chapter 20
He asked if we were still going to get noodles. We were.
Matthew stood there with his hands empty and his face unarmored. He looked at Tyler the way a person looks at an eclipse through a safe filter. “I’ll see you Wednesday, buddy,” he said, cautious on the nickname, testing the floorboards of the house he’d abandoned but wanted to rebuild. Tyler nodded. Then, unprompted, he said, “Okay, Mr. Grant.”
Matthew didn’t flinch. He swallowed and then crouched to Tyler’s height. “That’s fine,” he said. “One day, if you ever want to call me something else, I’ll be here for that too. Until then, Mr. Grant is going to learn how you like your noodles.”
Tyler considered him. Then he said, “Not spicy.” A treaty, toddler-style.
Update 9: The mango thing and other domestic miracles
Two Wednesdays later, I got a text at 5:12 p.m.: “At grocery. Reading labels. Is ‘natural flavor’ a mango trap?” I said maybe, and he sent a photo of the ingredient list like a student doing extra credit. He sent another photo fifteen minutes later: Tyler and him making pancakes for dinner with blueberries and a heroic amount of flour on the counter. Tyler texted me from Matthew’s phone: “Mr. Grant burned one. We laughed.” I saved the photo. I also cried a little on the rental’s unflattering laminate because sometimes progress looks like a charred circle and a six-year-old’s grin.
I’d worried the supervised-to-unsupervised transition would feel like giving away my bone marrow. It didn’t.