Chapter 3
We had spent almost three weeks on that airplane. We started in the garage on a Saturday afternoon when Ethan brought me a kit he'd found at a hobby shop with his own birthday money, and we sanded the pieces and fitted the frame and painted it together over several evenings, and the last thing we'd attached was the propeller, which required a small drill and more patience than an eight-year-old usually has, and Ethan had been patient the whole time, more patient than I had seen him be with almost anything, because it was his and he had built it and he was proud of it.
Now the wing was snapped clean in half.
"What happened?" I asked.
He wiped his face with the back of his hand. "Jason got mad because I wouldn't let him use my headphones."
I walked into the living room.
Jason was on the couch with the controller I had bought him last Christmas, and the television was throwing blue and orange light across his face, and he did not pause the game when I came in. I told him we needed to talk about the airplane. He said it was an accident without looking at the screen. I told him he had thrown it.
He put the controller down then. He looked at me directly, the way he did when he had decided that whatever came next was going to be said for maximum effect, and I saw something in his expression that I had been seeing in pieces for three years and was now seeing all assembled in one place, and it looked exactly like his mother.
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"Listen carefully, Rachel," he said. "You're not my mother. I don't owe you respect, or explanations, or anything else. Ethan isn't even my family. You're just the woman my dad married."
The room went quiet.
