My grandson does not pitch a fit when his daddy comes to get him. And Lord help me, I almost wish he would. A screaming, kicking child, that is a normal child, a kid who does not want to leave his cartoons and his grandma. I would know what to do with that. No. What my grandson does is go quiet. So quiet. Still and folded-up and good, too good, the way a little soldier gets before he marches off to something. He sits real straight and answers yes maam to everything and does not make a single sound. And that stillness is the thing that scares me worse than any tantrum ever could.
I have had that boy since he was five, since his mama passed and things got complicated. His daddy gets him every other weekend, and I never questioned it, because a boy needs his father, that is what everybody says. But over these last months I started watching those Fridays. He would lay his own clothes out the night before, careful, pack his own little backpack, and by the time his daddy truck was due he would already be sitting there waiting like he was bracing himself. My chatterbox, gone silent. And when he came home Sundays, it would take him a day, sometimes two, to come back to himself.
This one Friday, while we waited on the truck, he sat on the stairs already dressed, that backpack in his lap, staring at the floor. I sat down beside him, put my arm around him, and asked him, soft, why he always went so quiet before his daddy came. He leaned into me, and I felt how he was trembling, just a little, all over. And he whispered that if he was very quiet and very good and never cried, his daddy did not get so mad, and that he practiced being a little soldier all week so he would not slip up and make him mad on the weekend.
Five years old when I got him. Nine now, and he had spent months training himself to disappear so a grown man would not turn on him.
I did not send him that Friday. I did not make a scene at the door either, which only ever lands back on the child. I called our family lawyer that night, and I got that boy in front of a counselor who knows how to talk to children and how to write down what they say so a judge will read it.
The court moved. The every-other-weekend stopped cold. His daddy has supervised visits now, at a center, with people in the room, and he was ordered into the classes a man like that needs, and whether he ever does the work is on him. But my grandson is not alone in a house with him anymore, bracing.
Do I still have to be a soldier, Grandma? Or can I just be a boy now?
You can just be a boy now, I told him. That is the only job you have got.
He hums again. He leaves his food on his plate without asking permission. He is a loud, silly, wonderful nine-year-old boy, all the way back to himself. And he never has to be a little soldier again.