Junonia by Kevin Henkes Page B

didn’t mean him, of course. But Mitch hadn’t been so sure.
    Mitch ran his finger over his initials. M.S. His father’s initials were W.S. Wade Sinclair. Turn an M upside down and you get a W, thought Mitch. We’re the same. It was an idle thought, but it caused a burning knot to form in his stomach. “We’re not the same at all,” Mitch whispered. And we never will be. At the moment, Mitch hated his father, hated him and yet longed to see him so badly tears pricked his eyes. He thought he could destroy this empty little house right now with his bare hands, he was that upset. But he wanted this house. He wanted it for himself and for his mother. To live in.
    Mitch rubbed his finger over his initials again. “Ouch,” he said. A splinter. A big one. But not big enough to pick out without a tweezers or a needle. He retreated to his spot under the porch and settled in. He hadn’t asked his grandparents yet what they knew about the house, because he didn’t want an answer that would disappoint him. Maybe he’d ask today. He dozed off in the still, hazy afternoon, blaming his father for everything wrong in the world, including his aching finger.
    Sometimes he wished his father had simply vanished. That would have been easier to deal with. Then he could make up any story he wanted to explain his father’s absence. Or he could honestly say that he didn’t know where his father was or why he had disappeared. And if he had vanished, there would be the possibility that, at any moment, he’d return. There he’d be, suddenly—hunched at the sink, humming, scrubbing a frying pan, a dish towel slung over his shoulder. A familiar pose. Everything back in its proper place, the way it was meant to be.
    He even wondered if death would be better than the truth. An honorable death. If his father were killed trying to stop a robbery at a gas station . . . something like that. A car accident would be okay, too, if it were someone else’s fault or caused by a surprise storm.
    But the truth was worse. The truth was that two and a half weeks ago, his father hadn’t come home from work. He had called that night to say that he was going to live with someone else, a woman from his office.
    Mitch hated thinking of that night—his mother pressing apologies upon him, and then her silence and the way she kept hugging him, her shoulder bending his nose back until he had to squirm away. He’d felt as if he were nobody’s child.
    The following morning, his father made a couple of phone calls to Mitch that left him more confused than ever, and left him with more questions than answers.
    As that day passed, and the next, Mitch’s sadness grew; it became a rock inside him, pulling him down. He carried the sadness everywhere, morning, noon, and night. It hurt to breathe. And then, after three days of looking at each other with mutual uncertainty, Mitch and his mother packed up their most necessary possessions and drove to Mitch’s grandparents’ house on Bird Lake. “I can’t live here anymore,” Mitch’s mother had said as she stuffed clothes into duffle bags. “We don’t belong here, now.”
    She told him they’d come back sometime during the summer to straighten things out and to pick up whatever they might have forgotten. He told her about a new movie he’d heard of, not because he really cared about this, but because it was a way to keep her from saying things that made him more uneasy than he already was. At one point during their conversation, her voice cracked and she had to turn away for a moment before she began talking again. She circled back to the same topic. “We couldn’t afford to stay here if we wanted to, anyway,” she said. “Not on a teachers’ aide’s salary.”
    It was June. School had just ended for the year, which made the situation easier for both of them.
    â€œWe can look