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Troublesome Boy


It started around puberty. The defiance, the swearing. Locking his bedroom door, playing loud music. I don’t know when he started using drugs. He didn’t have money to keep up with the habit, so he started selling them. Then he started stealing.

I tried talking to him, but he wouldn’t listen. Sometimes he shouted over me, or raised his fists. His step-father, Bill, intervened once, and wound up with a black eye.

It was ruining our marriage.

Bill spent long days outside, driving the fields over and over with harrows, loosening up dirt for planting. We barely talked. We were never intimate.

So, when I found Joey’s note on the counter last Friday, announcing he’d gone to live with his father, as much as I was upset, I was also relieved. Bill rubbed my back while I sobbed, and it was me, not him, that said, “Maybe this is for the best.”

I put Joey out of my mind as best as I could for the weekend.

And it worked. I actually found myself smiling for the first time in months.

On Monday, I decided to call his father to make sure he had arrived all right, make sure he was eating, make sure he wasn’t in jail already.

“The little shit never came here,” his father said.

I collapsed on the floor.

“What do you mean?” Bill asked, as startled as I was.

I called the police, I called the hospitals, I even called the fire department. Their calmness in the face of my despair was maddening.

Finally, I tried calling Joey.

It rang endlessly. Then it went to voicemail.

“I’m not here, so fuck off,” said my son’s recorded voice.

“Leave him a message,” Bill suggested. “He’ll call back soon, I’m sure.”

But I needed to talk to him NOW.

I called again. And again. On probably the tenth call, I began to hear something.

It was faint, but I could swear I heard Joey’s phone ringing, somewhere in the distance. He must have been squatting out in one of the old barns on the property, where we stored hay and farm equipment.

“It’s raining, Mary,” Bill called after me. He hadn’t heard the ringing.

I kept redialing every time it went to voicemail.

I followed it backward and forward across the horse paddocks, louder here, quieter there, listening intently to discover where it was coming from. I expected to be drawn toward one of the barns, but instead I found myself circling back, over and over, to a specific spot in the middle of an empty field.

To some freshly churned soil where Bill had been planning to plant.

I dialed again, and lowered my ear to the dirt. I could hear the phone ringing. Louder than anywhere else.

Bill, I saw, had caught up to me.

“Bill…” I began, my voice shaky. “Did you…?”

He swallowed hard, not meeting my gaze.

“He was tearing us apart,” he explained.

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Credits

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