A Million Nights Without You

Sixteen years I'd endured days like that.

The bell cut through my thoughts. I pressed against the railing, craning to catch sight of Mike.

But when he came out, his face was covered in blood.

“What happened?” I grabbed his shoulders, hands shaking.

“I fell.” He wouldn't meet my eyes.

This scene was nothing new. Over the past sixteen years, it had played out more times than I could count.

“Tell me who did this!”

Mike kept his head down.

“They said I'm retarded. That I shouldn't be taking the SATs.”

The tears came before I could stop them. Behind me, Lance walked over with his daughter.

“Retard can't even fight back, just runs crying to Mommy.”

I turned and looked at the girl's haughty face. She had her hands on her hips.

“I heard you and your mom hitched a ride in my dad's car. Someone like you taking the SATs is just a waste of everyone's resources, isn't it?”

She was smiling while she said the cruelest things. “If I'd known it was you, I never would've let my dad give you a ride.”

I clenched my fists and forced the rage in my chest back down. “My son is not retarded. His body just doesn't move right.”

How many times I'd said that sentence, I'd lost count long ago.

I held Mike's trembling back steady and fixed my eyes on Lance.

“Is this how you raise your daughter?”

“What did you just say?!” The girl lunged forward, but Lance caught her arm.

“Ina. Apologize.”

Ina's face was a picture of resentment. She rolled her eyes and squeezed out a sorry through her teeth.

“To make it up to you, let's have a meal together.” Lance's voice was unhurried, almost bored. “My treat.”

I wanted to refuse, but the thought of my near-empty wallet made me hesitate. I looked down at Mike.

His head was bowed. His stomach let out a long, audible growl.

“Mom, I'm hungry.”

Lance could barely keep the mockery off his face. He held the car door open for me and drove us to a Western restaurant without asking.

He flipped through the menu. “Steak, medium rare. One without black pepper. The rest as normal.”

When the food arrived, the memory hit me all at once: the first time Lance and I ever went to a Western restaurant. We'd actually studied how to use a knife and fork beforehand.

But one look at the blood pooling under the steak and we both lost our nerve, insisting the chef cook it all the way through.

We chewed through that tough, overdone steak, laughing at each other the whole time, determined to finish every bite of a meal neither of us could really afford.

But Lance turned out to be allergic to the pepper, and we ended up at the hospital.

Too broke for a hotel, we curled up together in the hospital corridor and spent the night there.

The Lance sitting across from me now handled his knife and fork with practiced ease, cutting the steak on Ina's plate and sliding it in front of her.

He ate the pink meat with obvious pleasure. After all these years apart, he'd worked his way up to medium rare.

The clatter of silverware hitting the floor yanked me back. Mike's pants were stained, and he sat with his head tilted to one side, face burning with shame.

“Can't even use a knife and fork. Joyce, is this really how you've been raising your son?”

I met Lance's half-smiling eyes and thought, of course. He was still the same person who never forgot a grudge.

The year we sat next to each other, I was a class monitor. He'd skipped class, so I wrote his name down.

He spent the entire break begging me to erase it. I refused and reported him to our homeroom teacher anyway.

Soon enough, I was the one singled out. I hadn't run during PE, and Lance, the PE class representative, pulled me out of line.

He made me stand in the sun as punishment. I stood there until my period bled through my pants and the heat knocked me unconscious.

After that, Lance changed completely. He dropped the antagonism, stopped picking fights with me, and started deferring to me in everything.

He told me later that watching me collapse was the first time he'd ever felt his heart ache for someone.