Chapter 3 - "He Has Been Spelling It Since You Walked Up"
The blonde woman's face changed. Her friend whispered, "Oh."
The mother looked at her. "That's what he was doing while you stood over him."
The blonde woman shook her head fast. "I didn't realize."
"No," the mother said, immediate. "You didn't." She looked down at her son. He pressed two squares again. The same ones. I watched his thumb move. One letter. Then another.
I realized what they were. "G." "O." Go.
His mother looked back at the women. "He was spelling 'go.'"
The blonde woman stared.
"He has been spelling it since you walked up."
That sentence landed harder than anything else she'd said all evening. The boy hadn't been playing with a strange tattoo. He hadn't been hanging off his mother's arm. He'd been asking her to leave. Over and over. Go.
The blonde woman stepped back. "I couldn't have known that."
"No," the mother said. "You couldn't."
For half a second I thought that might be forgiveness. Then she kept going.
"That's the point. You didn't know anything about us." Her voice wasn't loud. Somehow that made it worse. "You didn't know what this was. You didn't know what he was doing. You didn't know why he was doing it." She looked at the tattoo. "But you decided what kind of mother I was anyway."
The blonde woman glanced around. People were staring now. "I wasn't trying to—"
"I asked you twice to leave us alone."
"I was only saying—"
"No." The mother shook her head. The blonde woman's face tightened, but she had nothing left to say. "You were saying what you thought of me. You just didn't expect me to have an explanation that would make you feel bad about it."
The friend looked down at the ground.
Then the mother picked up the canvas bag she'd left on the bench. Her son moved with her instantly. She took his hand. He kept his other hand wrapped around her forearm. As they started toward the parking lot, his thumb pressed one of the squares again.
His mother looked down. "Yes," she said softly. "We're going."
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Somebody behind me clapped once. A single clap. Then stopped. I'm glad they did — it wasn't that kind of moment. The mother hadn't won anything. She wasn't walking away triumphant. Her son was distressed. She was crying. They'd come to a summer festival like everybody else, and now they were leaving because two strangers had decided her own arm required their opinion.
The blonde woman stood there a few more seconds. Then she and her friend walked off in the opposite direction. Nobody said anything to them.
