Work In Progress

Over the phone, Eleanor heard her son exhale.  Heard the moist munching of the residual Fritos paste slickened across his tongue.

"I was here," he said.

"Well, right," said Eleanor.  "But Justin, she didn't know where you were."

"I was here."

She sighed.  She was on her feet, walking in long elliptical loops across her hotel room carpet. 

"So why didn't you tell her where you were?  She was worried, honey.  You don't want people to worry about you, right?"

"I didn't hear her."

"You didn't hear her?"

"No."

"You were there, but you didn't hear her?"

"No."

Eleanor pushed the tip of her index finger into the space between her eyebrows.  Where a headache was gathering mad force. 

"What were you doing?" she asked.  "If you were there, if you couldn't hear Kendall calling after you, what were you up to?"

"I was following a man," said Justin.

"'A man'?"

"Uh-huh."

"What man?"

"I don't know.  Just a man.  He was in the house." 

"In the house?"

"Yeah."

"Is he still there?"

"No," said Justin.  "He's gone.  He told me to let him go so I let him go."

Four-year-olds.  If hiding from a babysitter and fibbing to his mom was the worst Justin would do, that was fine.  So long as it didn't metastasize and result in physical injury or inflict long-term madness.  The less stress he endured the better.  Eleanor didn't want him to repeat any part of her childhood. 

At four, Eleanor had been deep in the throes of not having a mom around anymore, of being bounced between sets of grandparents while Ned came to terms with his spouse's suicide.  Although he was remarried, an admired poet, a tenured professor complete with the estimable shock of bone-white hair, thirty years on Ned was still at a loss, floating in the black, absent one Althea Bluth.