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“Hard to believe you were lobbing bombs. What were some of your suggestions?”
“Well, at the top, was Jaws—”
“Nice. Love that one.”
“Then there was Fin, Sushi, and Moby—”
“As in Moby Dick, the book, and not the singer?”
“Exactly, but it was a little obscure for Jacob, since he hasn’t read any Melville, yet.”
“It’s also pretentious. I would’ve voted it down, too.”
She elbowed him in the ribs. “I liked Pesche, the Italian word for ‘fish’, but Jacob didn’t, so that got tossed. So did Rocky.”
“Rocky?”
“Bettas are ‘fighting’ fish,” she explained.
“Oh. Okay. Well, I guess it was time to pass the torch on to the next generation,” David told her.
“I guess so.”
Another day David came home to find them wearing matching white uniforms, tied at the waist with thick white belts.
“What’s going on?” he asked at the unexpected sight of them looking like extras from the show, Cobra Kai, which David and Paige had recently started watching. “What are you wearing?”
“We signed up for taekwondo lessons,” Paige said. “This is the uniform, or dobok.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“We were just trying them on to make sure they fit.”
Later, in bed, Paige went on to tell David that she and Jacob had been out running errands, and he’d seen someone who resembled Liam. “It wasn’t Liam, thankfully, but there was enough of a resemblance for it to be a trigger, and Jacob got pretty anxious. So, we ducked into a Starbucks and sat down with two pieces of lemon cake and talked for a little while. I told him Liam was never going to hurt him again, but then it felt like I was blowing smoke up his ass, because my saying that didn’t make him believe it. Not really. So I thought about how knowing a few defense moves made me feel better, and I figured if he learned a few, it might make him feel better, or maybe more empowered, you know? So, I googled nearby taekwondo studios and we went and checked one out … and then signed up for lessons.”
“That’s … I don’t even know what to say.”
“It’s a couple of hours a week, and it’ll be fun. Jacob needs to regain a sense of safety, and feeling like he has some control over it will help. I mean, obviously, he won’t take down a grown person—and he won’t need to, because he won’t be in that situation again—but it’s about being proactive.” She tapped her temple. “It’s mental.”
David pulled her close. “I don’t even know how much I love you,” he told her softly. “I really don’t.”
One day, right before Jacob was scheduled to start pre-kindergarten, David got home before Paige and Jacob did, and decided to start preparing dinner. When he heard them arrive fifteen minutes later, he went to the entryway and found them both looking like they’d gotten a lot of sun, their cheeks pink. He took a moment to admire Paige in her leggings and windbreaker, her hair up in two side poofs, making her resemble a teenager.
As she toed off her black Chuck Taylor’s, Jacob followed suit, and it was then David noticed for the first time that Jacob was wearing a smaller, identical pair.
Seeing David looking at the matching shoes with raised eyebrows, she shrugged. “He wanted some, so we bought a pair while we were shopping for school clothes.”
David noted how dirty the shoes were, and she added, “Then we had to break them in.”
He thought about how Ashley had never taken Jacob shopping, and everything he was wearing today had been purchased by Paige: jeans which now sported a tear in the knee, a shirt with a T-Rex on it, his short, tiny arms in the Put up your dukes stance, and a zip-up hoody. Every piece of clothing was also dirty, like Jacob had rolled down a grassy hill, fell into a pond, then crawled through a field of mud. He had traces of dirt on his hands and face—even some in his hair, which was hard to do, since it was only an inch long on top and basically shaved on the sides.
David had never seen his son this dirty, or happy.
“So, you two have been … clothes shopping?” David asked, somewhat dubiously.
Paige pointed to several shopping bags on the floor. “We shopped in the morning when the stores opened, then went to a new park that has some cool hiking trails.” She took off her windbreaker, then pointed to another bag. “And we collected a bunch of pine cones.”
“Oh. Why?”
