Read Online Eleven Days by Lea Carpenter - Free Book Online

envelope, and on this one is written one word in her son’s handwriting: “Mommy.” She was not ready for that. So she placed the letter on the small desk on the landing, right outside her bedroom, next to the phone forever blinking with too many messages.
    She goes to the shower and undresses. She stands for a moment wondering what the rule is now, whether these men will expect a meal. Or worse: expect her to sit with them and talk. Who are they anyway? Do they really know her son? She showers, and after she showers, she puts on a pretty dress, something she knows that her son would like, something he would be proud to see her wear when doing the right thing for these men who are, in any event, only here to do something kind for her, something that is right, while being sad and uncomfortable. She finds them in the kitchen, stooped awkwardly on her little lacquer stools; they are laughing when she enters—so they stop.
    “Please,” she says. “I love having people in the house, and I want you to feel at home. I know that Jason is fine, and I know it is only a matter of time before he is here again, standing in thiskitchen and doing exactly what you are doing. Please, will you stay for supper?”
    But they demur, and after several glasses each of iced tea, they are on their way. She walks them to the car, and Jones makes an awkward motion to give her a hug. He takes off his sunglasses, and she can see he is emotional; maybe this is why he said so little at first. “Your boy is extraordinary,” he says.
    “Yes, I know that.”
    “Excuse me for saying this, but I simply didn’t expect you to be so young. You look—you look about twenty-five years old.”
    “I’m older than that,” she says, and can’t help a smile. Seeing someone so powerful disarmed charms her.
    “We will find him,” the captain says. “We will find him.”
    “I know,” she says. “I have a birthday cake for him.”
    The men drive away. Now here she is in the house at her least favorite part of the day, with an afternoon of hours to fill and that letter on the landing. She doesn’t want to read and she doesn’t want to sleep and she doesn’t want to talk to anyone who is going to say anything sentimental or maudlin. So she goes and finds Sam. He is in the kitchen, cooking. She gets a glass of water and lingers, waiting for him to say something, but he doesn’t, so she starts.
    “What is he like?” she asks.
    “What is who like?” he says.
    “My son. What is he like? What is he like to work with?”
    And she sits down at the little “eating square,” as Jason had called it, the one someone who clearly didn’t know her, or her taste, had given her—with the matching stools. And she listens.
    “To work with? He’s an artist.”
    “Artist?”
    “He’s talented. Quiet, talented. He taught me a lot.”
    “Taught?”
    “He taught me about how to dial it down.”
    “Dial what down.”
    “Temperament. Emotion. Stress. One of my first memories of him is standing by the side of the pool, in California, that first week. He was referencing some obscure book.”
    “Do you remember what it was?”
    “I don’t. But what was cool was that he did it in a way that was not about proving anything; he wasn’t arrogant.”
    “No, but he used to love to read,” she says.
    “He was quiet.”
    “He’s shy,” Sara says.
    “Shy?”
    “Reserved. The book talk: that’s a default setting. He gets that from—”
    “Default setting?”
    “Yeah. Our default settings are rarely our best selves.”
    “I think my default setting then was fear.”
    “The training was tough.”
    “Yes. Everyone was terrified. Even the guys too proud—or possibly, too stupid—to show it.”
    “Or maybe just too young.”
    “Having to hide a broken ankle teaches you something about yourself,” Sam says.
    Sara has an instinct to say something along the lines of
you can go you don’t have to stay
, but instead she just keeps listening. And Sam says,