Part Six: Please Don’t Be Angry
I grabbed my car keys off the hook by the door.
“Put your shoes on properly, sweetheart,” I said. “We’re going to bring him home.”
Finn reached out and gently caught my wrist.
“Mom,” he said. “Please wait.”
“What is it?”
He looked up at me.
“Please don’t be angry with Owen,” he said.
I knelt down in front of him on the kitchen floor.
“Why would I be angry with Owen?” I asked.
“Because he’s the reason I didn’t come home,” Finn said.
“Finn—”
“He told me I could leave,” Finn said. “The first night. He said I could call you. He said he’d be okay by himself.”
His eyes filled with tears.
“But I didn’t want him to be by himself,” Finn said.
He swallowed.
“He was scared, Mom,” he said.
I pulled him into a hug.
He was cold. His jacket was damp with dew. His hair smelled like dust and old upholstery.
I held him in the middle of the kitchen with the sleeping bags still under his arms.
For eight weekends, I’d believed my son was having fun.
Instead, he’d been keeping his best friend company through something no child should ever have to manage alone.
I felt a mixture of things I couldn’t name. Rage. Fear. Guilt so sharp it took my breath away.
But I knew the most important thing was making sure both boys were safe.
I knelt down. I untied the Walmart bag from around Finn’s shoe.
The sole of his sneaker was split almost all the way across. From the toe to the arch. Flapping.
“It broke,” Finn said. “On the way home. I put the bag on it so I could keep walking.”
I handed him his jacket. I grabbed mine off the hook.
“Come on,” I said. “You can tell me everything else while we’re driving.”
Part Seven: The Drive
Walmart was about a mile from our house.
Down Cherry Street to National Avenue. South on National to Battlefield Road. Left on Battlefield.
It was 4:46 a.m. The streets were empty. The traffic lights were blinking yellow. The air was cold. Thirty-eight degrees, the dashboard said.
Finn sat in the back seat with the two sleeping bags in his lap.
He told me while I drove.
He’d walked home. Alone. A mile. At four in the morning.
Down Battlefield Road in the dark, past the closed gas stations and the empty Taco Bell. Up National Avenue under the streetlights. With his shoe falling apart and two sleeping bags in his arms.
“Why did you bring the sleeping bags?” I asked.
“Owen said to,” Finn said. “He said you wouldn’t believe me unless I showed you. He said grown-ups never believe kids.”
He looked down at the red sleeping bag in his lap.
“He said you’d believe the sleeping bags,” he said.
“Why tonight?” I asked. “Why come home tonight? After eight weekends?”
Finn was quiet for a moment.
“Because of the paper,” he said. “The orange one. The man from Walmart put it on the window around three. With a flashlight.”
He swallowed.
“Owen read it,” Finn said. “It said they were going to tow the car at six. And Wade said he wouldn’t be back till six-thirty.”
“Owen said we’d get towed,” Finn said. “With us inside. To a tow lot. And nobody would know where we were.”
His voice cracked.
“And Owen’s been coughing,” he said. “A lot. Since last weekend. He used his inhaler three times tonight. He only had a little left.”
I gripped the steering wheel so hard my knuckles went white.
Owen has asthma. I’ve known that since he was six. Beth keeps an extra inhaler at my house, in the kitchen drawer by the stove.
Cold air triggers it.
“So I said I’d go get you,” Finn said. “And Owen said he’d stay with the car. In case Wade came back early. So he wouldn’t think we ran away.”
He looked out the window at the dark.
“He said if Wade found the car empty,” Finn said, “he’d get in really big trouble.”
