The Map My Son Drew of Both His Addresses

My son had drawn two houses on the same piece of paper. Mine had a square chimney, even though we lived on the fourth floor and the only thing over us was another apartment. His mother’s had six windows. She had three, but Ben liked to double things when he had enough room.

“It’s for school,” he said. “We had to draw how to get home.”

I put the paper on the kitchen table. Ben pulled a pencil out of his backpack and handed it to me. “Which way does your bus come?”

“I did both ways already.”

He took the pencil from me and traced two blue lines with its eraser. One began at his mother’s apartment, the other at mine. They came together at the school, where he’d drawn the flag almost as tall as the building.

In October, when we told him we’d be living in different places, I’d made a calendar with blue days and green days. I spent enough time at work changing the clocks in empty office suites that I trusted a schedule to make things right. I printed a copy for his mother and put a third in his backpack. He came home one day with a wet corner on it and said the paper had gotten hungry in the rain.

Now it was March. On blue days he walked out of school and turned left. On green days he turned right. I knew those directions because twice I’d stood in the wrong place and watched him look for me.

Ben put his finger over a gold star between the school and the corner store. It sat a little off the route, beside a gray rectangle I couldn’t name.

“What’s there?” I asked.

He picked at a corner of the star. The point was coming up, and I almost reached over to press it down.

“That star is where I wait,” he said, “when I want both of you to come.”

I said I didn’t know he’d been waiting for both of us.

“I haven’t yet,” Ben said. “I drew where I’d do it.”

The gray rectangle was the stone bench outside the school gym. I’d walked past it a hundred times. Parents used it to tie skates when the gym opened for winter rec, and a loose piece of gravel clicked under one end if you sat down too hard.

“What would we be coming for?”

He zipped his backpack up and unzipped it again. “Friday. I have a line.”

I knew about the third-grade assembly. I had the time on my calendar. I’d figured I’d go because it was a blue day, and I’d send his mother the video.

“You can tell her about it, too,” I said.

“I told her last week. She said she’d let me have my time with you.”

I could hear her saying it. I could hear myself thanking her for it.

I called Maya while Ben sat next to me. When I told her about the star, she said, “Put him on.”

He took the phone and walked to the other end of the kitchen. “I only have one line,” he said. Then he listened a while. “Okay. I can do that.”

After he hung up, he told me she wanted him to practice the line on us before he went in. He refused to tell me what it was until Friday.

I got to the bench first. When I sat down, the gravel clicked. Maya came around the corner with a paper bag and set it between us. She’d bought two muffins because she didn’t know whether I’d eaten. I took the one with the broken top.

Ben came out in his yellow sweater. He stood in front of us with both hands flat against his legs.

“Some birds come back to the same place every spring,” he said.

Maya said, “Louder,” so he said it again. Then he ran back inside with the pleased look of someone who’d been told to make more noise.

There were folding chairs set out in rows when we went in. Maya saw two together and tipped her head toward them. I sat beside her and put my phone away.

When Ben said his line, he knew where to look.