That night, after Dustin was asleep, I sat in my car in the driveway with the engine off.
I don’t know why I went out there. I think I just needed a place where he couldn’t hear me. I sat with my hands on the steering wheel and stared at the garage door, and I didn’t cry, not at first. I was too angry to cry.
It wasn’t even what she said about me. Fine. I was thirty nine, I’d gained some weight after the divorce, I mostly wore jeans and sweaters from Target. I didn’t need a stranger to tell me that.
It was that she said it in front of my son.
It was that his father laughed.
It was that my ten year old had been carrying this around for weeks, maybe months, building potato walls and closing his door softly, because he didn’t want to hurt my feelings.
I picked up my phone and called Nigel.
He answered on the fifth ring. “Hey. Everything okay? Is Dustin okay?”
“Dustin’s fine. Physically.”
A pause. “What does that mean?”
“It means our son just told me that your girlfriend makes fun of me in front of him. Regularly. And that you laugh.”
There was a long silence on the other end. Then Nigel sighed, the long, tired sigh he used to do when I asked him to take out the trash.
“Okay. First of all, she doesn’t make fun of you regularly. She’s made, like, a couple of jokes.”
“In front of our son, Nigel.”
“They’re jokes. She’s got a sharp sense of humor. It’s not personal.”
“She asked you how you stayed married to me so long. And you said you had no idea. While he was standing in the hallway.”
Silence again. Longer this time.
“He heard that?”
“Yes. He heard that.”
“Well, he shouldn’t have been out of bed.”
I actually pulled the phone away from my ear and looked at it.
“Are you serious right now?”
“I’m just saying, that was a private conversation.”
“In your kitchen. With your son in the apartment.”
“Look,” Nigel said, and his voice got that sharp edge it always got when he felt cornered. “I’m not going to apologize for having a life. You don’t get to control who I date or what we talk about in my own home.”
“I’m not trying to control who you date. I’m asking you to not let her trash his mother in front of him.”
“Fine. I’ll talk to her.”
“Will you?”
“I said I would, didn’t I?”
He hung up before I could answer.
I sat in the car for another twenty minutes. Then I went inside, checked on Dustin, and stood in his doorway for a long time watching him sleep. He was curled on his side with one arm hanging off the bed, the way he’d slept since he was a baby.
I wanted to wake him up and tell him that none of it was true. That his mom wasn’t someone to be laughed at. But I didn’t know how to say that without making his dad the bad guy. And I’d made a promise.
Never make him choose.
So I didn’t say anything.
Whatever Nigel said to Annabelle, it didn’t work.
Two weekends later, I went to pick Dustin up at Nigel’s apartment because Nigel had a work thing and couldn’t drop him off. I’d never been inside before. I’d always waited in the car. But Nigel texted, “Come up, he’s not ready,” so I went up.
Annabelle opened the door.
Up close, she was younger than I’d thought. Maybe thirty. Very pretty, in a careful way. She was holding a white fluffy dog that immediately started growling at me.
“Oh,” she said. “Hi. You must be Dustin’s mom.”
“Hi. Yes. Nice to finally meet you.”
“You too.” She looked me up and down. I was in my work clothes, gray slacks and a blue cardigan with a small coffee stain on the sleeve that I hadn’t noticed until that exact moment. “Wow. Did you come straight from work?”
“I did.”
“That makes sense,” she said, smiling, and she said it in a way that made it clear it didn’t make sense at all. Like she’d just figured out a mystery.
I didn’t answer. Behind her, I could see Dustin on the couch, putting his shoes on very slowly. He wasn’t looking at either of us.
“Nigel’s so stressed about work,” Annabelle said, to fill the silence. “He works so hard. I keep telling him he deserves to relax more. He said you two never really did anything fun together.”
“Did he,” I said.
“Mmhm. Anyway.” She set the dog down, and it trotted over and sniffed my shoe with deep suspicion. “Dustin’s such a sweet kid. Really quiet, though. Is he always this quiet?”
“No,” I said. “He isn’t.”
Dustin finished with his shoes. He walked over, grabbed his backpack, and slipped past Annabelle without a word.
“Bye, Dustin!” she called. “Tell your mom about the thing we talked about!”
He didn’t turn around.
In the elevator, I asked him what thing.
“Nothing,” he said. “She just said maybe you could try a new haircut.”
I laughed. I didn’t mean to. It just came out. And then Dustin laughed too, a little, and for a second it was almost okay.
Then he said, “Mom? Why don’t you ever say anything back?”
The elevator dinged. The doors opened. Neither of us moved.
“What do you mean?”
“When she’s mean. Or when Dad’s mean. You just smile. You always just smile.”
I didn’t know what to tell him. The doors started to close, and I stuck my hand out to stop them.
“Because,” I said finally, “I don’t want you to be stuck in the middle. That’s my job. To keep you out of it.”
He looked at me for a long time. Then he walked out of the elevator ahead of me and didn’t say anything else the whole way home.
That was the first time I wondered if my rules were for him or for me.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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