Chapter 2 – Two Deliveries
Maya’s phone rang before Ruth could explain the second address.
Nate was calling back.
“What happened? Are you hurt?”
Maya put him on speaker because she did not have the strength for two different versions of this conversation.
“Your mother pushed me. I’m getting checked. The movers are here a day early, and Eli’s belongings are going to my father’s house.”
“What?”
Ruth stepped closer.
“Nate, she lost her balance. And Ray has plenty of room. We discussed—”
“Mom. Did you push her?”
Ruth stopped.
“I asked her to move.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Tom stayed on the porch, close enough to answer when Nate asked what he had seen. He described the shove without adding anything. He also confirmed that the truck had not left and that the two delivery addresses were on the revised job.
“I approved one address,” Nate said. “All our things were going together. Tomorrow.”
Maya closed her eyes for a moment. Relief hurt almost as much as fear.
“I’m leaving the job,” Nate said. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Keep Eli with you.”
Eli had heard him. His grip on Maya’s cardigan loosened slightly.
Ruth folded her arms.
“He needs to finish his work. You can’t call him away every time something doesn’t suit you.”
Maya looked at her mother-in-law’s face and understood how often she had mistaken Ruth’s confidence for information.
“Nothing leaves this house,” she told Tom. “Especially my son’s things.”
Tom called his dispatcher. The men moved the hand truck away from the doorway and waited outside while Maya kept Eli beside her.
Eli’s blue box stayed beside Maya’s shoe.
Nate arrived with dust on his work shirt and his tool bag still in the passenger seat. He crouched in front of Maya, asked before touching her shoulder, and listened to the instructions she had received over the phone.
Then he looked at Eli.
“You’re coming with us.”
“To Grandma’s?”
Nate glanced toward his mother.
“First we’re getting Mom checked. After that, we’ll decide together.”
At the hospital, Maya was examined and monitored. The first reassuring news did not make her stop shaking immediately. Nate sat beside her while Eli stayed with her friend Elena in the waiting area, where he could see when his father came through the doors.
Nate had adopted Eli two years earlier. There had been a courthouse photograph, a crooked cake, and a boy who asked whether he could call him Dad before the paperwork was finished.
Ruth had been at that celebration.
That was one reason Maya had agreed to her offer of two spare rooms. It was supposed to be family helping family.
While they waited for the next check, Nate opened the moving estimate saved on his phone.
Sunday pickup. One destination. Household furniture and personal belongings.
There was no exception for Eli.
“Did you ask my father to take him?” Maya said.
“No.”
“Did you tell your mother he should go somewhere else?”
“No.”
Nate turned the phone toward her.
“Then why did she tell him we’d all agreed?”