Excavate

Say It

The dinner table looked incomplete to Sharon as she glanced down at the vacant seat next to Matt's. She still put out a place setting for Riley, though he'd been unresponsive when she knocked on his door to let him know that dinner was ready.

It mirrored the earlier interaction (if she could even call it that), when she asked Riley if he wanted to go pick up Andy from preschool. Sharon would admit, it was somewhat of a cheap blow as Riley had quickly become a sucker for his youngest brother, but he'd been quiet when she knocked. She couldn't tell if he was simply asleep, or just outright ignoring her attempts.

"Mom, why does Riley get to skip dinner?" Audrey asked pointedly. "You never let me and Matt miss it."

Sharon sent a piercing glare at her daughter, too worn down to deal with her snotty question about fair and unfair.

Brad intervened, asking her to put her napkin in her lap and eat her dinner. She gave Brad a grateful half-smile, not wanting her impatience to bleed out onto her other children.

Brad reached over and gave her hand a comforting squeeze, and she felt a bit more relaxed. Enough so that she could pick up her fork and eat, pretending like it was a normal night and her oldest son wasn't upstairs drowning in his own misery that she'd directly caused.

After she'd left Riley to his distress, she'd called her husband at work and told him about the situation. He'd immediately offered to come home from work to help her and Riley sort things out (still ever the mediator), but she'd refused the offer. Riley needed time to calm himself down.

And Sharon needed... well, she needed a chance to apologize and tell Riley that she was wrong and she didn't mean what she said.

But what he'd said had shaken her to her core. She had been struck speechless when he said that he knew about the circumstances surrounding him coming to live here.

It would be another apology, so worn and over-tired that it would sound insincere even to herself.

What was she asking Riley for this time? A third chance? Fourth?

Her stomach clenched so hard that she sat down her fork. Her son must feel so pressured into giving her chances since he knew that he had nowhere else to go. 

Riley's choices consisted of accepting her banal apologies or being shunted around foster care, which, as an emotionally-disturbed sixteen year-old, would sentence him to aging out of the system without any support.

"I thought you liked me."

"Excuse me," Sharon muttered, discarding the cloth napkin from her lap and fleeing the table before her family saw her cry over her meatloaf and green beans. 

Rushing up the stairs to her bedroom, she hastily turned on the faucet and splashed her face with cool water.

A warm, firm hand on her lower back instantly grounded her. She closed her eyes, hands braced against the bathroom counter and tried to control her breathing.

"Are you okay honey?"

"No, I'm not." She shook her head decisively. 

"I need to fix this with him. He thinks all of this is fake. That I don't want to be his mom because I made a stupid mistake and called him your nephew. And on top of that, he knows that I only took him at first because CPS said I had no choice."

Struck by the burning need to right things, she started toward her son's bedroom before Brad stopped her with a gentle hand on her shoulder.

"We are going to fix this Sharon. Riley is part of the family and we will do whatever we have to to make him believe that." His low voice was a well of safety and security. She stopped trying to leave in effort to force Riley to talk to her, to accept her apologies and explanations.