# 10 - Disillusionment
The air on the porch seemed stifling to Emma as she sat with a book in her lap; the pages fluttered lightly as she flicked them between her fingers. She let her gaze fall out beyond the wooden posts and the swinging fly-screen to the roses that were wilting behind a statue of a Kingfisher. She couldn’t believe how different things seemed now, as they were coming into the fall of such a year. The world seemed a different place.
Two months ago she had sat in this very spot, with this same book, and everything had seemed so much stronger in her mind - painted in vibrant colours rather than the monochrome that blanketed everything now. Two months ago it had been a vacation from real life to be here, back home again. Two months ago she had Ollie with her.
The little boy had spent his afternoon running around the back yard with a piece of wood longer than he was tall, shouting that it was his horse and he was a pirate. He had named the horse Captain Silver, and everybody nearby was to call him only by his new name: Ollivander.
“He thinks Harry Potter is a book about pirates,” Adam explained to Emma’s mother. “But, whatever. It’s the best thing since sliced bread.”
“Or chocolate,” Emma said, laughing. She watched Ollie run circles around the rose bush, every so often knocking a flying limb against the pink blooms.
“Oh, be careful Ollie!” Adam had scolded. Emma smiled.
The roses were dying now, she knew. They probably wouldn’t last the winter; the soil in her mother’s garden had never kept anything alive for more than a season. Their house had been the last built in the neighbourhood, and the grass covered more than just mud. Emma had once found an entire shoe, still whole, with several nails hammered into the heels. It was no wonder than nothing grew.
Without realising it, Emma had let herself begin to cry.
She should have known from previous experience that things were going too well to last. Like the roses, her relationships never lived for more than a season. But Ollie - he was something new. At twenty-five years old, Emma had never dreamed that she could love a child so much. Adam said that she was brilliant with his son, better than Ollie’s own mother.
What Emma didn’t know then was that Ollie’s mother hadn’t even stuck around long enough to name the kid before dumping him on Adam. If she had known that, Emma thought, would she have acted differently? Perhaps she would have steered clear of Adam, stayed away from him and the heartbreak he was sure to cause when he decided that nobody could be good enough for his son.
But thinking about it, Emma knew that things wouldn’t have been different. Knowing where Ollie had come from would just have made letting him go harder.
Three days after Ollie declared he was a fireman, thank you, Adam told Emma that she had to leave.
“You’re filling his head with too much nonsense. I can’t have him learning all this stuff, only to have his teachers tell him it’s wrong. It’ll mess him up too much.”
Emma didn’t say anything about the fact that Adam was just as guilty as she was when it came to telling stories. She surprised herself with how easy it was to just stand up, hand Adam the bag with Ollie’s toys, and leave ten dollars for her meal. The cafe around them was bustling, but that didn’t stop her either; nobody looked at her any differently as she laid down her money; nobody frowned when she kissed Ollie’s soft, blonde curls for the last time.
Her mother hadn’t been surprised to see Emma on the back porch when she returned from work. She came outside bearing a plate of cookies, two glasses of sweetened ice tea, and the book her daughter had left behind on her last visit.
“Your old room is ready when you want it,” she said. That was all there was to it.
Emma nodded. “Yes. Are the roses dying already?”
“Who knows,” Emma’s mother had responded. “They might take us by surprise.”
Emma thought, sitting on the porch and watching the roses die, that her mother must have been waiting for an explanation, but she never got one. Instead she got warmer weather, dying foliage, and Emma.
Words: 744
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