Chapter Text
The bus was late.
When he’d woken up that morning, Jared hadn’t known he was going to be on a bus upstate by noon. Or, well, noon-ish, since it was late.
He’d only found out about the whole thing when his mother had come into his closet-sized room in their tiny city apartment, yanked up the blinds, put a small thrift-store-shabby suitcase down on the floor, tossed an empty backpack at him, and told him to pack anything he wanted to keep.
Still half-asleep and blinking drowsily, he’d asked why.
“Couldn’t make rent,” Ania had said. “We got evicted.”
With a groan, her son pulled his pillow over his face. “Then we have a month, don’t we?”
His mother hesitated. “We got evicted a month ago.”
That had finally jarred him into consciousness, and he sat up. “Mom, what the hell?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to worry you.” She said it like she’d done him a favor; like this rude awakening was the less stressful option.
He’d swung his legs out of bed and nudged open the suitcase with his foot. “So where are we going now?”
Ania sparked up a cigarette and blew the smoke at the walls; might as well leave a few extra soot stains on their way out. “Just pack, okay?”
“I’ll pack when you tell me where we’re going.”
“Well,” she answered slowly, “Chris said I could move in with him.”
Jared didn’t miss it: I, not we. “Yeah?”
She blew out another lungful of smoke and watched it dissipate in the air. “And, you know, he’s not the biggest fan of little kids—” Holding up her hand before he could protest, she said, “I know, I know, you’re not—”
“Not a fucking little kid,” he’d interrupted anyway.
“Ten is probably a bit too little to be talking like that,” Ania scolded: one of her approximately biannual attempts to be a responsible parent.
Ignoring her, Jared crossed his arms. “So you’re moving in there, and I’m, what, sleeping on a bench in Central Park?”
“You’ll be staying with your grandparents for a bit,” she’d told him, checking her watch. “And your bus leaves at noon, so let’s see some hustle.” Then she’d breezed back out to hunt down some cheap bagel sandwiches at a bodega before he could ask any more questions.
It didn’t take Jared long to shove his small collection of earthly possessions into the suitcase and backpack, so when that was done, he’d climbed out the window to the rickety fire escape where he often liked to sit and watch whatever he could see of the sunset through the buildings and smog, legs dangling in the air over the traffic ten stories beneath him.
And he’d tried not to think too much about it. It wasn’t the leaving that hurt, because he’d left plenty of places before. It was just that until now, it had always been the two of them, leaving together, making it through the hard transitions into whatever new forms of chaos lay ahead. This was the first time that it was different—that there wasn’t a place for him in her plan. So he tried not to think about how maybe this time, it meant he’d finally become too much trouble to keep around.
When Ania had come back with the sandwiches, she’d shimmied out to sit there with him too, and the metal had creaked ominously even at their relatively insignificant combined weight. And she didn’t say a word the whole time, even though there should have been a lot to say, because maybe she was trying not to think about it too.
Now they were at the bus stop, and the bus was late, and Jared could tell his mother was getting antsy; she was already on her second cigarette. “You can go,” he said. “I can wait by myself.”
“Yeah, right,” she said, shifting back and forth on her feet. “If I don’t watch you get on that bus, you’ll get on one going anywhere except where you’re supposed to, or you won’t get on one at all. Am I wrong?”
She wasn’t. Jared rolled his eyes. Then, a thought suddenly occurred to him. “What about school? It’s only April.”
“Shit,” Ania said, absently starting to rub the inside of her elbow, the way she did when she was jonesing for her diabetes medication, because she hadn’t realized her son had gotten savvy enough to connect the dots that insulin shots didn’t make you nod off on the couch for hours at a time. “I meant to pick up the transfer paperwork to send with you.” She glanced at him. “I’ll mail it. Not like it’ll hurt you to miss a little more until it gets there. You already have the damn school blowing up our answering machine every other week for skipping.”
Jared pressed his lips together to hide his smile. “Remember in October when they suspended me for three days for skipping too much?”
Dropping her cigarette to the pavement and grinding the butt out with her shoe, Ania sighed. “Still don’t get the logic of that one. ‘You missed too much school, kid. Here, miss some more.’”
“Worked out pretty well for me, at least,” Jared said.
“Well,” his mother said, jerking her other hand away from her arm like she’d suddenly caught herself, “I guess you’ll be transferring to my old school up there, and you probably shouldn’t f—” She stopped herself and replaced the word, a rare and suspicious attempt to set a better example: “screw around about going. It’s a small town, so they might actually care enough to send the truancy officers out.”
Jared scowled. “How small of a town?”
“Small,” Ania said. “You don’t remember anything about it?”
“Not much.” Although Jared had vague recollections of early childhood trips to his grandparents’ small farm in the Adirondacks, they hadn’t been for years now. He couldn’t have been more than five or six the last time.
“I won’t lie, kiddo, it’s gonna be pretty different,” she said, glancing around at their little piece of the concrete jungle and then back at her son. “I know you’ve never really been out of the city for more than a few days at a time. But it’s just the best place for you right now, all right?”
“The best place for you to get rid of me,” Jared muttered. “So you can go have fun with what’s-his-face.” He knew Chris’s damn name, since his mother rarely shut up about him lately.
Smiling brightly, Ania chucked him under the chin with a knuckle. “Christopher and I are in love. One day you’ll understand.”
“You said you were in love with last year’s what’s-his-face,” Jared said, scuffing his foot against the pavement. He hadn’t forgotten Sean’s name either; after all, they’d lived in his apartment for six months, until one screaming match too many had led to him pulling a gun and them moving to a shelter until his mother scrabbled together enough work to afford their own tiny place in the projects where they only had to listen to other people’s screaming matches through the thin walls. It had been a real step up in lifestyle.
A shadow passed over Ania’s face. “Chris isn’t like Sean.”
“Sean wasn’t like Sean until he was,” Jared pointed out.
She plastered the smile back on. “Anyway, Chris just got a van, and he’s going to spend the rest of the spring getting it set up so we can travel in it. We want to follow the Dead around for a little while when summer comes. Everyone’s saying the ’90 tour is the best one yet. You like their music too, don’t you, baby?”
Jared grimaced. “No.”
Ania faltered again, but held him out by the shoulders and brushed back the shock of blond hair that had fallen into his eyes. “Well, it’s only for a little while, and then at the end of the summer I’m going to come back and get my shi—sort myself out. Okay? I’ll get a good job and a nice place and then I’ll pick you back up. And this way you can get to know your grandparents better.”
“What are they like? I barely even remember that.” Besides those scattered visits for a couple days at a time when he was small, Jared hadn’t spent much time with the Krylov side of the family (although they still had his father's side beat, since he'd never met the Grays at all). He vaguely remembered what they looked like, and how to say the names he’d been taught to call them: babulya or bab for his grandmother Irina, and dedulya or ded for his grandfather Ivan.
His mother chewed her lip. “They’re good people. My mom’s parents left Russia when she was little, so her English is better than my dad’s. He was around twenty when he came, I think. They’re, I don’t know—I guess people might say salt of the earth sums it up. Pretty simple, straightforward, not the most talkative. But good people.”
“Then why don’t we ever visit them anymore?” Jared pressed. “Or stay with them? Wouldn’t that have been better than the shelter last year?”
Glancing at the bus stop as if she were hoping it would come in time to save her from more questions, Ania sighed and fished around in her bag for a third cigarette. “I mean, they’re old-country immigrants, and they don’t approve of…” She paused to spark it up and think in the head-clearing rush of her drag. Then she struck upon the perfect way to finish the sentence, and smirked. “Of people who like the Grateful Dead. So since you don’t, you’ll be fine.”
“Whatever.” Jared kicked a rock and watched it skitter across the pavement toward the at-long-last-approaching bus. “Any last words of wisdom?”
“Just try to behave, yeah?” She took another long drag of the cigarette. “I get that it makes me a hypocrite to tell you this, but watch your language and try to be respectful. You’ll get extra points for an occasional ma’am or sir. You know, maybe help me look like I’m not a total failure at raising you.”
When she paused, Jared wondered if it was so he could jump in to assure her that she wasn’t a failure at all—that in fact she was the best mom ever—but he didn’t feel like going on that particular guilt trip at the moment. “That it?”
If there had been one of her trademark shame spirals on the horizon, Ania managed to flit past it this time. “Be ready to help out with chores, because they’ll definitely put you to work. God knows I served my time in the apple orchards as a kid.” Then she gave him a mischievous look and a nudge to the shoulder. “It might be good for you, really. Learning how to be a little farm boy.”
The bus swung into the stop, and Jared eyed it apprehensively. “Sounds like a blast.”
His mother playfully shook her finger at him. “See, that’s exactly the kind of attitude you need to not be having. Open mind. Maybe you’ll like it.”
Jared narrowed his eyes. “So you ran off at seventeen because you liked it?”
“I hated it,” she admitted. “I always knew I belonged in the city. Couldn’t wait to get away. But you?” She shrugged. “Never know. At least they’ve got better sunsets than the fire escape.”
With a jerk of his head in its direction, Jared said, “The bus is here.”
Pulling him into a tight hug, Ania murmured, “I’m going to miss you, baby. Once we get on the road, I’ll try to find a payphone every once in a while and check in, okay?”
Reluctantly, Jared hugged her back. “See you in a few months, I guess.”
She let him go, and he picked up his suitcase and boarded the bus. When it pulled out, he didn’t look back.
Maybe he didn’t want to know whether she was standing there for the extra minute to watch it drive away, or if she had already turned to leave.