Take One With You by Oak Anderson Read Free Book Online Page B

tank, Mom!”
    Anne looked up from her newspaper at her son. She’d read the same story several times now and couldn’t seem to grasp what it meant. Charlie was smiling down at her hopefully, with that same expression that made her so sad every time she saw it cross his face. It was in his eyes, something no mother should ever have to see in her child.
    It was pity.
    She tried to focus on what he was saying, but suddenly she was taken back to that terrible Saturday years ago, looking up at her eleven year-old son.
    “Daddy won’t wake up.”
    She was sitting in the chair she had slept in, reading the morning newspaper, and when she looked into the eyes of her son, that was when she knew that her husband was dead.
    Anne jumped up and went to the back of the house, followed by her only child, and the two of them shared a moment no mother and son, or anyone, should ever have to share.
    They looked down at the body of her husband and his father.
    “Mom, what are you doing?” Charlie screamed, and she was jolted from her memory.
    Anne was standing in the middle of her bedroom, staring at the empty bed.
    “What’s happening?” She looked at Charlie, and there was only fear, because he knew that she had been, for a moment, completely lost inside her head, which they both knew was an increasingly dangerous place to be.
    Charlie guided her back to the living room and didn’t attempt to remind her of the joke they’d shared about Bessie, his tarantula that she had, against every ounce of better judgment, allowed him to get after the death of his father. She had worried that he’d developed a morbid fascination with death around that time, looking up terrible things on his new computer and behaving oddly. She considered taking him to a therapist, concerned that he might develop suicidal thoughts or urges, but he seemed to calm down a bit after he got the spider, as if his interests were a wide-cast net that he’d learned to focus more narrowly in order to catch whatever prey he’d been looking for.
    Their Bessie joke had been the first bit of humor they’d shared after her husband died, the first time laughter had returned to their home, and Charlie’s mother had loved the crazy spider for that.
    He’d found Bessie on the Internet, and she’d let him buy the arachnid and a terrarium for his room. It was only a month after the death of his father, and though she hated the thing initially and would have preferred a dog or even a goldfish, she had always recognized the fact that her son was unique, and she indulged him. She had to admit it looked rather delicate and even beautiful at times, as long as it wasn’t moving. She cringed to see those spindly legs in operation, but that was just the sort of thing that little boys think are cool, and Charlie spent hours and hours in his room, watching Bessie in fascination. The females supposedly lived much longer than the males, something she could never bear to tease him about, given the circumstances.
    So it had been a shock when her son emerged from his room and told her that his spider had escaped its enclosure.
    “What?” she very nearly screamed. “Oh my God!”
    And then she saw him smile; an event that had been all too rare of late, and she knew that she’d been had.
    Her jaw dropped and then she got the giggles, which turned into laughter, which morphed into something akin to real guffaws. For a while she could hardly breathe, and it was infectious. The two of them laughed until they cried. Charlie actually doubled over and collapsed into her lap like a child, and though he was much too big for it, she held him in her arms and rocked him like a baby until their laughter subsided.
    It seemed like they’d reached a milestone in their life after Jim, the first time either one of them really felt safe since he’d passed. They felt close , an intimacy they’d not shared since Charlie was a baby, and the bond forged that day around the circumstance of a silly joke had