zone of recovery?” Lauren looked at me with judging eyes, “You weren’t exactly a ball of sunshine.”

“I didn’t tell someone I loved them when I didn’t mean it.”

“You didn’t mean it for like the first year we were together and you know it,” she said. “So yes, actually, you did.”

“But that’s his son,” I said, “And he should mean it. And he doesn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he’s just like my father,” I snapped.

Lauren stared at me for a long moment. “Are you sure that isn’t why you dislike him so strongly?” she asked, raising an eyebrow, “Is it possible that you’re projecting your feelings about your father onto Ethan’s father without really experiencing Otis to make a judgement based on Otis?”

I gritted my teeth. “No.”

Lauren shrugged, “Maybe you should think about your answer a little bit.” She turned to the door. “Come back to the room when you’re done taking your piss,” she said the word with emphasis.

As soon as she left the room I pulled the toilet paper off the little spindle hanger thing and threw it against the wall just to vent some frustration. I paced some more. I didn’t like Otis. I didn’t like Otis. I didn’t want it to be that I didn’t like my father and projection and all that shit. So what if Otis kinda had a similar build and coloration and hair pattern or whatever of my father, so the fuck what? It had nothing to do with it. Otis had avoided shaking Lauren’s hand and fake I love you-ed Ethan. What was there to like?

I didn’t leave the room until a nurse knocked and told me that Ethan and Lauren were waiting for me to go home.

Chapter Fourteen - North Carolina


Lauren was still less than happy about the whole Cumberland Heights experience by the time came to head to bed. She was rubbing lotion on her arms as she sat, her legs under the covers on her side already, and I brushed my teeth. Ethan had sensed the tension between us, I think, and we’d all been pretty quiet the rest of the night after getting home. Nobody argued about an early bedtime under the guise of us leaving for the trip to the North Carolina coastline in the morning and needing our rest. I knew I needed to talk to Lauren before bed, though, because if I didn’t the ride to the ocean was going to be a bitch because Lauren clearly would have rathered to undergo some sort of horrible torture procedure than be in too close a proximity to me prior to a discussion on the topic of me and Otis and the way I’d acted.

I plugged my phone in and climbed into bed next to her, took a deep breath, and said, “Okay. Let me hear it so we can go to sleep.”

She frowned.

“C’mon, Lo,” I said.

She sighed. “I just really feel like you acted pretty immaturely today, that’s all. Like I get it that the whole going to Cumberland Heights thing stirred a lot of bad memories but that didn’t mean you had to be rude to Otis. Ethan wanted you to get along with him so badly, he looked so disappointed when you didn’t come back to the room.”

I looked down at my hands, “I know and I tried, I really did. There’s just something about that guy that rubs me wrong.”

“He’s not your father, Nick,” she said.

“It’s not ‘cos of that,” I argued, “I just got a bad feeling is all.”

“I know you do,” she replied, “But I still don’t think how you acted was fair. The guy deserves a chance before you judge him. He hasn’t done anything wrong. He’s just a guy trying to make the ends meet and the addiction end, that’s all.”

“Yeah.” I wasn’t so sure, though.

She ran her hand over mine, “I’m sorry I was harsh about it.”

I nodded.

She was still running her hand over mine, staring at me, waiting.

“Sorry I was rude,” I said finally. “Are we okay now?” I asked.

She nodded and leaned into me, our usual sleeping position and we dropped into the pillows and I closed my eyes, feeling a million things at once about Otis and Ethan and my father and my mother and parents in general and this weird combination of fear that I’d be a bad one and fear that I’d never get the chance to find out.




The next morning, bright and early, we were shoving all our crap into the back of the Jeep to head to the North Carolina coast. Lauren had found a house to rent for the weekend right on the water. “They said the house is even already decorated for Christmas,” Lauren was telling us as I drove north to the main highway out of Nashville, “And there’s a marina that does rentals right down the road.”

“A boat?” Ethan looked equally excited and terrified, “I’ve never been on a boat.”

“I fuckin’ love boats,” I announced.

Lauren looked back at Ethan, “He does. I couldn’t picture Nick at the ocean for more than a couple hours without boat access.”

We started the eleven hour drive across the states of Tennessee and North Carolina by seven in the morning, coffee and egg sandwiches in hand after a quick pit stop at Starbucks. I was honestly still pretty tired from the night before, I hadn’t slept a whole lot with all the stuff on my mind and what sleep I had gotten had been pretty rocky, punctuated by strange dreams that flirted with the definition of nightmare, none of which I could remember by morning, other than the feeling they gave me. I only drove a couple hours before Lauren and I switched when we stopped to refill the gas tank on the east side of Knoxville.

We stopped for lunch in the mountains. I nudged Ethan, “Blue Ridge Mountains,” I said.

“John Denver would be proud,” he replied.

“Wonder if his country road is around here some place,” I laughed.

It definitely felt like it was. The highway climbed said Blue Ridge Mountains for what felt like for-fucking-ever, curling around these crazy bends and going up these precipices that seemed to come to immediate apexes. I was glad Lauren was driving, I wasn’t sure I would’ve wanted to try to navigate these twisting roads. I tend to drive too fast for shit like that and I pictured us driving over the edge into one of the valleys between the mountains if I’d been behind the wheel.

On the other side, though, the ride seemed to go really quick. I’d barely started to complain about my legs and ass falling asleep when we were there and Lauren was pulling into the lot of a grocery store so we could get food for the house. In the parking lot, you could smell the salt in the air from the ocean. “Is that the ocean I’m smelling? Seriously? Like for real?” Ethan asked.

“Sure is,” I answered. It smelled even stronger and saltier here than it did in Florida or California. It was like one of those Febreeze sprays or something.

All manner of snacks, drinks, and food items came home with us. Lauren surprised me as she stopped at a display of chips and grabbed a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.

“You want Doritos?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah don’t they sound amazing?” she asked, putting them into the cart. I eyed the display. “Pick a flavor out,” she suggested.

“Seriously?” It was rare that we ate anything but healthy stuff. I’d tried many a time to sneak a bag of Doritos by her.

“Sure,” she said with a shrug, “Why not, it’s the holiday and we’re on vacation. Buy whatever you want.”

So I took advantage of the opportunity to get a package of Oreos and a bag of Doritos - spicy nacho flavor. My fingers tingled for the feeling of the cheesy powder.

When we were finished grocery shopping, we only had a short drive left, through a little town that looked like it’d fallen out of a photograph that would’ve been in black and white and named something like Old Fashioned Town at Christmas. The lamp posts were strung with those tree-looking garland and lights, glowing warm white and reflecting off storefronts with elaborate Christmas displays with light up santas and trains and those elf on the shelf figures and Christmas trees. The center was a roundabout with a big lit up Christmas tree like the one in downtown Franklin, but even bigger.

We stopped at a real estate office to pick up a key to the house and get final directions to get there. The realtor wished us a wonderful vacation and gave us each a candy cane from a bowl on her table.

Once we were through the town, the buildings started getting squatter and soon the pavement and grass started giving way to beach sand and reeds and the street lamps had become further apart, their glow more orange than white the further we went and houses replaced businesses. Finally, Lauren turned into a short little driveway and parked in front of a house that looked like it might’ve been a bright blue-teal color. Inside the front window was a glowing tree. We climbed out and I grabbed mine and Lauren’s travel bags and the two dog crates while Ethan and Lauren split up what was left to carry in, and we walked up to the door and Lauren opened up the house.

It smelled like Christmas in there, a warm combination of spruce and cookies. I breathed deeply. The door opened into a combination kitchen/living area and Lauren put her bags down on a table. Sure enough there were chocolate chip cookies on a big plate there with a note welcoming us to North Carolina for the holiday with a list of Christmas activities going on downtown over the weekend.

While Lauren inspected the list and started nosing around the kitchen, I walked through the living area and into a second living room with a big picture window that looked out over the deck and the dark beyond that told me we had an ocean view.

“Is it out there?” Ethan asked excitedly.

I nodded and unlocked a sliding glass door and we stepped out onto the deck, which was that gray weathered wood. It was windy, and the smell of the salty water was even stronger. The deck’s rails were decorated with Christmas lights, those big-bulb ones like my grandmother used to put on her Christmas tree every year. We went down the steps of the deck and followed a long stair-punctuated boardwalk through a marshy area, where all these reeds waved and whistled in the wind, across the sand to the beach, where the wooden walkway suddenly ended in a pile of sand. I kicked my shoes off and rolled up the cuffs of my jeans to my knees and Ethan copied me. Across the sand we walked, the water roaring in our ears as it slammed into the shore. The moon reflected off the water, and the stars hung over it, too. Far off we could see the curve of the land, ending with a lighthouse, whose light spun it’s welcome messages to the water beyond.

Ethan stared out, eyes wide, “It’s huge.”

“It’ll look even huger in the morning,” I replied, “When the sun’s on it and you can see the whole of it.”

“Can you see Europe from here?”

“Nawh,” I laughed.

He stared out at it.

“C’mon.” I waved for him to follow me and we went even closer until the water was licking at our toes. It was fuckin’ freezing. Ethan jumped back when it first touched his skin.

“It’s cold,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I mean, it is winter,” I laughed.

We stood there, the water giving our toes frostbite probably, staring out at the ocean. I felt better already. Just the smell and the sound of it. I closed my eye and buried my hands in the pockets of my jacket.

“You knuckleheads are gonna catch a cold,” Lauren’s voice carried across the beach. I turned back to see her standing by our shoes at the end of the walkway. I looked at Ethan and nodded toward her and we started back up the beach.

He glanced back at the water as we gathered up our shoes.

“Don’t worry, we’ll get back to it in the morning,” I said.

Inside, I started a fire in the fireplace in the living room and Lauren made grilled cheese and tomato soup with popcorn and we sat and played some board games Ethan had found in one of the closets. It was warm and we could just hear the ocean’s groan and a beautifully lit live Christmas tree glistened in the corner, the room decorated with garland and nutcrackers. I’d completely forgotten all my worries by the time we’d played through a couple rounds of Clue. It was nice just being with them and being there. I was really happy.




That night, I was so tired, every limb of my body felt heavy. I was really looking forward to sleeping, but after the long drive in the car, I needed a shower because I knew I had the smell of car funk all over me and I headed for the bathroom. The problem was there wasn’t really a shower so much as there was a spray nozzle hanging over a bathtub. I filled the tub up with water instead, figuring a bath would be an okay alternative. It was one of those really deep, luxurious type bath tubs, too, with the steps to get into it and the whole nine yards. There was some bath stuff on a little shelf with the towels against one wall and I poured some soap bubbles into the water.

Bubble baths are for boys, too, don’t judge me.

I stripped my clothes off and tossed them in the corner, turned the lights lower, then climbed into the bathtub, sinking so the bubbles were around my face, letting the hot water sting my skin, and I closed my eyes.

I was really glad we’d decided to take this trip. I really needed the break from all the thinking and worrying and stressing I’d been doing back home, especially after meeting Otis, and it was like removing me from a familiar place had given me the freedom to let it go.

There was a knock on the door. “Nick?” It was Lauren.

“I’m just washing up,” I called out.

“Can I come in?” she asked.

I shrugged, “Yeah.”

She pushed the door open and stepped inside, closing it behind her. She had on a little sleep dress with flowers on it and her hair was down around her shoulders. She turned to see the bubble bath and smiled, amused. “Well look at you,” she said.

I sat up and the bubbles clung to my chest and chin. “The shower was kinda pathetic.”

She laughed and came over and sat on the edge of the tub. She reached in and felt the water, “It’s warm,” she commented. I was kind of wishing she’d go away so I could go back to relaxing in the bubbles and stuff. At least until she said, in a deep voice, “Maybe we could make it hot.”

Without waiting for a reply, she slid the sleep dress over her head, tossing it to the same pile as my clothes, and she climbed in with me. Now the tub was huge, but we’re both tall, so when she got in our legs were on either side of each other’s bodies, and she ran her feet around my waist to my back, stroking my skin with her toes. I licked my lips. The bubbles only just barely covered her breasts, which seemed especially inviting to me. I started to move but she shook her head, “Uh uh. You stay put.” She rose up on her knees and the water fell across her skin, making it glisten in the low lighting. She leaned over me, her hands in the water, pressed to the bottom of the basin of the tub at my thighs, and she kissed me softly on the mouth, then the neck and chest just above the bubbles. I ran my hands over her, feeling her skin, soft as a dolphin’s, like silk under the bubbles and water.

She scraped my chest with her teeth and I closed my eyes.

She then proceeded to completely blow my mind.

The water was cold before we got out, the bubbles evaporated, my heart still racing. It’d been one of the hottest things I’d ever experienced and my brain was going a billion miles an hour. We fell into bed and she spooned the back of me as we snuggled under this heavy down comforter in the dark ‘til we fell asleep, staring out at the Christmas lights glowing outside the window, speckling the coastline all the way to the view of the lighthouse way off in the distance.




The next morning, Lauren was still really touchy feely, running her fingers across my shoulders as she got the cereal we’d bought at the grocery store, and rubbing the back of my neck as she read a news article on the iPad and I crunched my cheerios, waiting for Ethan to get up.

“Last night was incredible,” I said.

Lauren smirked without looking up. “Maybe we’ll try a repeat tonight,” she mumbled.

My penis stirred at the very suggestion.

I pulled my cellphone out and texted Jordan.

You’re a fucking genius.

I liked North Carolina so far.

Chapter Fifteen - We’re On a Boat


The next morning, I took Ethan out on a boat.

Ethan kept his eyes glued to the ocean as I talked to the guy at the counter at the marina about renting a boat. Just as promised, the splendor of the ocean was much better in the morning, with the sun reflecting off it like a million diamonds stretching into forever. He kept muttering “wow, wow” over and over.

I rented a Espirit 3775 cabin cruiser at the marina, a boat model I recognized because one of my friends in Key West owned one back in the late 90’s. It was an old boat, but good enough for a day trip out to the water and familiar enough that I would be comfortable driving it. It’d been awhile since I’d driven a Whaler, but once the key was in the ignition I knew I’d be fine. We donned our rented life vests before getting on board, standing on the dock next to our cooler of drinks and snacks. I showed Ethan how to put the vest on and tighten the straps so it wouldn’t fly off should he fall into the water.

“How easy is it to fall into the water, exactly?” he asked nervously tugging the straps as tight as he could.

“It’s like wearing a seatbelt in a car,” I said, “You don’t do it because you think you’ll get in an accident on the way to the store, you do it because you could.” Ethan nervously helped me carry the stuff we’d brought along for the excursion onto the boat.

Lauren had opted out of going on the boating trip, choosing instead to stay home and read. When I’d frowned in disappointment, she’d promised to make it up to me that night and I’d felt a little better, but I was still a little nervous because this was one of the first times it would be just Ethan and me. What if I said the wrong thing and upset him or hurt his feelings or something?

On the boat, we stowed the food down below in the little living quarters, which Ethan stared around at with wide eyes, “You’d never think there was a whole room under here,” he commented, “It’s like being in a hotel.”

“Kinda,” I agreed, “The beds are harder, though.”

He crawled onto one to test it out. “It’s not bad,” he said with a shrug.

We headed back up to the deck and I showed him how to check the gauges to make sure we had plenty of gasoline and oil and we opened the ventilation on the engine and started her up. Ethan watched the dials move on the control panel and breathed excitedly as the boat pulled away from the dock a moment later and I pulled it about to head out of the marina.

“What’s those things in the water for?” he asked, pointing at the buoys that bobbled in the wind.

“Those are buoys,” I said, “They’re like traffic lights or street paint, so you know which way to go and stuff ‘til you’re out of the marina. Three R’s… Red Right Return,” I said, “Meaning the red should be on your right on your way in from the sea, so they gotta be on the left on the way out. Basically they’re like the double solid yellow lines on the street.” I steered the boat away from the marina, Ethan moving between watching the panel and the land getting further behind us. When we were out of the marina, I turned on the navigation systems, flicking switches and turning knobs across the dash. “This stuff tells us where we’re going and how to get back,” I said, waving my hand at the navigation.

“It looks confusing,” he said.

“It’s not once you know what all that does,” I replied.

“How long have you been boating?” Ethan asked.

“All my life,” I answered, “Different size boats of course, but all my life. My family would take vacations on boats. I’ve owned boats. I could drive a boat before I could drive a car. Honestly, I probably do better boating than I do driving,” I laughed.

“Wow,” Ethan watched my hands on the wheel.

“You wanna try?” I asked.

He shook his head no.

“Aw c’mon, you’ll enjoy it. It’s easier than it looks.”

“I don’t have a driver’s license,” he said.

I laughed, “It’s not like a car. Get over here.” I moved so he could get to the wheel and he took a hold on it.

“Which way am I going?” he asked.

“Which way do you want to go?”

“I dunno. Where are we going?”

“Where do you want to go?”

Ethan shrugged.

“The beauty of boating is it doesn’t really matter where we go,” I said. I looked around. “Here, let’s come about and go down by that lighthouse down there,” I pointed. It was the same lighthouse we could see from the bedroom window. Ethan clutched the wheel and I reached over his shoulder to help him turn it slowly ‘round until we were facing the open ocean, the lighthouse like the end zone.

“It’s so big,” Ethan said.

“The boat?”

“The ocean,” he said. “I can’t get over it. It’s just so big.”

I smiled.

Not for the first or last time I wished Lauren had come along so she could see the excitement in Ethan’s eyes as we steered through the water, which was a little choppy from the wind but not bad as we were in a small cove protected by the breaker islands. I showed him how to hit the waves at a 45 degree angle instead of head-on. “It helps,” I said. “It keeps the wave breaking too hard on the ship’s nose.”

We switched seats at the lighthouse, where the water started getting rougher and needed the hand of an experienced driver. I guided the boat through some pretty rocky waves and into the next cove between the breakers, keeping the land to our right as we headed south along the coast.

Around lunch time, we stopped and let the boat rock us gently in it’s current, and I tossed a “lunch hook” out to keep us anchored while we took a break from the drive. We grabbed our food and settled on the steps going down to the galley, where we were protected from the wind, could feel the heat of the cabin rising up and still see the water and the gulls flying overhead in lazy circles while we ate the sandwiches we’d packed… and also the Doritos.

“So did you and your dad used to do this?” Ethan asked me as we ate.

I nodded, “Yeah, we did a lot of boating together. It’s basically the only thing we ever really shared.” I shrugged and chewed my sandwich thoughtfully, watching the white caps dance on the water.

“I’m glad we’re here,” Ethan said.

“Me, too,” I answered.

He paused. “What’s your dad like?”

I took a deep breath, “He’s…” I didn’t know an adjective. I shrugged, “He’s my dad.”

“Are you close?”

I shook my head.

“Why?”

I licked my lips. “I dunno. We’ve had a lot of… of disagreements, I guess, over the years. There’s a lot to it.”

Ethan thought about this for a few moments. “Me and my dad were close when I was little. I hope we get to be close again now that he’s better.” He pulled the crusts off his sandwich and put them back in the bag, which he was balancing on his knees. He was a kind of gangly kid, like you could tell he’d grown quite a bit height wise in a very short time and still had more growing to do. “He seemed a lot better.”

I swallowed back passing judgement.

“Does your dad drink?” Ethan asked, looking up at me.

I nodded.

“I’m sorry, that blows,” Ethan said.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“Is that how come you aren’t close?”

“Part of it. It’s kinda complicated. My dad was always kind of distant… rough, I guess. He didn’t get along too good with my mother, but then again not many people do get along with her.”

Ethan asked, “Are you close to her?”

I shook my head.

He took a deep breath.

I looked over at him and he looked disappointed or sad or something. I knew I should say something profound right then, but I didn’t know what. So I simply said, “I used to be mad about it but it gets easier when you get older. Well, maybe not easier but you learn from it and move on.” I shrugged.

Ethan nodded. He stared down at his sandwich for a few minutes while I chewed, thinking about that. I wondered if maybe I’d said something profound after all. Maybe, I dunno. But he looked back up after a few minutes and he had this look on his face, like this desperate sort of expression. Then he looked back down. I wondered what he’d been about to say, if I’d ever know.

I stood up, “Are you thirsty?”

“Sure,” he answered.

I walked over to the cooler to get a couple drinks and while my back was turned to him, Ethan asked, “Did he ever hit you? When he was drunk?” His voice was hesitant.

I took my time pulling two cans of root beer out of the cooler, my insides feeling queasy. It was a raw question, the kind of question that you only ask if you have reason for it and the reason demanded the utmost trust in the person you were asking.

My answer demanded that, too.

I took a deep breath, staring at the cans, feeling their coldness against my palm, listening to the water rap against the outside of the boat and when I turned around and looked at Ethan I knew I trusted him with it.

“Yeah,” I answered. I shrugged, like it wasn’t the most hardest answer in the world to give. “Sometimes.”

Ethan stared up at me with wet looking eyes.

“I couldn’t ever trust him after that. Every time he’d reach for his belt you’d just -- you’d think what it was you’d done, if there was anything to piss him off that day, and usually he’d just be taking his belt off but sometimes he’d be after you.” I shrugged. “That’s why we weren’t close. Because I always felt like he was an undetonated bomb and he was going to explode at any moment. Couldn’t ever trust him.”

Ethan nodded.

“How about you?” I asked, even though I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer since the very thought of it made my stomach twist into knots so severe I felt it might turn inside out. “Did your dad ever hit you?”

“Same as you,” he replied, trying to be as equally casual about the answer as I’d tried to be. “But he’s better now,” he doubled back quickly. “Like for real. The doctor said so.”

I nodded slowly. Not really in agreement or anything, just processing my thoughts on the words.

“It’s gonna be better,” Ethan said with a deep breath, “It’s gotta be.”

The thing is that once something as sacred as all that is broken, there’s really not any going back. I knew that better than anyone. There’s a certain line that once it’s crossed there’s no going back, once someone has abused you once they kind of do it without even realizing they are. Like because they got away with it once they’re quicker to repeat it and the horror of having done it the first time no longer is a hinderance to them doing it again. Like ripping off a bandaid. It only hurts at first.

I chewed my lip, picturing Ethan going home with Otis on the 20th and discovering that the hard way, like I had when I was a kid time and time again.

“You’ll tell us though, if it’s not better?”

He looked up, “Huh?”

“After you go back to livin’ with your dad. If it’s not better than it was… you’ll tell me and Lauren? So we can help you?”

Ethan shrugged, “Sure.”

“Promise? No matter how scared you are to tell us or what you think we’ll say or what you think your dad will say or do, you’ll tell us. Promise.”

“I promise,” Ethan answered with a nod.

“Here, put my phone number in your contacts now so in case you need it I know you have it.” So I sat there and watched while Ethan put my number into his phone, the only way I could think of at the moment to protect him.




It bothered me the rest of the day, picturing Ethan going home with Otis. I hadn’t liked the guy from the very moment I laid eyes upon him and now I couldn’t stand him even worse than that. I wondered what the hell Lauren and I could do to help him. One thing was for sure, when Otis came knocking on the 20th, if there was any reason for me to think that Ethan was going to end up abused the moment he got home, then there was no way in fuck that I would let him go.

Despite my brain working overtime with all this stuff it had to think about, we had a great time exploring the coast from the water, skimming along over the waves. We saw a group of wild horses grazing and running along the marshes near the shore and we slowed to watch them go. “Lauren’s gonna be sorry she missed this,” I commented.

Ethan asked, “She likes horses?”

“She likes all the animals. She’s huge on the environment and the earth and all that. But yes, she loves horses.”

Ethan smiled. “That’s cool”

“Yeah,” I said.

Later, when we got back to the house, I found Lauren in bed with a cloth over her eyes. I sat down on the edge of the bed, “Are you okay?” I whispered.

“I have a headache,” she answered.

“I’m sorry baby,” I lifted the cloth and kissed her forehead. She felt clammy. “Are you running a temp?”

“Yeah,” she replied. She grabbed the blankets and pulled them tighter around her. “I’m freezing.”

It was pretty hot in there.

I frowned and smoothed her hair, “I’m sorry. Did you take an Advil or something? Do you want anything?”

“I have water,” she answered, waving vaguely at the table by the bed. “I just want to sleep. I’ll feel better in the morning.”

“Okay.”

“Just order a pizza or something.”

Downstairs, Ethan had set up Jenga and we did order the pizza for dinner and we played games ‘til it was getting pretty late and finally we agreed it was time for bed, so we picked up the games and headed upstairs.

“Thanks for taking me on the boat, Nick,” he said. “And for, you know, the talk.”

“No problem, bud,” I said.

“Night.”

“Night.”

He went down the hall to the room he’d taken and I turned back to my own room. Lauren had gone to the restroom, I’d seen the light glowing under the door on the way down the hall to the room, so I just got into bed and settled myself down into the pillows, waiting for her to come back so I could make sure she was okay before I fell asleep. Plus, I wanted to talk to her about Ethan and what I’d learned, hoping that she and I could come up with a plan for what to do on the 20th to make sure that Otis didn’t hurt him again… But when she came back, she crawled into bed and right onto my lap, straddling me and kissing me.

“I thought you had a headache?” I asked.

“Sex cures headaches,” she said.

That was reason enough for me.

Chapter Sixteen - Indefinitely


The next morning, the sun came up bright through the window over the horizon behind the lighthouse. When I woke up, Lauren was already gone from the bed. I climbed out and pulled my sweats on and walked to the bathroom. After I’d done my business, I pulled the paper off one of these little soaps they had sitting on the counter by the sink faucet. It smelled like almond and honey and I sniffed it a few times before actually washing my hands with it and throwing the paper into the trash. I missed the garbage bin and bent down to pick it up and throw it away.

In the trash was a familiar sight.

I picked up the bin and stood there staring down at it… a home pregnancy test box, the wrapper undone, the box open. I felt a lump rise in my throat and I reached into the bin and pulled the box out with my fingertips, carefully shaking it ‘til the little stick came out. I closed my eyes, afraid to see the answer. I like the name Jack, I thought. Jack or Brenda or Sam or -- I opened my eyes.

Negative.

I threw it into the bin and put the bin back under the sink where it belonged.

That’s why Lauren had a headache the night before. It’d been testing day, I just hadn’t known it. I wondered if we’d never stopped trying at all, if all the sex I’d been getting lately was some kind of plot to keep trying without telling me we were trying so I wouldn’t worry about it so much. I felt kinda sick that she’d been lying to me about it.

I paced around the bathroom a few laps before I went downstairs.

Lauren was outside. I walked down the length of the wood walkway, toward the ocean, hugging myself against the cold. Nacho and Igby were out on the sand, chasing the seagulls and sticks Ethan was throwing for them while Lauren watched, sitting on the very end of the wood walkway. I sat down next to her.

“Morning,” she said, still staring at Ethan as he laughed and threw a stick for Nacho, who rushed after it, kicking sand up behind him.

“You feelin’ better?” I asked.

“I’m okay,” she answered.

I reached out and put my arm around her shoulders. Somehow now that I was out here and looking at her, I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d found the test. So I just hugged her instead. I leaned my forehead on her shoulder. Since I’d decided not to mention the pregnancy test to her, I decided I should bring up the other thing that had me upset. “I was talking to Ethan yesterday,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” I paused. Now that I’d brought it up, I wasn’t sure how to tell her without her thinking I was maybe being a little biased still. But I’d felt haunted about it and I knew the only way to fix it would be to talk to Lauren. She was looking at me with a questioning look on her face. “He brought it up, not me,” I added, “But… Laur, we were talking about dads and he asked what mine was like and I just said that me and him aren’t close, you know, and he asked if my dad drinks and if he’d ever hit me before.”

Lauren’s eyes were nervous as the words came out of me.

“So I… I was pretty honest with him, but then I was like ‘what about you’ and he said that Otis hit him,” I said.

The expression in Lauren’s eyes melted into surprise.

“He brought it up,” I reiterated, “Not me.”

“Fuck,” she whispered and she looked away, back at Ethan as he ran after Nacho, waving his arms across the beach. She bit her lips, then looked down at her hands, “Fuck.”

“I know,” I said quietly. “What do we do?”

“I don’t know,” she said.




“So you got yourself laid, did you?”

Not hello, not how are you, not any normal form of greeting. No, when I answered my phone when Jordan Knight called around three that afternoon, before I could even say a word he’d blurted that out in a very self-righteous sort of way.

Lauren, Ethan and I were in the little town at a sort of festival thing they were doing. A lot of people milled around me, trying to buy fried dough and hot cocoa from street vendors, whose carts steamed in the cold night air. Everyone was bundled up, the lights glowing from the store fronts warm and revealing crowded interiors. I tapped Lauren’s shoulder and motioned that I’d catch up with her and Ethan. I stepped aside, “I did. A bunch of times since I’ve seen you last.”

“Jesus,” Jordan laughed.

“Dawg, I got laid in a bubble bath,” I bragged.

“So your pisser’s working again okay I take it,” Jordan said the word pisser funny because of his accent. Well, I mean, it’s not a word anyway, that I know of, but in his Boston it was like pissah. I’d heard him say it a few times, usually as a swear. Like one time he cut his hand during sound check on a sharp edge on his keyboard and he was like well that’s pissah. “You, uh, keepin’ him goin’ during…?”

I took a deep breath, returning to the conversation instead of thinking of Jordan and his weird ass accent. “Yeah. No troubles there. Except we aren’t trying anymore.”

“Aren’t trying?” Jordan asked, a surprised tone to his voice. “You can’t just give up, man, it’s the dream!”

“Yeah… well.”

“What happened? I scare you off with my stories of what it’s like when they get older?” he laughed.

My eyes moved to Ethan and Lauren, who were walking on, laughing and talking together, each holding a cup of hot wassail (which is just a fancy ass word for spiced apple cider by the way). I smiled. “Nawh,” I answered, “Fifteen year olds ain’t as scary as you made it sound like.”

Jordan laughed, “You say that now ‘cos you ain’t got one, brother, but when you do --”

“I do,” I answered, cutting him off.

Jordan paused. “Say what?”

“There’s this kid Laur and I are kind of… taking care of, I guess. We found him, he was livin’ out on the street, we kinda took him in, I guess. He’s fifteen. Ethan.”

“Shit, man, I thought you were ‘bout to say you knocked up some groupie in like Sweden in the 90s or some shit,” Jordan said with a laugh, “Jesus Christ.”

I laughed, “Nawh, nothin’ like that. I mean he’s not mine, we’re just taking care of him is all.”

“How long?”

I thought about the 20th and Otis and how reluctant I was to let Ethan go back to him. I shrugged, even though Jordan couldn’t see that, and I replied, “Indefinitely.”

“Well. Let me know if you need any advice,” Jordan said, “They get to be moody when they’re fifteen. They run hot and cold like a menstruating woman. It’s all those hormones, they go wicked insane. He might be cool right now, but trust me, there’ll come a moment when he turns on you and you’re gonna be like what the actual fuck.”

I wasn’t sure I believed Jordan. Ethan was a good kid, he was grateful and gentle and just a good kid all around. He’d been through rough times, but he wasn’t a bad kid. “Yeah, I’ll call you when that happens,” I said, but I didn’t think I’d ever make that call.

When I’d hung up with Jordan, I caught up to Ethan and Lauren and put my arms over each of their shoulders, hugging both of them into me as we walked through the street in the glow of the colorful twinkle lights. “So how’s Jordan?” Lauren asked.

“He’s Jordan,” I answered. I kissed her face awkwardly, making us all tip to one side. We all laughed as we caught our balance.

We got these fried clam strips from a vendor for dinner that came in a greasy cardboard container and walked through an alley way ‘til we were at the ocean’s shore, where we sat under a faint orange glow of a street lamp on the breaker wall and watched the waves crash on the rocks below us. The three of us were getting closer and closer the more we knew about each other as we talked and threw clams to the seagulls that collected on the sidewalk beside us, begging like little feathery dogs.

It occurred to me as we got back to the Jeep a while later, after we’d sampled sugar plums and watched a guy play The Carol of the Bells with an extraordinary assortment of actual bells, that Jordan was right. We couldn’t just give up on having a baby. I wanted one really bad, and so did Lauren, and she hadn’t given up. She was still testing quietly, going through the same struggle we’d gone through since June all by herself. I wanted to give her a baby for Christmas.

So that night, we had sex again, neither of us mentioning that we were trying, but I was trying so, so hard…




I woke up at three in the morning to the sound of someone throwing up and realized Lauren wasn’t in bed beside me. I rolled out and put on my sweatpants and went out into the hallway. The bathroom door wasn’t even all the way closed, the light spilling onto the carpet outside, so I just walked in as she retched again, her face in the toilet, knees tucked under her on the tile. I pushed the door closed, hoping the smell that permeated the bathroom would stay contained and not go through the whole house, and maybe to muffle the sound so as not to wake Ethan up, too. I knelt down beside her without saying a word and ran my hand down her spine softly, then caught her hair up in a fist.

She looked up when she was done puking. Her face was all red. “Bad clams,” she said.

“That’s the danger of seafood,” I replied.

“Fuck seafood,” she groaned and turned back to the bowl.

“Fuck seafood,” I agreed.

I sighed and leaned against the side of the tub, holding her hair out of the way of her throw up. My eyes wandered to the garbage bin, and I thought of that negative pregnancy test. A couple weeks ago, we would’ve been all excited by Lauren wakin up in the middle of the night barfing and she would’ve grabbed a fresh test out of the medicine cabinet, where we had a couple of them stocked up. There’d been one night like that, back in August, where she’d woke up on the tour bus sick and we’d made this huge deal of it, assuming it was the first sign of pregnancy. But since then we’d become less jubilant over such things. They were always just motion sickness or bad clams in the end.




The last day in North Carolina seemed to come so quickly. We didn’t do much, we took a walk out on the beach and played games some, but mostly we just stayed inside. It was rainy and gray outside and the wind coming off the dark blue ocean was sharp, and freezing cold. “The ocean’s way better in Key West in the summer,” I told Ethan when I caught him staring out the window at it. “We’ll take you to our house there sometime so you can see it.”

“Sweet!” he said excitedly, “My dad, too?”

I shrugged noncommittally.

The next morning we’d packed up and gotten Nacho and Igby into their crates and stowed them into the Jeep. We dropped the key to the house off at the real estate place and got on the highway, undoing all the traveling we’d done. I drove this time, and Ethan sat shotgun. Lauren still wasn’t feeling good and she wanted to stretch out across the seat and fall asleep in the back, so we listened to the radio and sang along when we knew the lyrics and talked while she slept.

“Hey Nick?”

“Yeah?”

Ethan shifted a little in his seat, “Tomorrow, will you bring me up to the mall? I wanna get my dad a Christmas present.”

“Sure,” I replied, my hands tightened a little on the wheel at the thought of how close it was to Christmas and how soon Otis would be coming for his kid. Less than a week. “I gotta get Lauren’s present, too.”

Just in case I can’t knock her up in the week, I added in my head.

Besides, you can’t really giftwrap a sperm.

Well. You can, but that’d be just really gross, and also counterproductive to what we were trying to do, considering they were supposed to be like incubating or whatever they do in there.

Ethan smiled, “We just have to stay away from Sbarro.”

I shrugged, “I dunno last time I was by Sbarro I got something pretty good out of it,” I replied.




Back in Nashville, Lauren woke up feeling much better having slept the entire seven hours we’d been driving. She made dinner and I didn’t even complain when there was some spinach on the plate. Bring on the zinc, I thought eagerly.

“That was a good vacation,” I said, snuggling Lauren in next to me in the bed. “Any time you wanna go back to North Carolina and repeat that whole bubble bath sex thing I am ready.”

Lauren smirked, “Who says we have to be in North Carolina to have bubble bath sex?”

I grinned, “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I mean… we have a tub.”

“We certainly do,” I agreed.

“And we have bubble bath,” she added.

“Yes, yes we do,” I nodded. “But would it be the same?” I asked.

A playful smile flickered through her eyes and across her lips, “Well,” she said, “We could go find out.”

Chapter Seventeen - Return of Otis


I woke up late the next morning. I had an interview in downtown Nashville at noon and it was almost ten before I woke up. I took a shower and got dressed and headed downstairs to find Lauren teaching Ethan how to kickbox in the gym in our garage, where she had a punching bag hanging from the ceiling. “You let me sleep in,” I accused her.

“What time is it?” she looked at her watch, “Shit. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was so late. We were doing this.”

“I’m learning how to kick ass,” Ethan informed me.

I gave him a thumbs-up, “Awesome.”

Lauren glanced at him, then back to me, “Hey I wanna talk to you later, okay?”

“Sure.” I jogged down the couple steps from the kitchen door to where she stood, kissed her on the cheek, waved to Ethan, and headed back through the house to the front door to leave.

There was a lot of traffic on the highway, and I made a probably ill-advised choice to stop at Starbucks in Cool Springs on the way up to Nashville and almost ended up late, only just barely making it in time. The radio station was on the south west side of the city, near the colleges. I was brought into the booth by an overly excited intern with bright blue hair and a nose ring that was kind of distracting. The deejay was a young guy with skinny jeans held up with suspenders and a hipster handlebar mustache that was probably left over from movember. He shook my hand and didn’t bother telling me his name, I have a feeling I was supposed to know it but I so rarely listen to the actual radio that I had no clue.

Once again, we covered the typical questions about the movie and the group, discussing when a new CD might come out, if there was a soundtrack, what it was like doing the filming, etc., and so forth, and then we started the phone calls and once more we got a bunch of the usual stuff, girls calling and squealing and telling me how long they’d loved BSB for and all that. Every time he answered a phone call, I dreaded it being my mother calling for Round Two of our Public Display of Family Drama, but it never came.

Instead, the deejay asked about it.

“So I heard about the, uh, incident on the Florida station last week, when your mom called in,” he said. “What’s the story there, how’d that all turn out, did y’all get to talk after the show?”

I took a deep breath, “I’d rather not comment on it,” I answered. “It was, and still is, a private matter.”

“I get that, I respect that,” he nodded. “Okay let’s word it like this. In the reality show your wife and you did for your wedding - I Heart Nick Carter - Lauren said that your family abuses you and you were really upset about your mom talking about you on social media. Since then, she’s spoken out saying that your accusations on the show were false, calling you a liar and saying that she’s actually the victim. What say you?”

I sighed. I stared down at my hands. Why do deejays and reporters never take I don’t wanna talk about this for an answer? I wondered.

“We didn’t lie about anything,” I answered flatly.

He nodded, “Okay. So you’re saying she lied about you being a liar?”

I took a deep breath. “Dude, I really -- I just don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

He nodded, “Okay. I respect that.”

Like hell you do, I thought.

“So in the end of the show, you and Lauren were talking about making a baby,” he said, nand I already dreaded the rest of his question. “Any news on Baby Carter?”

I shook my head, “No.”

It went on that way for a few minutes, the deejay asking wildly inappropriate questions and me fencing him off until he finally got the hint that I wasn’t going to give him any of the juicy information that he wanted, and he gave up and signed me off the air. I walked back to my car feeling kind of pissed off. I got in and pulled the door shut. I had three texts from Lauren.

Otis called again.

Asked for our address so he can come see Ethan.

Got out of Cumberland Heights early, working on getting a place for him and Ethan to stay he says.

I groaned.

Just a perfect cherry on top of the down-in-flames feeling that the radio interview had just brought on.

Quickly, I searched through my contacts and found my lawyer, Jason. I pressed my thumb to his name when I found it and when he picked up a few minutes later, I said, “What do you know about child guardianship laws?”

“Say what?”

I spent the next ten minutes describing to him the details of everything that had happened, from meeting Ethan at the Cool Springs Galleria to Otis’s plans to pick him up and my reluctance to let him. “Is there anything I can do to… I dunno… stop Otis from taking Ethan?” I asked.

Jason took a deep breath, “To me, it sounds like your biggest challenge is to make the kid realize why he shouldn’t want to go with his father... In most teen custody battles, the kid’s word is just as powerful as anything else because after a certain age they’re considered capable of making their own judgement. It’s only really extreme cases usually that a judge will rule against a kid’s wishes once they’re past that age. Usually it takes like a year to get custody granted. You can file for an emergency custodial ruling, but only in the case of proven physical, sexual, or mental abuse, not just speculation of it. And again you’d have to get the kid to go along with you.”

“Thanks,” I said. I sighed, “Look, I’m gonna talk to him and I’ll probably call you back.”

“Okay,” Jason agreed, “Sounds good.”

I drove home feeling frustrated again. I wished we’d stayed in North Carolina, where the problems had seemed further away than they did now.

Back home, Lauren was a wreck, I could see it in her eyes, but Ethan was excited as could be, oblivious to the worry in her face. “My dad’s coming tomorrow,” he told me in exhilaration as we ate an early dinner.

“Did he say why he got out early?” I asked, shoveling some green beans into my mouth.

Ethan shook his head, “No, but who cares, he’s coming!”

Lauren looked at me with eyes that were wide, wet, and full of nervous energy.

She didn’t like this anymore than I did.

When Ethan had gone to bed, eager to sleep to awaken on the day his dad would be there, Lauren and I sat on the couch until we heard the bedroom door close upstairs. She turned to me, “What do we do?” she asked in a hushed tone.

I sighed, “I dunno,” I answered. “I talked to Jason about it earlier, he said the whole thing is pretty complicated. Basically there’s not a lot we can do. Ethan wants to go with him and we have no proof besides Ethan’s word that anything ever happened between the two of them. There’s like an emergency custody thing we could do, but we’d have to have proof of abuse to do that and again Ethan’s word isn’t much help when he’s so excited about going with him.”

Lauren looked downright sick.

I shrugged.

She pursed her lips. “He shouldn’t have to be abused before we can save him from it,” she said thickly.

“I know that, you know that, the state apparently didn’t get the memo.” I shrugged.

Lauren sighed.

I nudged her, “What did you wanna talk to me about?” I asked.

“Hm?” she raised her eyebrows.

“This morning, when you were out kickboxing with Ethan, you said you wanted to talk to me tonight about something,” I supplied.

“Oh. Yeah.” She licked her lips. “When we stopped… you know… trying…. that was because of the pressure, right, not because you didn’t want a baby anymore?”

I nodded.

“Okay.”

“Why?”

“I was just curious,” she said.

I’d thought for a moment that she was about to tell me she was pregnant. I’m not going to lie, in the three seconds of silence that had hung between the word why and the I was just curious my heart had soared pretty high at the thought of it.

“I have a confession to make,” I said.

Lauren looked up at me.

“I found the pregnancy test,” I said.

“You did?” her eyes were wide.

“Yeah… I know that’s why you didn’t come out on the boat with me and Ethan, I know how the negative tests bother you,” I said. “And it’s okay. I realized when I saw it that… I still wanna keep trying with you. In my heart, I’ve been trying still.”

Lauren smiled slowly, then leaned into me and wrapped her arms around me.

“I wanted to give you a baby for Christmas,” I told her.

She drew a deep breath, “I wanted to give you one for Christmas, too,” she replied.

“Right now, I’d settle for a teenager,” I said, rolling my eyes to look up at the ceiling through which was Ethan, probably squirming with excitement in his bed, trying to fall asleep to bring tomorrow faster. I hated to think of all the hopes and dreams resting on the shoulders of this supposedly new version of his father. I hated to think what would happen if… when… those hopes were shattered. Where would Ethan land, what would happen to his ability to trust? Would he end up the way I had, lost and searching for myself for years, losing myself completely, just trying to numb the pain? I wanted better than that for him.

“Me too,” Lauren said with a sigh.




Typical to the pattern of late, it was rainy and grey out the next day. Nashville December was like that. I brought Nacho for a run in the morning because all of my muscles were tight with dread and when I got back Lauren and Ethan were up and eating breakfast. I took my egg and spinach omelette without complaining about the spinach. We ate in silence, the sounds of the silverware on the plates the only noise between the three of us.

When we’d finished eating, I took a deep breath. “Ethan, before your dad gets here, I wanted to talk to you about something.”

Lauren stared at her plate.

“Okay, what?” Ethan asked. I could see the excitement and expectation in his eyes still.

“Well, see, it’s like this… when we were talking on the boat, about our dads and everything, and you said your dad’s hit you before…” I hesitated because a clouded look had come over Ethan’s face, like whatever I said next was going to go in one ear and out the other, “I just have been really worried about you going back with him is all.”

“He’s better,” Ethan replied. “He’s been to rehab.”

“Rehab isn’t a magical place, though,” I said, “It’s a medical facility and just like any other sickness in any other hospital, just because you go there doesn’t mean you leave cured. There’s still stuff you gotta do to keep the cure up or you can leave without a cure at all. Sometimes people gotta go back more than once. Usually they do. Sometimes they seem better but they get out into the world and it’s a different place. Sometimes they go back to their old ways.”

Ethan stared at me. “What do you know about rehab?” he demanded, “It’s not like you’ve been.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Ethan.”

“You’ve been to rehab?”

“I’ve been through addiction.”

“But you didn’t go to rehab, so you can’t judge it.”

I took a deep breath, “One of my very best friends went to rehab - twice - and he still struggles with his addiction.”

“Being addicted and struggling with that doesn’t mean he’s going to hit me,” Ethan snapped, “He’s not gonna drink anymore. It’ll be hard, I know that, but he’s not gonna do it. Because he loves me. He said so. And the doctor said he’s better.”

I could tell by the tone of Ethan’s voice that we weren’t going to get anywhere with the discussion, so I decided I needed to back off. I didn’t want to end up in a fight with the kid, especially on the last day he was with us. I didn’t want him to go home with Otis and feel like he couldn’t tell me if something went wrong. So I bit my tongue and backed down. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I was just concerned because I care about you and I want you to be okay.”

Ethan nodded. He was still upset. He looked down at the table, then stood up and put his plate in the sink.

The doorbell rang.

I looked at Lauren.

Nacho and Igby went running out of the room to the foyer, I could hear Nacho bouncing off the door as the bell rang again, and Ethan charged out after the dogs. “Fuck,” I muttered, as Lauren and I went out, too.

I scooped Nacho and Igby up, one under each arm, as Ethan pulled the door open and Lauren picked up Mulder, who was peeking curiously from behind the table. Otis stood on the stoop, wearing an old pair of jeans, a threadbare white t-shirt and a grease-stained red plaid flannel shirt. “Dad!” Ethan’s excitement took over and he hugged his father with joy.

Otis patted Ethan’s back. “Hey there, boy,” he said. He nodded at Lauren and I. “Mornin’ to ya,” he said.

I nodded.

“Come in,” Lauren said, waving with her free hand, “Have you eaten breakfast? We just finished, but I could make you an omelette if you’re hungry.”

“Thank you, that’d be mighty nice,” Otis replied.

Lauren turned toward the kitchen, “Nick, come put the dogs in the garage so they won’t bother Otis,” she said. She put Mulder down on the stairs and the cat rushed up the steps, body hung low to the ground and eyes glowing with distrust as he got to the top and stared down from between the banister. Nacho didn’t seem much happier, his fur was up on end around his neck and he was growling unhappily. “Nacho, stop that,” Lauren said. “Nick, go put them away.”

I carried the dogs back to the garage door. “Sorry guys,” I said as I put them down on the carpet by Lauren’s weights. Nacho tried to rush the door before I could close it, but he didn’t manage to get through. He laid down and snuffed under the door frame in frustration.

Otis and Ethan were sitting at the table when I got back to the kitchen, Lauren was mixing egg for the omelette. I leaned against the door, my arms crossed.

“So did you find a place?” Ethan was asking excitedly, practically bouncing in his seat.

“I got me an RV from a buddy,” Otis drawled, “It ain’t much to look at, just one of them ridin’ RVs but it’s got a hookup for cable and everything. Water and the like. I got me a site to keep it on up in Nashville by the Opry.”

“Cool,” Ethan said, “An RV, wow, we could drive all over with that.”

“Costs a load in gas,” Otis said, “We ain’t driving that bitch anywhere. You’re lucky I could afford the gas to come out to here.” He cleared his throat.

I had a feeling that was a pitch for gas money.

Lauren looked over at me.

“An RV,” she said, turning back to the egg, “That’s going to be awful cold this time of year, isn’t it?”

“Ain’t bad, s’gotta hookup for the electricity. I got me an area heater, should be ‘nuff to warm it up. Ain’t much square footage on a RV, you ain’t needin’ much to keep ‘er warm.”

I pictured Cousin Eddie in Christmas Vacation and wondered how long it’d be before Otis was in my front yard emptying his shitter into the sewer drain.

Ethan was grinning, “But it’s a start, right, dad, and when we can we can move out of the RV into a house. Real soon, right? Just as soon as we can?”

Otis shifted, “Well see, boy, that’s the thing is I was thinkin’ maybe you stay with these fine people until I can get us a real place to stay.”

I stood upright, interest peaked. This was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to hear.

“That is, if that’s alright with these people?” Otis looked around at us.

“Yes, yes that’s good, that’s fine,” I said quickly.

Lauren nodded as she flipped the omelette in the pan, “Absolutely. As long as he needs to stay.”

“But dad,” Ethan looked crestfallen, “What about spending Christmas together?”

“We can still spend Christmas together. Maybe you come up and stay with me for Christmas next week and we’ll have some eggnog and ham or somethin’. How’s that?” Otis asked.

“You could come here,” Lauren said quickly without so much as a glance at me. I cringed at the thought of spending Christmas with Otis.

Otis nodded, “Mighty fine of you, mighty fine. Might just take ya up on that,” he smiled. Lauren smiled back, though less eagerly than Otis was, and put the omelette she’d cooked onto a plate in front of him. “You got you a nice woman here,” he said to me as he breathed in the smell of egg.

“Lauren’s great,” Ethan agreed. Then he asked, “How long ‘til we get a house dad? How long would it be? I want us to be together.”

Otis started eating the egg and Lauren wiped her hands on a dish cloth. “I ain’t sure, boy, houses ain’t cheap and I ain’t got a lot of money right now.”

“What about an apartment?”

“Boy, we’ll get us a place as soon as I can, whatever shape it takes.”

“Well you have an RV, why can’t I come live with you on the RV?” Ethan persisted, “It sounds like fun.”

Otis gave him a Look, “It ain’t real spacious and I think you’re better off here with these nice people.”

“But dad --”

“Boy I done told you how it’s gonna be, don’t you be whining about it.” Otis’s voice was final and hard. Ethan sighed and stopped asking.

I glanced at Lauren, eyebrows raised.

Chapter Eighteen - Galleria


I had hoped after Otis’s revisal of the way things were going to go that Ethan would’ve been more open to an honest talk about what to expect from his father in the aftermath of rehab and everything, but he seemed less open about the topic than he had even before. It seemed like he was actually more defensive of Otis, and that was probably at least partially to blame on my quick mouth the day before when I’d argued with him about it at the table just before Otis had gotten there. Possibly part because he knew I was right. Either way, it made me afraid that I might’ve broken some of the trust that we’d had before and I was scared that if, or when, he went with Otis finally, if something went wrong he would be reluctant to call me. I didn’t know how to tell him that there wouldn’t be an I told you so waiting for him, that I’d just help him the best I could.

But the good news was that with Otis trying to figure out the RV/apartment/home situation I had some extra time to figure out how to respond when he tried to come for Ethan.

At least, I thought I did.




“You said you’d take me to the galleria,” Ethan said, coming up behind the couch, where I was watching a rerun of Survivor. He looked anxious as he said it. “I need to get my dad a present.” Otis had ended up saying that he’d come to our place for Christmas to spend the holiday with Ethan, like Lauren had suggested. I’d whined to high heaven to her that night about the offer, but she’d pointed out that Christmas was about family and it wasn’t fair if Ethan couldn’t spend it with his dad because of us and I’d given in with a sigh.

Lauren was vacuuming when I found her to tell her that we were going to the Cool Springs Galleria. I felt a little bit like it was a waste of time for Ethan to buy something for his father - ingrateful as the man already seemed to be - but I didn’t want to try to tell him that. Plus I needed a present for Lauren, so… you know, the proverbial two birds with one stone.

“Have fun,” Lauren had said with a laugh when I told her our plan to go get the cliche last minute manly Christmas shopping done. Then, in a lower voice, “Maybe talk to him if you can, about… you know. Otis and everything.”

“I’ve tried, but I’ll try again,” I answered with a nod.

There were only five more shopping days until Christmas and if the banner that ran hung over the food court in the mall reading that didn’t get through to you, you’d know it by the crowd. It was ridiculous in there. People were everywhere, swarming around almost as bad as they’d been on Black Friday when I’d been here. They were still tug-of-warring over the same sweaters. Ethan followed me into the concourse and we started walking past the kiosks of Dead Sea Mineral Lotion and microwavable heating pads shaped like seals and teddybears. “So what are you getting for Lauren?” Ethan asked as we walked.

“I have no idea,” I replied, looking around. “What’re you getting for your dad?”

“I have no idea,” Ethan answered.

I laughed, “Well this should be easy, since we know what we’re looking for and everything.”

He laughed, too.

We walked in silence for a few minutes, glancing this way and that way at the displays and kiosks and door signs. My brain was whirring, torn between coming up with a way to talk to Ethan about Otis and also searching for an answer of what Lauren would want that wasn’t baby-related. We hadn’t really been doing much else besides thinking about babies lately. She’d been using her iPad a lot, so maybe I could get her like an app gift card or a new case, but those were more like stocking stuffers than an actual gift.

It occurred to me, too, that I needed to get Ethan a Christmas present as well. That would be way easier than shopping for Lauren, I thought, as we passed a GameStop. I glanced at him. “We ought to split up, cover more ground that way,” I suggested, hovering there.

Ethan looked around at the crowd, “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I said. I pulled my phone out to see what time it was. “We’ll meet back at the food court at two-thirty?” I suggested.

Ethan pulled his phone out, too, and nodded, “Okay. Sounds cool.”

“Cool. See ya then,” I grinned, and we split up, Ethan walking on through the crowd and I doubled back to the GameStop.

GameStop is like a crack den for me basically. I looked at all the shiny game systems and game cards and if I’d been having trouble still getting Thor up then he would’ve been healed by the beautiful-ness that was this store. My worries about Lauren’s present and Ethan’s present and Otis and everything kinda melted off as I scrambled excitedly for the used consoles to see if they’d gotten any vintage pieces in that I didn’t already have at home or anything I could use for parts for the systems I was rebuilding. I dug around through the store, collecting a pile of stuff that eventually an employee came over and offered me a basket for. An obscene amount of money later and I’d dug up an old Nintendo GameCube for parts, a working Sega Genesis system and a bunch of games for myself, and a 3DS handheld and a bunch of games for Ethan.

At least I’d gotten Ethan out of the way, I thought as I emerged from the haze of GameStop and refocused on my tasks. Lauren’s present and Otis. I sighed.

I made my way back down the mall, wreckin’ my brain once more. I found myself in a jewelry store, looking at the shiny stuff in the cases, but Lauren had a bunch of that already and it seemed like a traditional dude gift and not really very personal, so I went back out in the mall and kept walking.

I wondered how Ethan was doing on his mission, if he’d found what he wanted yet. I looked at the phone and realized I didn’t have a whole lot of more time before I had to meet up with him and I doubled up my walking speed. I’d spent longer in GameStop than I’d intended to. But most addicts do spend longer in their crack dens than they intend, really.

I was hovering outside of Victoria’s Secret, trying to decide if Lauren would shoot me dead if I got her this strappy black ensemble that the mannequin in the window display was wearing, when my phone vibed in my pocket. “Hello?” I answered it, still staring at the mannequin. Anyone walking by was gonna think I was a pervert ‘cos I’d been staring at it entirely too long. I turned away.

“Hello, is this Mr. ….Carter? Nick Carter?” It was a low voice, a man.

“Uh… yes,” I answered. I pictured it being like the CIA and this was finally my call to join the Men in Black and discover all the aliens or something.

“My name is Vince, I’m the security manager at the Cool Springs Galleria, and I have a young man in my office named Ethan Paulson who says you’re his guardian.”

“Uhm… yes,” I answered.

Vince took a deep breath, “I’m going to need you to come down to my office, sir. Ethan was caught shoplifting and I’ve already contacted the police. I just need someone to hand over custody of the minor to.”

My stomach did several somersaults.

“He was what?”

“Shoplifting. If you could come down, my office is located by the Macy’s on the north end of the building --”

“I’ll be right there.” I hung up and walked quickly down the length of the concourse, my palms turning to pools of sweat, my blood seemed to be running ice cold. I felt sick. I felt like everyone was staring at me, like everyone in the entire place knew why I was walking quick, like they were blaming me for the shock and horror that was happening. I thought of Jordan’s words on the phone that night. He’ll turn on you, he’d said.

“Fuck,” I muttered as Macy’s came into view.

The last time I’d felt like this, I’d gotten a call from my mother asking for money to help pay fines that Angel had accrued trying to steal jewelry from a Rite Aid in Florida years and years ago, before she got her act together and became probably the best adjusted of the whole group of us Carter kids. I remembered the strange realization that someone I’d trusted to do only good things had suddenly done something horribly wrong.

I don’t know why I was so fucking shocked about Ethan, though. Angel I understood, she’d never done anything like that before and never did again, but Ethan -- for crying out loud I’d met the guy after he stolen. It really shouldn’t have been a surprise. And how stupid had I been, not even thinking to ask how he was gonna buy his father a present. Surely Mr. Carver’s tree shanty wasn’t paying him good enough to afford much. I should’ve asked if he had money, should’ve offered him an allowance, should’ve done something to stop this instead of letting him run wild and free all on his own at the mall. I hadn’t even stuck with him to keep an eye on what he was doing.

I found the office, it had a wide glass paneled waiting area where an older woman with dark hair sat behind a desk labeled Mall Security. I stepped hesitantly up to the desk, “Um… hi,” I said.

She must’ve seen a nervous parent before because she stood up and without even asking me why I was there, she said, “Come with me, he’s right in here,” and led me through a door to a short hallway and knocked on a door with a little placard on it that read Vince O'Neill, Assets Protection Officer in gold letters.

Vince opened the door and held out his hand, “I’m sorry to call you like this,” he said, “I’m Vince O'Neill.” He waved me into the office. It was tiny, mostly bare except for a desk full of computer monitors, covered with video feeds from a million angles of all the stores in the mall. How he could watch all of those at once was beyond me. In the corner was a hard metal bench and on that bench, cuffed to the arm of it, was Ethan.

“I didn’t steal anything,” Ethan said in a fiery voice.

Vince glared at him, “Don’t tell me that bullshit, kid, I already showed you I had the tape showing you put the necklace in your pocket.”

“I was trying to get my wallet.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it,” Vince snapped.

“It’s not bullshit.”

Vince sighed, shaking his head. He turned to me. “Honestly, I’ve been watching him for awhile now. This is just the first time I’ve been able to catch him on camera,” he said. “I’m sorry, man. I know it’s not easy to be in your shoes.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. I looked at Ethan. He was staring at his feet, like he didn’t dare to look up.

It felt really surreal, standing there in that office. It wasn’t jail but it reminded me of the two times I’d been arrested in my life and how horrible I’d felt then. I hoped Ethan was feeling that right now, too, and I suddenly understood why Kevin had been so pissed off both times when I’d called him to come get me out. This was humiliating, even if you weren’t the one in shit. It was like claiming responsibility for the person that had done the crime and it felt low and gross and disgusting and the room was cold and Vince had this really curious, condescending almost look on his face as he put some paperwork on the desk.

“Because Ethan’s under eighteen, he’ll be presented with a court summons which will be delivered via US Postal Service from the State of Tennessee. This is the first time he’s been caught, -” Vince said the word caught with emphasis, “- so there will be a fine of at least twice the amount of the merchandise he attempted to steal, possibly more, and he will be asked not to shop at Macy’s again. This form is saying that I’m releasing his personal items to a guardian.” He pushed a form at me and took Ethan’s cell phone, jacket, and wallet out of a box that had been sitting on the desk.

I took the stuff and signed the form.

“What did he steal?” I asked out of curiosity.

Vince reached into the box and produced a little box with a necklace inside with a horse charm hanging from it. “It’s only a piece of costume jewelry,” he said, “Forty dollars worth of cheap crap, really. Well, $43.68 after tax.”

I looked over at Ethan, but he still wouldn’t look up.

Vince cleared his throat. He was pushing another form to me across the desk. “This one is saying that I’ll be releasing custody to you, and here it’s saying I told you about the potential fine and court summons.” I signed that one, too. “And this one is saying that you accept Ethan’s ban from Macy’s stores.” I took a deep breath and signed that, too.

Ethan never once looked at me. He just stared at his shoes.

A hundred forms like that later, or so it seemed at least, and I finally was finished. I grabbed Ethan’s stuff off the counter. “C’mon,” I snapped at him.

Ethan stood up and followed me out the door of the office, past Vince O'Neill and his dark haired secretary and through the mall. I didn’t bother looking to make sure Ethan was keeping up, I was too angry. When we got to the food court, I shoved his stuff into his arms. “Here. Put your coat on.” I stepped outside while he was still getting his stuff together, shoving his wallet and phone into his coat pockets and following after me several feet behind. I had the car running already by the time he pulled himself in and drew the seat belt across his chest.

“I didn’t mean to st--”

I cut him off, “Do not finish that sentence,” I said in a growl.

He fell into silence.

The longer I thought about it, the more pissed off I was getting. I was literally to the point that I didn’t dare to open my mouth until Lauren was there to moderate. I didn’t know what would come out. I wasn’t even sure what I was feeling and thinking. I felt like a black hole of anger.

We drove rest of the way to the house in absolute silence.

Chapter Nineteen - Just Like Your Father


“LAUREN!”

My throat hurt I’d yelled her name so loud, the second I stepped over the door frame into the foyer. My voice was so tense that Nacho and Igby doubled back halfway toward greeting me and hightailed it to the other room. “LAUREN!” I bellowed again. Ethan slunk into the room behind me, staring at his shoes, hanging back a couple feet.

Lauren came running down the stairs, “What?” she asked, a look of fear in her face, “Nick, what is it?” She came to a stop on the bottom step, her eyes traveling between me and Ethan, “You asshole, you’re both okay,” she said, gasping for breath, “Don’t you dare call me in that tone unless one of you is dead!”

I shoved the papers from Vince into Lauren’s hands.

“What’s this?” she asked, looking down at it, “Cool Springs Galleria Assets Protection? What?” She shuffled the papers, then looked up, “What happened?”

I looked at Ethan, “Tell her what happened.”

“I didn’t steal,” he said through his gritted teeth.

“DO NOT lie to me! That dude had a tape of you doin’ it!” I yelled.

“I’M NOT LYING!” Ethan yelled back, “I DIDN’T DO IT!”

Lauren’s eyes were wide, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Calm down. What happened?” she looked at me.

“We split up at the mall and I got a phone call from this security guy sayin’ he picked Ethan up at Macy’s for shoplifting,” I said.

“Shoplifting?” Lauren looked at Ethan.

“I didn’t do it,” he repeated.

“He has a tape, Ethan!” I snapped, but Lauren held her hand up to stop me, still looking at Ethan.

“I was getting my wallet and I didn’t have enough money and I meant to put the necklace back. I took it back out of my pocket and I was gonna leave it on the last counter so I could find it easy after I found you, Nick, and suddenly this fuckin’ asshole --”

“Language,” Lauren injected.

“-- jumps me and drags me off to his office and starts yelling at me and callin’ the cops and everything else,” Ethan finished.

“Bullshit,” I said.

“It’s not bullshit!” Ethan yelled again.

Lauren looked at me with a disapproving look. “Nick, --”

“No, Lauren, no. He stole, we can’t just let him steal.” I turned to Ethan, “You’re a thief. You stole pizza the day I met you, I know you’re a thief. You told me you don’t usually steal when I talked to you about it, which means you have other times before, and now this. What’s next, the fuckin’ hope diamond?”

Ethan rubbed his face. “I didn’t steal this.”

“You’re a liar.”

“I AM NOT A LIAR!”

“You’re gonna throw away your whole life this way, Ethan, I’ve seen it happen and it’ll happen to you if you ain’t careful. You’ll ruin everything… you could have so much, do so much, and actually be something, actually make something of yourself if you just break the cycle! But no. You can’t even tell the truth when you’ve been caught. You’re gonna end up just like your father.”

The words had fallen out of my mouth before I could stop them.

He stared at me like I’d just slapped his face.

Lauren closed her eyes with a sharp inhale of breath.

We all kinda stood there a second - the longest second of history - staring at one another.

It was a line I’d had thrown at me a hundred thousand times, one my mother said everytime she wanted to end an argument because she knew that above every other thing in the world that was my biggest fear. Some people fear dying alone or drowning or being in airplanes or spiders or any number of phobias that engulf them to the very bone. Me, I have the threat of becoming my father. It freezes me exactly the same way and therefore it was the most absolutely scathing remark that could ever be said to me, and whether it had the same effect on other people or not, it was still the most terrible thing that I could possibly think to say.

Ethan turned and ran up the stairs, pushing past Lauren and thundering to the room, where he slammed the door shut behind him.

Lauren turned to me, one eyebrow raised.

I breathed heavily - I could feel my nostrils flaring with the breath going in and out of them, my chest rising and falling. I flexed my palms.

“Really? Was that necessary?” she demanded.

My face felt hot. “I just -- I want better for him.”

“I know,” she hissed, “But you could’ve said it nicer.” She sighed, looking up the stairs, then back at me. “You need to go talk to him.”

I closed my eyes, steeling myself, trying to prepare for what I might face if I went up there. I was about to reply to Lauren when the bedroom door opened again and once more there were footsteps on the stairs. I looked up. Ethan was coming down, his old bomber jacket and jeans on, the messenger bag around his chest and holding his guitar by the neck.

“What’re you doing?” I asked.

He didn’t answer.

Ethan pushed by me and Lauren and headed for the foyer.

Lauren gasped and she went after him. “Ethan, wait. Ethan.”

I stood there dumbfounded as the front door slammed.

“NICK!” Lauren yelled from the door, “Nick!”

I hurried out to the foyer and pulled open the door. Ethan was halfway across the lawn. I rushed after him. “Ethan, c’mon. Come back inside.”

“No. I don’t have to stay here. If you think I’m a liar and a thief then why would you want me to stay with you anyway?” he snapped, “I’m going to go find my dad and stay with him.”

“Ethan, you can’t walk from here it’s too far.”

“Then maybe I’ll steal a car,” he snarled.

I grabbed his messenger bag and held on. “Ethan.”

“Ethan, please!” Lauren caught up to us, barefoot and hugging her sweater around her chest. “Please. At least let me give you a ride,” she begged.

He glowered at me.

“Please.” Lauren’s voice was emotional.

“Fine,” he answered.

“I’ll get the keys,” I said.

Ethan shook his head, “Lauren said she was going to give me a ride. She doesn’t think I’m a lying thief.”

“I’ll get the keys,” Lauren said, and she turned and went back in the house.

Ethan and I stood there facing each other on the lawn. I stared at him. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t trying to be an asshole, that I didn’t know how to handle this, that I was sorry I’d said what I had, that I hadn’t wanted it to end like this. “I’m not good at being a parent --” I started, but he cut me off.

“You aren’t a parent,” he snapped, “And thank God for that. I wouldn’t want you for a father if you were the last one on the whole planet!”

Gutted. That’s the only word for what I felt.

I stared at him, my jaw moving, but no words coming out, like the very air I breathe had been sucked out of me vacuum-style.

Lauren came running out of the house, like she hadn’t believed he would’ve waited for her. She was waving the Jeep keys in her hand triumphantly. Ethan walked over to the Jeep and they got in and I watched them drive away as the words he’d said echoed in my head, a refrain all too similar to the things I’d been telling myself all along.




I wandered around the house aimlessly, pacing more than anything. I hoped that Lauren would come back with Ethan, say that she’d worked her magic and talked him into staying and that we’d somehow work it out. I couldn’t stop the words echoing through my head, all my worst fears confirmed. My hands were shaking. Finally, desperate to quell the torment my brain was putting me through, I went down to the studio and dug into the very back of the filing cabinet. There, a long time ago, I’d hidden a half of a pack of Marlboros when I’d been trying to quit smoking. They were the Emergency Pack, the only one that Lauren hadn’t found. I carried them out to the back deck like they were made of gold and there I proceeded to chain smoke them, one after another, praying for the nicotine to ease my nerves.

I was almost finished with them when Lauren got home. I had the last one in my mouth and I was smoking it slowly, savoring it. She came through the house and stood in the sliding glass door frame, half in and half out of the house. It was cool outside, about 40 degrees, and she leaned against the door, raised eyebrows, watching me smoking.

For almost a solid minute, neither of us said a word. It was like neither of us dared to.

We stared at each other.

“So he went,” I said, finally, lowering the cigarette. She stared at it with disdain, then looked back up at me and nodded in a disapproving manner. I blew the smoke I’d been holding in my chest and mouth out, watching it float away. “Is it bad?” I asked.

“Bad?” Lauren asked, her voice trembled between anger and sadness, a dangerous place to balance. She raised her eyebrows almost off her damn forehead. “Yes it’s bad,” she said, “It’s really, really bad. It’s a piece of shit RV in the damn winter in this cheap ass campsite on the crappy side of the touristy area, Nick, not a fuckin’ palace!” She shook her head, “You couldn’t just listen to him, hear him out, could you? You had to act like a god damn ogre.”

“I wasn’t a god damn ogre,” I snapped, “He shoplifted, Lauren. There was a video to prove it, don’t you get that? He did it and then he lied about it.”

“Did you actually see the video?” Lauren asked.

“Well. No, but --”

“Nick, all he wanted was you to believe in him over the word of some douchebag rent-a-cop at fucking Macy’s. That’s all he wanted. He’s a fifteen year old boy. They make mistakes.”

“Stealing is not a mistake, it’s a fucking crime,” I said loudly, “And lying about it is just as bad.”

“Maybe he wasn’t lying, did you ever think of that? Did you ever pause in your tyranny long enough to think maybe the security guy was lying or exaggerating or jumping to conclusions?”

I rolled my eyes.

Lauren’s mouth set. “Don’t you roll your eyes at me.”

I took another drag from the cigarette.

“Put that fucking thing out,” she said. I lowered it and blew the smoke out of my lungs, but I didn’t put it out. “You could’ve at least given him the chance to explain himself and apologize,” she said hotly.

“He wasn’t going to apologize,” I answered, “He was too busy denying he ever did anything wrong to apologize. That and calling me a bad father, like he even fuckin’ knows what a good one is like --”

The words still stung, even in me repeating them.

Lauren stared at me. I took another drag from the cigarette. “PUT THAT THING OUT!” she yelled and she reached over, snatching it from my hand, threw it onto the floor and stamped it out with her foot so violently the thing never had a chance.

“What the hell, Lauren?” I snapped, “One fucking cigarette is not the end of the world. It’s my fuckin’ lungs, why’s it matter to you if I smoke?”

“You can’t smoke around me,” she snapped back.

“Why not? I need a smoke around you right now, you’re being such a bitch,” I retorted.

Her eyes widened. “Why not? Why not? BECAUSE, you asshole, you just can’t smoke around me. You don’t need any other reason other than because. Now fucking pick up all these cigarette butts off this damn deck and go change your filthy smoky clothes and figure out exactly how you’re going to apologize to me for calling me a bitch. You better have some really good apology planned before I see your face again,” she said, and she turned and went inside.




I managed to put off the apology part for the rest of the evening, dawdling around taking the shower and changing and then locking myself into the basement studio and laying in the dark on the couch scrolling through pages of people named Ethan Paulson on Facebook, desperately trying to find my Ethan Paulson, but to no luck. It was time for bed by the time I emerged from there to find that Lauren had cleaned the kitchen and living room and all the lights in the house were off. I used the flashlight feature on my phone ‘til I got up to the bedroom, but the lights were off even in there and she was in the bed, her back to the door.

I hovered in the door a moment, but she didn’t respond to my presence and I wondered if she was even awake. I went in the bathroom and closed the door, leaning against the wood as though I could keep all the issues outside. I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked tired. And I was. I was really tired. In every possible way.

I sank onto the floor and let my legs stretch out in front of me with a sigh, closing my eyes and leaning my head back against the door.

When I finally got up and went out to the bedroom, Lauren was still back-to me and I crawled into the bed, laying flat on my back, staring up at the ceiling. I was there for a couple minutes, just breathing heavily, before Lauren rolled over. She licked her lip hesitantly, like she was contemplating something, then finally she said, “Nick, I need you to apologize to me so we can have make-up sex.”

“What?”

“Make-up sex,” she repeated. “Either that or we’re going to have to have I’m-still-mad-at-you-but-too-horny-not-to-fuck-your-brains-out sex with you.”

Both sounded okay to me.

I stared at her through the darkness. “It’s not the time to be trying to have a baby right now,” I said.

“I’m not,” she answered, “I’m dying over here. You smell like -- like you -- and I just want to climb on top of you and --” she let the words trail off.

I wondered what had gotten into her lately. We’d had sex like five times in the last week and they’d all been initiated by her. Usually it was me that was rolling over in the dark, trying to talk her into sex, not vice versa. She was biting her lip now, though, and I felt the blood rushing to my crotch from all over my body.

But I didn’t really feel sorry for what I’d done yet. I still felt like Ethan had done something wrong and sure I guess I should’ve let him talk, but he should’ve said sorry, too. He’d been the one that had done the wrong thing, not me. But I guess I didn’t have to call Lauren a bitch earlier, that wasn’t really good. I hadn’t meant it - even though she had been kinda bitchy about the cigarettes - I’d just said it ‘cos I was mad and stuff. I took a deep breath.

“I’m sorry I called you a bitch,” I said.

“Okay, I forgive you, now get your clothes off,” Lauren said, already reaching for the drawstring of my sweatpants.

After, long after when Laur was asleep and everything even, I laid there wondering if Ethan was okay, if he was happy, and if I’d ever see him again.

Chapter Twenty - When The Shit Hits the Fan


It was six in the morning when I was awakened by my cell phone buzzing on the nightstand. I groaned. Lauren pulled the blanket up over her ear to block the sound out. “Fucking phone,” I groaned louder.

“Make it shut up,” Lauren whined.

I swatted my hand at it ‘til I managed to wrap my fingers around it. It was Jack, my PR agent. “Jack,” I mumbled at the phone without actually answering, simply sending it to mute with a swipe of my thumb.

“Why is Jack calling you at this ungodly hour?” Lauren whimpered against my chest.

“Because he’s a minion of Satan,” I murmured back, and I closed my eyes, letting the phone drop onto the pillow beside me and feeling myself start to fall back to sleep. I was just about there when it started buzzing again.

“No,” Lauren whined, “No.”

I muted the phone again.

We layed there in silence for a few moments. And then it started again.

Lauren sat up and grabbed the phone from my pillow. “Do you know what time it is?” she hissed in a voice that would’ve stopped me from challenging her if I was on the other end of the line. She was quiet a second then she shoved the phone at me, “He says it’s an emergency,” she said. She groaned and rolled out of the bed, walking into the bathroom and closing the door.

I raised the phone to my ear. “This better be good.”

“Nick,” Jack said, “How do you not know why I’m calling already?”

“It’s called sleep, Jack,” I said, “You should try it some time.”

“Can I assume your lack of knowledge of what I’m speaking of means it’s not real?” Jack asked haughtily.

“Uh… sure,” I answered, confused and groggy, “Whatever will make you hang up faster.”

Jack took a deep breath, “Do you know who Ethan Paulson is, Nick?”

I rubbed my eyes, “Uh… yeah. Kinda. He’s this kid I’ve been kinda helping out while his dad’s in re--”

“Fuck. So it is real.” Jack’s voice was defeated. “God damn it. Nick. You have to tell me this stuff, you can’t go having secret lives off the clock and expect it not to come back to me. Who’s the mother? Does Lauren know? Maybe we could spin this into a second season of I Heart Nick Carter somehow --”

“What?” I sat up. “What’re you talking about? Ethan’s just some kid from around town I’ve been helping out.”

“He isn’t your kid?” Jack asked.

“No! He’s like fifteen --”

“You were old enough to have kids in 1999,” Jack said pointedly, “And if I’m not mistaken you were boinking anything that had two legs and a set of breasts back then, so I’m sorry if I questioned the validity of the rumor.”

“What rumor?” I asked. I would’ve defended myself against the accusation but -- yeah, kinda, he was right there. Just not about the Ethan being mine part.

Jack took a deep breath, “There’s a rumor going around the kid is yours,” he answered, “That he’s the product of a quickie backstage with a groupie back in the late 90’s. They’re saying your baby mama caused a ruckus between you and Lauren and that’s what was with the sharp no on the radio in Tennessee was when they asked you if you were trying to have kids.”

I stared at my knees, unable to process everything he was saying. “But how’d anybody even find out about Ethan?” I asked.

Another deep breath from Jack and I knew, beyond a doubt, that I wasn’t going to like the answer at all. “Well, apparently somebody saw you springing him out of a mall security office yesterday after he was caught shoplifting in a Macy’s. TMZ has footage and everything.”

“How in fuck --”

“I don’t know how, Nick, I just know that they do. So I need the details right now. Who is this kid, why’s he with you, what’s the deal with the shoplifting, and what’re we doing to fix this? ‘Cos right now, you come off looking like a complete asshole. There’s got to be a way to spin this out to the positive. Just tell me everything.”




After I’d told Jack everything, we hung up so he could go work his PR magic and I held my forehead in my hands and growled in frustration. I wished I’d never picked that kid up from the sidewalk that night… or even if we’d just let the little bastard walk back to his freakin’ grain mill and never run after him in the woods… this wouldn’t be happening to me. I looked over at Lauren to complain about juju and what a fat lot of good it’d done us, and that’s when I realized she’d never come back from the bathroom.

I got up and went over to the door and knocked. It wasn’t shut all the way so when I rapped on it, the door started to swing open, just as Lauren yelled, “I’ll be out in a minute!” She was sitting on the toilet seat, the lid closed, staring at the sink. On the sink counter was a pregnancy test stick.

I stared from her to the sink.

She looked up at me, “I said I’d be out in a minute!” she said anxiously.

“The door was open,” I breathed.

She bit her lip.

“What’d it say?”

“Hasn’t yet,” she answered. “What’d Jack say?”

“The internet thinks Ethan’s my shoplifting lovechild from 1999.”

Lauren took a deep breath, “God bless the internet. They never get anything right.” She turned back to the pee stick. She looked positively terrified.

“How long?” I asked.

“However long you were talking to Jack, give or take a second or two to open the box and actually take the pee on it,” she answered with a shrug.

I rubbed my hands together. “After everything yesterday… do you still want a kid with me?” I asked her, “Considering I’m officially the worst parent ever according to both my supposed lovechild and what Jack made sound like the entire internet?”

“The internet is stupid and Ethan doesn’t think you’re the worst parent ever, you aren’t even his parent,” Lauren answered, “You just had a really bad miscommunication is all.”

“He said he wouldn’t want me to be his father if I was the last father on the planet,” I told her.

“He didn’t mean it, I’m sure, it was just the heat of the moment.”

I shrugged.

“Nick, Ethan just wanted someone to stand up for him and to believe in him. That’s all.” Lauren looked up at me, “He needed somebody who was going to protect him. He was let down.” She shook her head, “That’s all those words were. They were disappointment lashing out in the only way that he knew how to do.”

I looked down at my feet, “But shouldn’t my natural instinct be to protect my kid?” I asked, “Not get angry at them? I said the worst thing I could possibly say to anybody in the whole world to him.”

“Did you mean it?” Lauren asked.

I thought about it. “Yeah,” I answered. “I did… because if he does keep stealing and all that, eventually he will be like his father. He’ll be like my father, like hundreds of fathers who just waste their lives away drinking and regretting. He’d be like me that way. He could do so much with himself --”

“You’ve done so much, Nick,” Lauren interjected. “Just think about all the plaques on the wall out there. All the awards on the shelves downstairs. You’ve done a lot.”

“But I mean like, I could be smarter and I could have better patience and be less apt to blow my temper and I could be a better man most of the times,” I said. “That’s the stuff I regret. And it’s the stuff he’s got a real potential for if he doesn’t end up throwing it all out. He needs to get it together and go back to school and learn and become something great.” I shook my head. “I don’t want him to become like Otis and be livin’ in an RV as though it’s a home. It’s not a home. I want better for him than he’s giving himself.”

“Because you care about him,” Lauren supplemented.

I nodded.

“That’s all he wanted,” she said. “That’s all anyone wants, really. To be cared about.”

My throat burned.

“And that’s all it really takes to be a good parent, Nick,” Lauren added, “Caring about someone.” She was quiet for a moment.

In the other room, my phone started vibing loudly on the nightstand.

“Are you gonna get that?” she asked.

“It’s probably just Jack, it can wait.”

Lauren shook her head, “No it’s okay. You go answer that and I’ll let you know about… this.”

I hesitated. “Okay,” I said, and with that I went back to the bedroom and picked up the phone again. “This better be good, Jack,” I said without even looking at the call ID.

“Comin’ back to bite, is he now?” Jordan’s drawl filled my ear. “I just can’t help but wonder why you didn’t call me before now. I just saw the news. You seen it right?”

I sighed, “Jordan. Hi. Yeah, my publicist called already.”

“His job’s gonna be a bitch today,” he laughed. “So - how’s it goin’ with the kid?”

I looked back at the bathroom door longingly. I wanted to hear a shout of jubilation from in there. A whee-hee of excitement, a yahooey of joy. Something. Anything. But it was silent. “He went back to live with his dad,” I replied.

“The rehab guy?” Jordan asked.

“Yeah, he got out, got an RV. Ethan decided he wanted to go live with him instead of me and Lauren after I got pissed about -- something,” I said.

“The shoplifting,” Jordan supplied.

“Yeah,” I replied. “That.” I rubbed my forehead. Was there anything the Internet hadn’t told the world about the incident? I wondered.

“Probably for the best in the run of it,” Jordan said. “I know it blows right now, considering how hard y’all been tryin’ for a kid and all and it seemed like this one just kinda fell on your lap out of the blue or whatever, but really it’s a good thing. He sounds like he was trouble. Could’ve been some kind of con artist or somethin’,” he added.

I shook my head, “No, he just was a kid that needed someone to care about him” I paused, chewing my lower lip. I ran my hand across the top of the dresser as I walked around the room, pacing, staring back at the bathroom door, waiting for something from within. As though on cue, the door opened. “Look. Jordan, I gotta go.”

Before he could say a word, I hung up. I looked at Lauren.

She avoided my gaze.

“Laur?” I asked.

She took a deep breath, “I’m going to call Dr. Walden and get an appointment,” was all she said.

I dropped my phone onto the bed, disappointed. There’d been something in the air just then, when I’d walked in on the test, when she’d said all those words about caring being all it takes to be a good parent and all that… I’d really thought that would be it. That the universe would’ve given in at that moment if she was ever going to at all.

I was about to say something - something to cheer her up, to make it better - when my phone vibed again on the bed. I looked down. Now it really was Jack. “Babe,” I said, my voice sad, “I --”

“It’s okay. Take care of the PR mess and I’ll take care of this,” she answered, interrupting me. Without another word, Lauren grabbed her own phone and went back into the bathroom, closing the door firmly behind her this time.




Jack had me doing a shit ton of damage control over the next several hours. Lauren emerged from the bathroom and said she had an appointment at Vanderbilt with a local OB-GYN that Dr. Walden had recommended and no, she said, she didn’t need me to go. She left me at the house with the dogs to do the plethora of interviews that Jack had set up to try to undo all the Internet drama that had followed whoever it was leaking the information about Ethan.

I faced question after question about whether I felt like I was a bad parent for allowing this to happen. My stomach turned as time after time I reminded them that I wasn’t a parent at all. Each time the words stung, Ethan’s words echoing in my head, and the failure that was all of my attempts to become a parent glaring in my memory.

TMZ, E News, MTV, Yahoo, People Magazine, a handful of radio stations… one right after another, repeating the same stuff, hearing the same rumors, feeling the same shitty feelings over and over and over.

Even my mother had to get into the act via her Facebook page...

Nick is a father???? God bless the child. I always feared this would be truth one day because of all the women Nick was with in the 90s!!! I told him many times that he needed to be safer about sex but I wasn’t welcome on the tours with the Backstreet Boys after Nick turned 18 and I wasn’t there to protect him anymore. But this is terrible news!!! Nick can’t even love the family he has, how can he love another person as unselfishly as a parent must love a child???? I am just praying to every deity there is that this is a MISTAKE and also if it is not that my grandson will come to me if he needs anything that Nick and his wife can’t provide. GRAMMA will ALWAYS have OPEN ARMS FOR YOU.

I was to the point of not being able to handle one more thing when my phone went off yet again.

I closed my eyes.

“Now what?” I murmured by way of answering, assuming it was Jack on the other end. I fully expected him to launch into a tale of some new gorey details about what the Internet was saying now… but I was greeted by a strange sound instead. My brows creased together. “Hello?”

On the other end, there was a crashing sound.

“Hello?” I pulled the phone away from my ear to see who it was. It was an unknown caller from a local number. I pressed the phone to my ear once again. “Hello?” I tried again, listening closely to the noises, sounds I couldn’t quite distinguish.

I was about to hang up, assume it was a wrong number, a prank call, a pocket call, a fan who’d obtained my number God knows what way…

Then… clear as day…

“Nick, help me! Please!”

“Ethan?”

In response, the line went dead.

Chapter Twenty-One - You Don’t Deserve Him


I didn’t know where he was. The only thing I knew was that he was in an RV park some place near the Opryland Hotel because that’s where Lauren had said she dropped him off when she’d driven him home. So I started north on I-65 while I repeatedly alternated between dialing Lauren’s cellphone number and the number Ethan had called me from. “Answer, answer, answer,” I muttered my mantra as I merged onto the I-40 loop that circled the city of Nashville, my hands gripping the wheel tight as I found myself in rush hour traffic. I chewed my lip, anxious, and craned my neck side to side, as though doing so might help me see past the box truck ahead of me, blocking my view of how far the traffic jam stretched on. “C’mon,” I said.

The desperation in Ethan’s voice was haunting me. The emphasis of the please echoing in my brain. I didn’t know what was happening, how bad it was. All I knew was that when I found them - and I would, if I had to knock on every fucking RV door in the city of Nashville - if even one hair was out of place on Ethan’s head then Otis would have me to answer to.

I pulled around the box truck, the thought of Ethan being hurt turning my stomach and making my mission even more inevitably important. I drove down the shoulder - past all the yellow caution signs directing me to never drive on the shoulder - and veered off the highway at the next exit, opting instead to take a couple backroads that normally would’ve taken longer, but in this traffic might be quicker. Certainly so, I told myself, if I didn’t exactly follow the speed limit…

How I didn’t get stopped, I’ll never know.

I was just putting my blinker on to merge from Lebanon Pike onto the I-155 Briley Parkway to get to Opryland Hotel when my phone vibed against the seat beside me. I picked it up, cradling it between my shoulder and my ear, driving a good twenty miles an hour over the speed limit. “Hello?” I asked.

Please, let it be Ethan, I thought.

“Nick, it’s me --” Lauren said, and I was so relieved that I cut her off mid-sentence.

“BABY! Baby. Quick. What campground did you bring Ethan to?” I asked.

“What? The one with the bear… what’s his name, the cartoon bear?”

“Yogi?”

“That’s it!” Lauren was proud of herself.

“So Jellystone? Got it. Babe, I don’t got time to explain’ right now, lemme call you back.” I hung up before she could protest and turned onto the exit for Music Valley Drive and the Opryland Hotel.

Jellystone was one of three different camping places on Music Valley Drive, past the nice hotels and even past the dingy rent-by-the-hour type places that cluttered the far end of Music Valley Drive. Next door to it was a Christmas tourist attraction, a place with thousands of crazy ass twinkle bulbs that the owners charged twenty bucks a car to drive through and watch the lights flicker on and off. Personally, I thought the flickering was more seizure inducing than season’s greetings, but that’s beyond the point.

I pulled into Jellystone’s winding drive, navigating around, glancing at the various RVs that cluttered the sites, my heart pounding. I tried to remember what the RV had looked like the day Otis had come to the house. I looked at the clock. It’d taken me almost an hour to get to this point. I was scared that it might be too late.

Finally, I spotted it -- a shitty pop-out trailer, which looked even shittier fully extended while nestled among a bunch of fancy Winnebago Tour RVs. I pulled up next to the old truck Otis had the shitty thing hitched to, and got out, jogging up to the door. There was the glow of the TV, but not much else. No sounds, nothing. I glanced around, but none of the other trailers were lit up, either. I took a deep breath and knocked on the door.

The door opened and there stood Otis, filthy and reeking of booze. He wore cut off khaki shorts and a food-and-sweat-stained undershirt, socks with a pair of crappy sandals, and was clutching a bottle of Jack in one hand, the TV remote in the other. He stared down at me through the screen door. “What the fuck do you want?” he demanded.

The sight of him made every blood cell in my body zing with anger. The disdain dripped from my voice, “I’m here for Ethan.”

“He ain’t here,” Otis gruffed.

“Where is he?” I demanded.

“Fuck if I know, the little prick took off.” Otis downed a good mouthful of Jack. “Now get the fuck off my property.” He slammed the door.

The muscles in my entire body tensed. It took everything in me to walk away, back to the Jeep, only succeeding by reminding myself why I was there: to get Ethan. I looked around in the dark surrounding the campers, at the trees and the nearby traffic zooming past on Briley Parkway. Ethan was a master at being outside, alone, I reminded myself. He could probably find a hundred places for shelter around here, but the temperature was dropping quickly, even colder than the night we’d first found him.

I got in the Jeep and as I started the engine a threadbare, moth-eaten curtain moved in the trailer window and I caught a glimpse of Otis drinking even more of the fucking Jack Daniels, right out of the bottle, his fist around the bottle’s neck, tight and shaking from drunkenness.

I gripped the wheel tighter.

“Ethan!” I called as I drove, my window unrolled. “Ethan!”

I was halfway through driving my fifth circle throughout Jellystone when my phone vibrated. It was another unknown number, but I quickly answered it. “Hello?”

“Nick?” Ethan’s voice trembled. Trembled is literally the only word for it. It was meek and broken and quiet. It was horrible because you could feel the hurt in the one little name.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“A Waffle House. The street sign says Pennington Bend.” He paused. “Please… Please come get me… Please.” He was crying.

“I’m on my way,” I said.

I drove to the Waffle House with an urgency that I’d never felt before swelling up inside of me. It was the strangest feeling, like nothing in the world else mattered other than seeing Ethan’s face and knowing he was okay. Like really, truly okay.

I pulled up into the lot and there he was, standing out front next to the phone booth, his hands buried in the pockets of his bomber jacket, hair all messy and greasy and his messenger bag. He came rushing forward to meet me at the driver’s side door as I got out. I gathered him up into a bone-crushing hug, and it wasn’t until that moment I realized I had been holding my breath. “Fucking hell,” I whispered, “Am I glad to see you.” I held him out at arm’s length, looking him right in the eye and said, “I’m sorry.”

He didn’t say anything.

Instead, he pulled me back into the hug, burying his face into my neck and I could feel hot tears on my skin. “It’s okay buddy,” I said thickly, “It’s okay.” But even after I’d said the words, he didn’t let go, his fingers wrapped tight into the back of my jacket, clutching the fabric. He gasped for breath, shoulders shaking. “I’m here, and I ain’t leavin’ you, okay? It’s gonna be okay. I’m here.” I rubbed his back. “Aw Ethan, it’s okay, buddy.” It was breaking my heart, him crying like this. “Tell me what happened.”

He pulled back to arm’s length and looked up at me and in the street lamp’s glow I could only just make out the dark shapes of bruises already forming on the side of his face, and he had dried up blood smears under his nose and a nasty gash on the edge of his eye socket on the left side, which he could barely open.

“Otis did this to you?” I demanded.

Ethan nodded.

“Get in the Jeep.”

“What?”

“Get in the Jeep,” I repeated. And I turned to the driver’s side. I grabbed my phone from the dashboard as Ethan climbed in and I hit Lauren’s speed dial as I backed out of the Waffle House onto McGavok Pike so fast that the Jeep’s wheels squealed. We shot across the overpass and I hung the right onto Music Valley Road, back toward Jellystone.

“Why are we going back?” Ethan asked, panic in his voice, “You aren’t making me go back, are you? I don’t wanna go back. Nick, please don’t make me go back. Please.”

“I’m not making you go back,” I replied.

On the phone, Lauren answered, “Hello?”

“Babe, it’s me.”

“Did you find Ethan?”

“Yes.”

“Is he okay?” she asked.

“Call the cops.”

“What? Why? Fuck. Nick, is he alright? What’s happening?”

“Just do it. Tell them to come out to Jellystone and to make it fast or I’m going to fucking kill Otis.”

Ethan was staring at me from the passenger seat, eyes wide, and I pulled into the campground. I slammed the Jeep into park behind the truck again outside the shitty old trailer.

“Nick, what’s going on?” Lauren’s voice was panicked even worse than Ethan’s had been moments before.

“Just call the cops,” I answered, and I tossed the phone back to the dash, having hung up. I looked at Ethan. “You stay right here,” I said.

He nodded.

I got out of the car and marched to the door of the RV. If I’d been zinging with anger before, it was nothing compared to what I was feeling now. My fist slammed against the door so hard it could’ve literally bent and I wouldn’t have been too surprised.

“What the fuck do you want, now?” Otis demanded, opening the door and staring out at me through the screen.

I grabbed the screen door and yanked it opened and stepped up into the trailer in two swift steps, forcing him to drunkenly back away. I got up into the trailer and took a couple fast paces to be right in Otis’s big, stupid, filthy face. I could feel the rage flowing through me, could feel the hatred burning the sensory nerves in my palms. Every time I’d ever been mad at my parents for something they’d done to me that I didn’t deserve flowed through my mind’s eye, the bruises on Ethan’s face punctuating the feelings… This was it. This was my chance to avenge every time that a kid had ever been hurt and cheated by a family who didn’t love them, by parents who didn’t know how to be parents.

“You fucking hit him?” I shouted, our noses so close they were nearly touching.

His eyes were having trouble focusing, but his voice came out sharp and spiteful, “Fucking beat the kid around a bit, but he ain’t hurt much. The little shit was disrespectin’ me.”

“What the hell is there to respect?” I shot back. I waved my arm at him, “Look at you. You smell like piss and alcohol. When was the last time you took a fuckin’ shower? Fresh out of rehab and already off the wagon… Pathetic. Who the hell would respect you?”

“Watch your damn mouth,” Otis growled.

“Or what? You’ll beat me, too?” I demanded.

His fingers had moved to his belt buckle.

I laughed, “Go ahead. Give it a try. I dare you.”

“Fuck you,” he grumbled.

I pointed my finger into his face, my hand shaking, “You know what you are, old man? You’re a coward. And you know how I know you’re a coward? ‘Cos I got a father just like you all my own and he’s a fuckin’ coward, too. You know, there ain’t much difference between the two of you, actually. You’re both assholes whose lives ain’t got no place to go but down the toilet because you’re too addicted to let go of the drugs that keep you from seeing straight. If you had any idea what kind of fuckin’ amazing person your kid is, you wouldn’t waste yourself away with that damn Jack Daniels and whatever the fuck drugs you’re on. You’d be spending time getting to know him before he grows up big enough to know better than to give a shit about you.” I stared at him. “The bad thing for you is I think you might just have crossed that line tonight.” His hand had shrunk away from his belt buckle and he’d backed into the couch and sat down.

He looked pathetic. He didn’t look scary at all sitting there like that. But I knew out in the Jeep there was a very, very scared kid whose heart had been shattered for probably the hundredth time. I knew that feeling way too well. I’d been that kid. A million times I’d been that kid.

“People like you and my own parents - you break people down. Ruin lives. Kids don’t understand it isn’t their fault that you hurt them. We think it’s our fault, we think we’re the ones to blame. But it ain’t us that’s to blame, it’s you. You and your insecurities. We’re just the victims. But we go our whole lives trying to make up for the shit you do to us, constantly apologizing to the universe, always afraid to become the person that you told us we were. It took me thirty-something years to realize that there was no place for that kind of fuckery in my life.” I shook my head. “You can’t hurt Ethan like that anymore. I won’t allow it. He doesn’t deserve that, he doesn’t deserve you in his life.”

I heard the wail of cruisers outside.

I took a deep breath. “And, most of all, you don’t deserve him.”

And with that, I turned around to leave and found Ethan standing in the screen doorway. I didn’t know how much he’d heard of what had been said. I walked out the door just as the cops were pulling up, their blue lights even brighter than the dancing lights of Christmas next door. Several owners of the surrounding RVs were peeking out their windows, and I put my arm around Ethan’s shoulders. “I told you to stay in the Jeep,” I said.

“I didn’t want him to hurt you,” Ethan answered.

I squeezed his shoulder gently.

Chapter Twenty-Two - I Already Did


Two hours of talking to the cops, signing paperwork granting me temporary custody of Ethan until further plans could be made, and some stitches later, Ethan and I were waiting for the final papers to sign at the ER’s exam room. It was all very stringent and clean looking. I sat on a little stool, Ethan on the paper-covered table’s edge, staring down at his feet. Neither of us knew how to breach the subject of everything that had happened between us, so it was an awkward silence that settled upon us. Finally, after some time had passed as we waited, I looked over at him. “You know it’s not your fault, right? None of this.” I waved my hand at the bruises on his face and in the air between us.

“Yeah,” he answered offhandedly.

“No kid deserves that.”

He shrugged.

“I mean it.”

He took a deep breath. “Nick, I stole the necklace, okay? I did steal it. And then I lied to you. A lot. And to Lauren.” He looked up at the ceiling, blinking rapidly. I recognized the motion. It was a tough-guy-doesn’t-wanna-cry move. Then he reached into his jacket, fished around a moment and held out his hand.

I held mine out, too, and he dropped something into it. Something small.

My guitar pick. Kurt Cobain’s guitar pick.

I looked up at him.

“I stole this, too,” he muttered. “I was gonna sell it. There’s a collector guy I know that sells stuff on eBay for a low commission fee and I knew he could get a good price for it,” Ethan chewed his lip. “I wanted to hauck it so I could help my dad with buying a place to live. I stole the necklace for Lauren. Because you said she likes horses.” He pulled his messenger bag up onto his lap and unzipped it. He took out a really nice leather wallet, two CDs, a Tampa Bay Buccaneers license plate frame, a small candle, and a small box of chocolates. I stared at the pile of assorted stuff on the table next to him. “I stole all this stuff,” he said. “For you guys. For Christmas. It wasn’t right, but I didn’t have any other way to get y’all Christmas presents. And I was gonna bring money back as soon as Mr. Carver paid me for the weekend shifts.” He looked desperately at me. “So you were kinda right to be mad at me.”

I stood up and looked at the stuff he’d stolen. I held up the license plate frame, “They probably appreciated you lowering the inventory in this case, considering how shitty they’ve been this season,” I commented.

Ethan sniffed a laugh and looked down, a slight smile threatening the corners of his lips, but the shame of the moment more strong than the joke I’d made.

I licked my lips, “We didn’t need presents.”

“Y’all have been so nice to me, I wanted to do something in return and… there’s nothing else I could do,” he said, looking up at me with wet eyes.

I put the license plate frame back down, pushed the stuff to one side and sat where it’d been, propping my arm up on Ethan’s shoulders. “You know what you can do that I want more than any of this stuff?”

“What?”

“Don’t steal anymore,” I said, “And study hard and get good grades and get real smart and do real amazing things with your life and someday, when you’ve done all kinds of cool shit, you can take a second and maybe thank me. Think you can do that?”

Ethan nodded.

“Cool.” I smiled, “Thanks.”

“I dunno if I’ll ever do anything amazing though,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because,” he answered with a sigh, “I just don’t know if I will is all.”

I recognized the defeat in his voice, in the look in his eyes. I knew what he was feeling all too well. I’d felt it so many times over the years, usually it was the feeling I had after long nights out at a bar when I’d be sitting somewhere nursing my hangover, my mind still spinning over blurred memories of the night before. It was the feeling that made me get back up and go back out hours later, the feeling that drove me to destroy myself. A worthless, empty kind of feeling, like nothing in the world would change if you weren’t part of it. The same feeling that whats-his-face got in It’s a Wonderful Life before the old man guy showed him how shitty life would be without him. A feeling that I’d carried around with me for years before Lauren had saved me.

I put my hand on his shoulder. “Look… Ethan… I know it’s hard to believe right now, but it’s gonna get better. You gotta believe me, you gotta trust me about it. You gotta stay strong, don’t give in to feeling sad and sorry for yourself. It ain’t you that’s wrong, it’s the world around you. You are a great kid. It might not always be easy - in fact, I promise there’s gonna be times that it’s gonna be really hard to do that right thing and stay on course - but… you’re gonna find someone someday who believes in you so much that when they look at you and they tell you that you can do it, you’ll feel it, you’ll know they’re right. And it won’t matter what kinda bad stuff’s in your past, they won’t judge you by it. They’ll still tell you you’re a good person, and they’ll show you how to do better, and they’ll be your biggest fan. Always. No matter what. Even when you’re scared they’re gonna leave you, they’ll surprise you and be there just the same.” I paused to take a breath. “I promise you… you’re gonna find someone like that someday.”

There were tears in Ethan’s eyes as he stared intently back into my gaze, his lower lip trembled just a little bit. “I already did,” he said.

I stared back, my mind reeling, trying to figure out who he meant… I realized it was me just as the door opened and the doctor came back in.

“Okay,” he announced, “I have the paperwork here… let’s get you out of here, you’ve had a long night.”

I moved through the discharge process on autopilot, my mind working on a knot of thoughts and feelings connected to Ethan saying that I was the person that made him believe in himself. Despite the fight we’d had, despite the shit I’d said, despite the shit he’d said. It was okay in the end between us, and not only okay, but maybe, just maybe, I’d been able to make it better.

In the Jeep, we were on I-40 when Lauren called, frantic because the last she’d heard I’d been about to go in and kill Otis at the RV. We brought her up to speed on the Jeep’s Bluetooth, which took most of the ride home. When we got back to the house, I pulled up into the driveway rather than park on the curb and Lauren came out the garage door, her eyes all red from crying, though she’d pulled it together by then, and wrapped Ethan in a huge hug. “Welcome home,” she said.

“Thanks,” he answered.

“You must be exhausted. C’mon inside,” she guided him in the door, glancing back at me anxiously before turning to follow him. “I’ll make coffee… or cocoa? Would you rather tea?”

“Whatever’s good,” he answered. “Cocoa.” Lauren saw him to the kitchen table, where Nacho jumped against his leg eagerly awaiting to be patted and I stood, leaning against the counter while she busied herself by opening the cupboards and getting the stuff together for cocoa.

My eyes traveled across the foyer to the living room, where the Christmas tree glowed, the base surrounded by presents of varying sizes. Lauren saw my eyes on the stuff under the tree as she carried Ethan his cocoa. “You know me,” she said, “I get busy when I’m nervous.” She put the mug down by Ethan, “I wrapped everything.” She shrugged.

“Thanks,” Ethan said, sipping the cocoa.

In all the craziness, I still hadn’t gotten Lauren a Christmas present. And here it was, almost too late. I rubbed the back of my neck.

When the cocoa was gone, we went to bed. “Let us know if you need anything during the night,” Lauren told Ethan. She fussed nervously over his bruises and finally let him disappear into his bedroom. She looked up at me. “He’s okay, right?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“You’re sure?”

I nodded, “The doctor said so.”

We went into our own bedroom and laid down in bed after getting ready for sleep, putting on pajamas and brushing our teeth. Lauren crawled in next to me and wrapped her arms around me tight, laying her head against my chest.

“I think we have a teenager,” I told her.

“I think so too,” she answered.




The next day, Ethan and I shipped all the things he’d stolen back to their respective stores with anonymous notes of apology. I would’ve made him bring them back in but I was afraid of the security guy in the Cool Springs Galleria, so we just mailed it, though the lady at the post office firmly reminded me that there was no way it would get there before Christmas, seeing as it was the next day.

In the parking lot I said to Ethan, “Here’s the deal. You’re welcome to stay at our house as long as you like. But no more stealing. For any reason. If you need something, you tell us and we will either buy it for you or help you figure out how to save the money to get it. Understand?”

He nodded.

I took a deep breath. “Okay. Now. Next mission. I need something for Lauren for Christmas.”

Ethan shrugged, “A horse necklace?”

I laughed, “While I’m sure she would love it, I’m not sure it’s the right thing for me to get her,” I answered.

“Well… what’s she want?” Ethan asked.

“A baby,” I answered.

I realized when I said it, that I hadn’t asked her how her appointment had gone.

I also knew what I could give her.




That night, we went for a Christmas Eve walk, putting little cotton antlers on the dogs and strolling through the neighborhood, looking at all the lights on the houses. The lights Lauren and I had put up might not’ve been the best in the neighborhood, but we were one of the few that had put our own up, making it better only because it wasn’t some professionally done impersonal thing like some of the other houses were. We chose favorites and sucked on candy canes as we walked, talking and laughing over Christmas memories.

Back at the house, we watched some movies - Christmas Vacation and a Christmas Carol among them - and drank eggnog and ate breakfast for dinner, bacon and eggs and pancakes with cinnamon sugar sprinkled on top, cut into snowflake shapes. When the night got late, I pulled up a three hour long YouTube video that looked and sounded like a fireplace on the TV screen and we played some board games by the fake fireplace.

Eventually, Ethan was sleepy and headed up to bed and it left Lauren and I sitting in the living room on the couch, just watching the stupid fireplace video crackle and flicker. I ran my hand along her shoulder, staring at the orange glow. My mind was still on the talk I’d had with Ethan at the ER, about the person that changes your life by believing in you, and I was really thankful to be holding mine.

I moved to look at her face and leaned down to kiss her cheek with reverence. She looked up at me. She must’ve feel the sincerity of it because she asked, “What was that for?”

“Because you’re you,” I answered. “Thank you.” I squeezed her into my chest.

She laughed, “Well thank you for being you, too,” she replied.

The video of the fireplace ended and went back to the YouTube comment page and I reached for the TV remote and turned it off so we were sitting there in just the Christmas tree light.

“Can I give you my present now?” I asked.

“Don’t you want to wait until tomorrow?” Lauren answered.

“I’d rather Ethan not see it,” I said.

Lauren raised an eyebrow, “Oh?”

“One sec.” I got up and fetched the bag from next to the tree where I’d put it. Yeah, Ethan had been with me when I got the stuff but I don’t think he’d really paid attention, given what it was. I put the bag on her lap. She smiled and sat up straighter, tucking her legs underneath her and gingerly pulling the tissue I’d stuffed in around the stuff inside out, a smile crawling over her lips. She reached inside and withdrew a pregnancy test and a bag of spinach. She laughed and raised her eyebrow.

“Nick, what’s this?”

“I want us to start trying again,” I replied. “Officially.” I stared into her eyes, “I want a baby with you, and I’m gonna do whatever it takes to make one. Seriously, I’ll eat nothin’ but spinach for the rest of my days if that’s what it takes. Spinach in everything, I swear it. ‘Cos we deserve a baby and the universe is gonna give us one, damn it, whatever it takes.”

Lauren smiled, holding the spinach and the little pink box in her hands. “You’re… incredible.”

“Yeah? You like it baby?” I asked, smiling. “I know it’s kinda lame but…”

“No it’s perfect,” she replied, “It’s not lame at all. It’s exactly what I wanted.” She chewed her lip, “Well. I guess I owe you a present now, too, don’t I?” she asked, and she pointed at the tree. “See that flat, square box there, by the window? Get that.”

I got up and got the box and came back, settling beside her. “Can I shake it?” I asked.

“Not too hard,” she replied.

I shook it. It made a light thumping noise, something that filled the box. I looked at her.

“Open it,” she said.

I pulled the ribbon that she’d wrapped put on the box off and stuck it to my forehead, “Look, I’m a present unicorn,” I said. She laughed and shook her head. I turned back to the present, eagerly ripped the paper away to reveal a plain brown cardboard box. I was getting more anxious, and so was she. She fidgeted, watching my fingers as I opened it, and discovered that inside that was something wrapped up in bubble wrap. I unfurled the bubble wrap and found myself staring at a picture frame. It was white ceramic with colored letters that looked like they’d been written in crayon reading I love Daddy. In the frame was a strange blue-grey image that looked like snow on a dark night with one tiny circle of clearness. I looked up at Lauren.

I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t dare to think. I just stared at her.

She reached down and pointed, tapping her fingernail against the glass of the frame, right at the clear spot in the grainy grey. “That right there,” she said. “That’s your baby.”

I felt tears rush my eyeballs from the back. There was no stopping them. I held my breath and my face got hot. I looked up at her. “We’re gonna have a baby?”

“We’re gonna have a baby,” she nodded.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“This… this is inside you?” I ran my fingers over the framed picture.

Lauren nodded. “The pregnancy test was positive. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to get your hopes up until I knew for sure. The doctor did an ultrasound and I’m five weeks.”

I put my hand over my mouth, staring at the picture, tears pouring down my face. I couldn’t believe it. “We made that,” I said, “You and me.”

Lauren laughed, “Yeah. We did.” She snuggled up to me and stared down at the picture, too. “We’re pretty bad ass.”

“Yes we are,” I replied. I wiped my eyes with my hand, still staring at the picture which laid in my lap, and wrapped my arm around her.

She ran her fingers over the picture.

“You think it’s a boy or a girl?” I asked.

“It’s too soon to tell,” she replied.

“It looks like a boy,” I answered.

She laughed. “Yeah? The little circle on the picture looks like a boy to you?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “It just feels like a boy.” I put my hand on her stomach. “Will it kick me?”

“It doesn’t have legs yet,” she laughed.

“How long ‘til it can kick?”

“I dunno. Maybe we should get a pregnancy book.”

“Yes,” I answered, “Yes I wanna know when he’s gonna start kickin’.”

Lauren laughed, “It could be a girl, you know.”

“That’s okay, too, but… I’m tellin’ ya, it feels like a boy to me.”

She leaned up and kissed my chin.

“I’m gonna love it no matter what, though,” I said. Then I thought of something, “I guess this makes my present kinda pointless.”

She laughed, “It’s okay; now you don’t have to eat spinach everyday for the rest of your days.”

“Thank God.”

Chapter Twenty-Three - The Best Christmas


“Merry Christmas,” I whispered into Lauren’s ear when I woke up the next morning. The sun was just coming up, sneaking in through our bedroom window, the rays crawling across the carpet. I kissed her temple as she roused, breathing deep and stretching her legs. I slid my hand across her stomach, my fingers cupping over the skin of her still flat abdomen. “Merry Christmas,” I said to the baby.

Lauren hummed a sleepy smile and snuggled into my chest, “Holiday. We can lie in. Go back to sleep.” She closed her eyes.

“I think Ethan’s up,” I answered. I’d heard the toilet flush a few minutes before when I’d been stretching and staring up at the ceiling. “We should probably go downstairs.”

She took a deep breath. “Okay. You’re right.” She stretched her back, curling her spine and then rolled to a sitting-up position and slid her feet over the side of the mattress. Her hair was a mess, all sticky-uppy in strange places and curled into little knots. I ran my hand over it from behind.

Lauren headed into the bathroom and I went out into the hall.

Ethan’s bedroom door was cracked open, the light spilling into the hall from it. I walked over and edged close, knocking on the door gently to keep it from opening. “Morning,” I called in, “Merry Christmas.”

The door opened a moment later and Ethan stood before me, his bruises a little lighter than they’d been the day before. Not that it was hard to be lighter - they’d looked like the mask of Zorro when we’d first got home from Otis’s place. He had a bandaid over the stitches on his forehead. “Merry Christmas,” he answered.

“Lauren’s gonna take a shower, but if you want you and I can get some breakfast goin’ downstairs,” I suggested. “And by breakfast going I mean like cereal and toast or somethin’ ‘cos I ain’t a chef.”

Ethan laughed, “Cereal’s good.”

“We got Christmas Crunch,” I said as Ethan followed me down the steps, “The same good Captain Crunch taste with Christmas tree shapes and colors.”

“Sounds like an amazing sugar coma waiting to happen.”

“Basically,” I nodded.

Lauren and I had stayed up a little longer after our talk and gift exchange the night before preparing for the morning. I was bursting to bring him out to the living room, but I knew she’d kill me if I told him anything before she got downstairs, so I carefully kept Ethan in the kitchen, where I filled two huge bowls with Christmas Crunch and poured soy milk over them. We crunched and chewed our cereal loudly, talking about football and who sucked worse, the Buccaneers or the Titans.

This season, it was pretty close.

When Lauren came downstairs, she smelled like purple flowers and coconut. She took a box of blueberries out of the fridge as I jumped up from the table and put my half-finished bowl of cereal in the sink, eager to start the Christmas of it all. “C’mon, you can eat those in the living room can’t you?” I begged, pulling her hand in the direction of the foyer.

She laughed, “You’re like a kid,” she said, popping a berry into her mouth.

“Well, you better get used to it,” I said, smirking.

She smiled.

Ethan followed us out to the living room, and I grabbed a couple of the presents, playing Santa Claus, handing one to Lauren and tucking one under my arm. Ethan looked up in surprise as I dropped one onto his lap. “For me?” he asked, looking around at Lauren, then back to me.

“Yeah, it’s Christmas, of course,” I answered, sitting down on the arm of the couch and shaking the one I’d grabbed for myself by my ear, “What’d you think, we weren’t gonna get’cha nothin’ for Christmas?”

Ethan stared at me, “Honestly? I mean... ” he shook his head.

“Well, I’m sorry, bud, but, you’ve got yourself some Christmas unwrappin’ to do.” I shook my present more, tilting it differently. Lauren raised an eyebrow at me.

Mine turned out to be crazy blue socks with Nacho dogs all over them wearing party hats. “NACHO SOCKS!” I shouted when I ripped the paper off and Lauren uncovered a new bathrobe and Ethan an iTunes giftcard. We worked through the presents - I’d amassed a bunch of little presents over the year for Lauren, and apparently so had she, for me. One of the best ones was one that was hastily wrapped in the same paper as we’d used on the last minute gifts for Ethan, which turned out to be a teeny tiny Buccaneers jersey. She grinned as I freaked out over it and held it up to her stomach, “I think it’s too big right now,” I deduced.

Ethan looked over, the question in his eyes, “Wait, are you --”

Lauren looked up at me with raised eyebrows, then turned to Ethan, “Yes.”

He smiled, “Hey that’s awesome,” he said. “Congratulations.” He looked down at his lap.

Lauren took a deep breath, “Which brings me to a very important question, actually.” She shifted, glancing at me, then turned back to Ethan. “In the last couple days some, uh, situations have… changed,” she was choosing her words delicately, I could tell. I sat down on the arm of the chair she was in, holding the itty-bitty Buccs jersey in my hand, letting her put the words together, since she was better at that stuff than I was. “Right now, Nick and I have been granted temporary custody of you until we can work out a more permanent answer,” she cleared her throat, “But --”

Ethan ran his hands down his knees, “It’s okay. I get it,” he interrupted, “You don’t want some strange guy livin’ at your place when you’re -- pregnant or whatever. You wanna focus on your family. It’s cool.” He chewed his lower lip. “I just don’t wanna go to no group home or whatever, you know, so please don’t like turn me over to the cops or nothin’. I don’t mind going back to the grain mill. I mean, my sleepin’ bag’s still good and it’ll be getting warmer soon. If it’s okay, can I stay just until after January? ‘Cos it gets cold in January and ---”

“Dude. Ethan,” I interrupted him. He looked up at me. “We’ve been thinkin’ that our kid could use a big brother. Are you interested in the job?”

He stared, blinking, trying to process the offer. “Are you sayin’ -- that I could stay here? With you guys? Like… like a family or somethin’?” he asked.

“We’re asking you to,” I said.

“Begging, practically, really,” Lauren added.

Ethan looked stunned. “Really? You’re serious? You ain’t jokin’ me?”

“Really,” I nodded.

“Yes!” he shouted, jumping up, knocking the torn wrapping paper from his lap onto the floor. Then, realizing how loud he’d shouted, he cleared his throat and, much more refined, repeated, “Yes.” He sat back down, looking between Lauren and I anxiously, rubbing his knees, “That could really happen? Really?”

Lauren nodded, “I mean there’s a whole process we’ll have to complete to do it. I researched it some on the Internet. We have to do a family screening process and it’ll take a bit before it’ll be official and all that. But it would most definitely be worth it to have you in our family.”

Ethan nodded, and I could tell by the look on his face he was choked up. “You guys really want me?”

“More than anything, buddy,” I answered.

Ethan pounced at me, wrapping his arms around my neck, almost knocking me off the arm of the chair.

“This is the best Christmas,” he said.

I smiled down at Lauren over Ethan’s shoulder. It was true, it really was the best Christmas. I could tell she thought so too by the tears in her eyes, and the way she had her hand on her stomach.




That night, in the small hours of the morning really, Lauren and I lay on the couch in the colored glow of the Christmas tree, our bodies all tangled around each other, my palm on her stomach, the stupid YouTube fireplace up on the screen. She kissed my chin and rested her head against my chest and I ran my fingers up and down her arm gently, staring at the star on the top of the tree. Ethan was asleep in the chair, the 3DS I’d bought him on his lap, legs hanging over the arm. Lauren took a deep breath, “We went from no kids to two kids,” she whispered.

“We’re doing good,” I said.

“You’re going to be a good father,” she whispered.

“I hope so,” I answered.

“I know so,” she replied. “You already are.”

I hugged her close. “Jack’s gonna have a fit.”

Lauren laughed quietly, “It’s good for him.”

We stared at the fire for a few minutes in silence. Ethan snored and rolled a little bit into the back cushion of the chair. I was running my foot along Lauren’s calves. “Can you imagine what our lives will be like a year from now?” she asked.

“We’ll be knee deep in shit diapers and teen drama,” I said.

Lauren laughed.

“Legit. You should hear Jordan talk about his fifteen year old. Either Dante is the teen from hell or we’re in for a ride,” I said.

Lauren glanced over at Ethan, whose hair was covering his eyes as he slept. “Hmm. I think we’ll be okay. I mean, we might have some girl troubles in our future. He does look like a heartbreaker.”

“No worries. I got experience in that department,” I said. “I’ll school him in all he needs to know about the ladies.”

“Oh Lord.”

“What?”

“He’s gonna be out there hitting on girls with the worst pick-up lines in the history of all time,” she said.

“I don’t use lame pick-up lines,” I argued.

“Nick, please.”

“I can’t be too bad at ‘em, I got you, didn’t I?”

“Not because of your pick-up lines,” she answered.

“Bullshit,” I said. “I had you at hello.”

“If I had a star for every time I thought how sexy you are tonight, I’d be holding a galaxy in my hand,” she said in her imitation-me voice with a laugh.

“Nuh uh, I didn’t say that, did I?”

Lauren nodded, “Yes. When we were watching the stars the night we met. You said it in this low, trying-to-be-Barry-White sort of voice, all crouching at my ear like you were freakin’ Casanova or something.”

“Good God,” I muttered, shaking my head, “Maybe you better be the one to help him pick up women.”

She laughed.

I kissed her head, “I couldn’t’ve been too horrible, though, I mean you’re here, aren’t you?”

“True,” she replied. “I guess I’m a sucker for stupid pick-up lines.”

I closed my eyes and just enjoyed the feeling of her, smiling as I smooshed my nose into her hair. I didn’t care why she was there, only that she was. I felt so good and happy and content and all that. Everything that Christmas should be.

“We should start trying to think up some baby names,” Lauren said.

I opened my eyes again.

“What do you think of the names Bradley or Quinn?” she asked.

“Quinn? For a boy?”

“That’s a girl’s name.”

“We don’t need girl names. It’s a boy in there.” I ran my palm over her belly.

“It could be a girl. You don’t know.”

“I know. I can feel it.”

“I like the name Quinn.”

“What about the name Winston?”

“He’s not a cigarette.”

“See, you said it’s a he too,” I pointed out.

Lauren sighed, shaking her head at me.

I kissed her head.

“You ever think we’d make it here?” she asked after a pause, “After all the things we’ve been through since we started trying?”

“I never doubted it for a second,” I said.

“Liar,” Lauren laughed.