Yesterday he grabbed my hand and said, “He does the FACE, Mom.”
I’ve seen that face somewhere before, and it scared me more than I wanted to admit.
Mason is six, and Derek is the first man he’s let close since his dad left three years ago.
I’m Danielle, and every Saturday we go to Foster Park so Mason can burn off energy before dinner.
Derek pushes the swing, ties Mason’s shoes, always remembers his favorite drink is the blue Gatorade.
For eight months I told myself I’d finally gotten this right.
Two weeks ago Mason started hanging back near the slide instead of running straight to Derek.
“He does the FACE again,” Mason said, not looking at me.
I figured he was just adjusting, still getting used to sharing me, and let it go.
Then I started watching Derek out of the corner of my eye instead of actually talking to him.
At the swings, when I turned to grab Mason’s water bottle, Derek’s smile dropped for a second, then snapped back before I fully faced him again.
A few days later Mason refused to sit next to Derek in the car, buckling himself into the FAR back seat instead.
“Why won’t you tell me what’s wrong,” I asked him that night.
“I don’t want to make him MAD,” Mason said.
Something tightened in my chest that had nothing to do with Derek.
That night I opened my mom’s shared photo album, looking for baby pictures of Mason to calm myself down.
Instead I found a photo of me at six years old, standing in our old backyard, my stepfather Gary behind me.
In the photo his mouth was doing something.
The SAME something.
My hands were shaking.
I called my mother and asked if she ever noticed Gary make that face around me.
She went quiet for a long time before she answered.
“WE THOUGHT IT WAS JUST HIS SMILE,” she said. “We never let ourselves think about it any other way.”
I sat there with the phone against my ear, staring at Mason’s sneakers by the door, the ones Derek had tied for him that morning.
I thought about every Saturday at Foster Park, every time I turned my back to grab a water bottle or check my phone.
My mother’s voice came through again, quieter this time.
“Danielle,” she said, “there’s something about Gary I never told you.”
For more stories about unsettling discoveries and unexpected twists in relationships, read about what happened when my daughter drew our family and crossed one person out in red or the moment I found a second phone behind his coats, and the photo on it looked like me. You might also be interested in the time the bikers in my driveway knew my foster daughter’s real name.
