PART 2
I didn’t say anything for a long moment.
Benji was in the bath, pushing a plastic boat back and forth. He kept looking at me to make sure I was still there. “Your idea,” I said finally.
“He keeps wetting the bed, Mom. Jaclyn’s tired of washing sheets. I told her to put him out back for a night or two. It’s what Dad would’ve done.”
“Your father,” I said, “would have thrown you off that rig himself.”
I hung up.
The police arrived nine minutes later. Two officers. Jaclyn’s friends were gone before the patrol car stopped rolling.
Jaclyn tried to tell them it was “a game.” That Benji “liked the kennel.”
Then the officers walked out back with their flashlights. The wet towel. The cut padlock. A plastic bowl of dry cereal on the concrete.
A bowl.
Like he was the dog.
One of the officers had a little boy at home. I watched his jaw tighten.
Jaclyn was arrested that night for child abuse and child endangerment.
Then they asked Benji how long he’d been sleeping out there.
He held up four fingers.
Four nights.
Every night since Clay flew back to the rig. Jaclyn would lock him out after dinner and let him back in at breakfast. If he cried, she turned the music up.
His preschool teacher had noticed he was falling asleep at his desk. She’d called the house twice. Jaclyn told her he “wasn’t sleeping well because he missed his grandma.”
The next morning, I called a lawyer.
By Friday, I had emergency custody of my grandson.
By Monday, I had a protective order keeping Jaclyn away from him. And from my house.
Clay flew home that weekend, angry. He banged on my front door.
“You can’t keep my son from me!”
“Watch me,” I said through the screen.
I handed him a folder. Photos of the kennel. The police report. Benji’s scraped knees. And a letter from my lawyer.
He had two weeks to move his things out.
He read the police report standing on my porch.
When he got to the part about the cereal bowl, he sat down on the steps and put his face in his hands.
He didn’t speak to me for three months.
Then, in January, he called.
He’d broken up with Jaclyn. She pleaded guilty and got probation, with mandatory parenting classes she’ll never use.
Clay had started counseling. He’d signed up for the same parenting classes on his own.
“I don’t know what happened to me, Mom,” he said. “I let her make me into somebody I’m not.”
He visits now. Supervised, at my kitchen table. He’s trying.
Benji doesn’t wet the bed anymore. The doctor said it was never about bad behavior. It was about being scared.
In the spring, Benji and I tore down that kennel together. He insisted on carrying every piece to the curb himself.
Then we went to the shelter and adopted a scruffy brown mutt.
Benji named him Lieutenant.
He sleeps at the foot of Benji’s bed. Inside. Where he belongs.
So does Benji.
THE END.
