30 Days - Promise

[felicitygs]

 “It will be okay,” Luke says.

 

His mother laughs, rubbing her face.

 

“It’s supposed to be me telling you that,” she says.

 

Luke smiles. It’s not big–just the slightest quirk up of one corner of his lip, and doesn’t reach his eyes at all.

 

“Well, sometimes you need someone to tell you,” he says.

 

She wonders when he grew up–not just physically, though he has done that, all tall and lanky. Taller than her, and looks more like his father every day. But there’s more to it than that. She didn’t think sixteen year olds were meant to be so serious, and the teenage rebellion she’s been braced for has never come. He gets more, quiet, and he’s withdrawn. Sometimes she thinks she doesn’t even know him anymore, and maybe that’s true too.

 

Things are better now, than they were, wehre every day was working two jobs and trying to find her feet again, but it doesn’t make her feel like she’s missed his childhood any less.

 

“It will be okay,” he says again. “I promise, Mama.”

 

She smiles at him, cups his face in her hand and runs her thrumb along his cheekbone.

 

“I know, Luke. I know. You don’t need to promise me anything.”

 

He smiles again, that same melancholy thing, and there’s something nearly indulgent, like she’s the child and he’s the parent and it’s cute how she’s saying she doesn’t need him.