Justin gets up and kneels on the bed and Shady goes to full alert beside him, ears up. “I’m stuck in this shitty cottage all day!” Justin blurts out. He is empowered by letting this forbidden word fly free, and he goes on, unstoppable. “You brought me down here so we can have a good life together and this is what you planned? You working all day and me sitting here alone? If you don’t have a better plan than this then just take me to the bus station and I’ll go back home.”

“Justin,” he says, and lets a time pass quietly between them. He doesn’t know what else to say. Asher knows that already his son is feeling bad about what he has said.

“But I don’t want to leave you,” Justin says in a small voice. “I want you both.”

Justin grabs the sandwich and bites into it. Shady edges in close to Justin’s mouth while he eats, taking deep breaths like that peanut butter is the best thing he’s ever smelled in his entire life. Justin holds the sandwich high up in the air between bites.

“If I hadn’t run off that night, you and Mom’d still be together,” Justin says, and then swallows down the mouthful of food.

Asher takes hold of Justin’s arms and looks him in the eye. “No, buddy, no,” aching at the sight of the sadness on his son’s face. “None of this is your fault. Do you hear me, Justin?”

Justin shakes his head, a barely seeable affirmation.

“Not a bit of it. Sometimes people just can’t make it work. Your mom and me, we tried. But we failed. We’re the only ones at fault here. Not you. Never you.”

“But if I hadn’t run off to look for Roscoe—”

“Listen to me.” Asher puts his face very close to Justin’s, locks their eyes together. “I want you to put that out of your mind right now, alright? You’re the best thing that ever happened to me or your mother.”

“She can’t even stand me,” Justin says, and he looks past Asher as if he is seeing the ghost of his mother standing in the doorway, a ghost with a firmly set mouth and crossed arms. “She wishes I was never born.”

“Stop that, now, Justin. That’s not true. Your mom and I don’t agree on a whole lot of stuff but she loves you, little man. We both love you more than anything in this world. Don’t you know that? You have to know that.”

Asher is thinking This is too hard I can’t do it I don’t know how to do this, but he keeps talking as if someone else has taken over.