“Thanks,” I said.
“Not a problem.”
“Did he tell you about his kitten?”
“Oh yeah. At great length. It’s not hard getting Connor to tell you about his kitten. The problem would be getting him to stop telling you about her.”
But I could tell by the expression on her face that she really didn’t mind at all.
I didn’t want to go home, because I figured Roy and Mom would need some time to have it out. And if they were fighting, I didn’t want to hear it.
So I went over to Connor’s.
I must admit, in addition to his being my friend, I really wanted to see that kitten again.
Connor surprised me by answering the door.
“Oh,” I said. “It’s you. Where’s your mom?”
“Not sure.”
I followed him down the long hallway and up the stairs, and I didn’t need time for my eyes to adjust. There was light. Lots of it. Apparently, after his mom left the house Connor had gone around and opened all the curtains.
“She goes out now and doesn’t tell you where?”
We slipped through his bedroom door carefully, so we didn’t let the kitten out. He never answered. Well, not never. But he moved on to a different topic in that moment.
“Uh-oh,” Connor said. “She’s under the bed. Well, the best plan is to just sit on the floor and pretend you don’t want her to come to you. And then she will.”
We sat cross-legged, facing each other. Just for a second we smiled. Then we looked down at the rug, the way we usually did.
Baby steps.
“She calls it ‘Me Time,’” he said.
I had no idea what he was talking about. I thought we were still talking about the cat. And if that had been the case, his comment would have made no sense.
“What?”
“My mom.”
“Oh. Your mom.”
“She doesn’t say exactly what Me Time is, but once she made some comment about needing someone to talk to. So she might be going to talk to a friend, though I’m not sure who that would be. Or she might actually be in counseling. I’m thinking counseling, because if she had a new friend, I think she’d tell me more about that. She wouldn’t treat it like some kind of secret.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well. That would be good, if she was in counseling. I mean . . . wouldn’t it?”
The kitten stuck her head out from under the bed. And my mood just soared when I looked at that little face. Those pink ears and those tiny, round blue eyes.
She looked at my hand where it sat on the rug, and did that gearing-up-to-attack thing kittens do. Front end hunkered down. Tail end in the air. Eyes all intense. A little swish of her body back and forth. Then she came barreling across the rug, bit my finger with those needle-sharp baby teeth, and ran under the bed again.
Connor laughed. I laughed, too. It hurt, but not so much that it wasn’t still funny.
“I think it’s good,” he said. “It’s good to talk to somebody.”
“Speaking of which. Speaking of talking to somebody. You’re not going to believe this. Zoe Dinsmore is going to be Roy’s sponsor in the program. But don’t tell anybody. It might not be the right anonymity thing, and maybe I shouldn’t have told you. And besides, I don’t want it getting back to my mom.”
Connor and I had talked once, briefly, about whether Roy would ever get serious enough to get a sponsor. So Connor knew what that meant.
“Wait. Zoe’s back in the meetings?”
“Yeah. Didn’t I tell you? I’m sorry. It was just a couple of days ago, and I guess I haven’t seen you since then.”
“That’s good,” he said. “I’m really glad to hear that. Good for her. And that’s good about her taking Roy under her wing, too. I think she’ll help him.”
“Yeah. I think so, too.”
Then we had one of those long silences. Like the old days. The kind that get stronger and more thick and solid the longer they go on, and you start feeling like you can’t break through them.
But I didn’t want the old days anymore. I wasn’t going back there. So I broke through.
“She really helped you, didn’t she?”
“Yeah,” he said. “She did.”
“What was it about talking to her that helped you so much?”
He didn’t answer right away. But I didn’t feel like he was holding back or holding out on me. He seemed to be really thinking about what he wanted to say.
“Sometimes it’s hard to put those things into words,” he said.
“Yeah. Sometimes it is.”
“I think . . . she made me feel like I was worth having around. And for a while there I didn’t really feel like I was.”
“It’s good that you believed her.”
“I didn’t,” he said.
The cat ran, pretty much sideways, in a wild arc between us and then back under the bed. We were too caught up in what we were saying to laugh.
“Oh, I don’t mean that quite the way it sounds,” he said. “I just mean . . . I felt like I wasn’t worth much, and sometimes on a bad day I still feel that way. But here’s the thing. Zoe felt like she wasn’t worth much, and like nobody wanted her around, and she almost killed herself over thinking that. But I know she’s worth a lot, and I know I want her around. So I know she was wrong. So now when I feel bad about myself, I think about that, and I think maybe I’m wrong. Maybe things aren’t as bad as I thought. So that’s one of those thoughts that, once you have it, you don’t ever really forget it. Just that idea that when you feel like everything is terrible . . . it might not be the truth. Once you get that in your head, you don’t want to do something
