Mortal Bonds by Michael Sears Read Free Book Online

didn’t think I owed her a damn thing.
    “Great. You know where to find us. When are you planning this for? No one but German tourists comes to New York in summer, but don’t wait for Thanksgiving. I won’t be able to get your mother good theater tickets, and the Kid absolutely hated the parade last year. Total meltdown when the Captain America balloon crashed into the Ethical Culture building.” I was babbling. If I kept talking long enough, maybe she would just hang up and never come to New York.
    “I’ve sublet an apartment for next month on Central Park West. Tino will call you with our flights.”
    “Next month?”
    “Well, next week, actually. They let us have the place a little early.”
    “Angie. Next week? I’m working. The Kid has school. We can’t just drop everything and—”
    “We will work around all that,” she interrupted. “I do not need your permission to see my son or to come to New York.”
    Technically, this was true. She had signed over sole custody to me six months earlier, and we had verbally agreed that she should keep her distance until the Kid rebounded from the treatment he had received while in her care. But if I tried to keep her away, she might easily demand a court review. I did not trust the courts to judge what was best for my son.
    It was late. My head was splitting. “This is not what we agreed.” I had a headache. When I was trading I never got headaches. Then, when I began the fraud that eventually brought me down, I had them all the time. But from the time I heard my sentence in court, through two years of incarceration, followed by eight months of learning to live with and love a very difficult boy, I could count on one hand the number of times that I had suffered a headache. I had one now.
    She heard my unspoken acquiescence. “Oh, now, don’t go all
nerval
on me, Jason. I am a changed person. I have turned my life over to a higher authority. I think I will surprise you.”
    Angie was always full of surprises.
    “The Kid does not do high drama well, Angie. I’m going to set some boundaries, and I expect you to respect them.”
    “You make it sound so warm and inviting.”
    “No joke, Angie.”
    “I’ll have Tino call you.”
    I got up, swallowed three ibuprofen, and sank back into my chair, staring down at Broadway.

| 5 |
    G ood morning, Kid,” I called from the door to his room. I had once made the mistake of creeping in and giving my beautiful six-year-old son a soft kiss on the forehead as a way of waking him. It woke him. He sat up screaming, almost colliding with me in the process, and rubbing at the spot with his pajama sleeve so hard that he still had a bright red mark there when I dropped him off at school.
    I waited the agreed-upon ten seconds and called again. “Good morning, Kid.” It was a ritual—or a formula. A slow count to ten following the first and second greetings, and he would answer on the third. It had taken me three months of trial and error—which translates as fights and screaming fits—to come up with a way of getting him out of bed that was both gentle and effective.
    “Good morning, Kid.”
    “Good morning, Jason.” He sat up and checked the alignment of his cars on the shelf over the bed. None had moved overnight. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and bent forward to look down. The floor had not disintegrated while he slept. He hopped down and shuffled past me and out to the table.
    It was Thursday. Cheerios and milk. A thimbleful of no-pulp orange juice, a large glass of water, and a chewable vitamin—artificial banana–flavored.
    On the advice of his tutor/minder/shadow—the usually infallible Heather—we had spent a week that winter experimenting with a gluten-free, dairy-free, casein-free diet. As far as I could tell, the Kid had not actually swallowed anything other than water and his vitamin pills all week. He didn’t rant, or cry, or spit things out. He just opened his mouth and let the soy milk,