Chapter Text
The first time he loses her, he’s too young to understand what it really means. She’s no more than a name Levi sometimes mumbles into his glass when he’s loose and lolling in his chair in the evenings and listening to old cassettes of Gary Stewart or Merle Haggard singing about heartbreak, too far gone to hold it fast and guarded behind clenched teeth, a name he tries to keep to himself most of the time because he worries it hurts his son to hear it almost as much as it hurts for him to say it. Truthfully, Will would count himself neither under nor overburdened by the shallow pool of knowledge he had about his mother’s existence. Her name was Eleanor Graham, née Abellard. She played the piano. She liked to collect seashells and listen to the crack and snap of twigs splintered underfoot, but couldn’t stand to be away from the modern conveniences of city living for too long. She knew better than to breed but had decided to keep the baby anyway, until she changed her mind again later.
On nights that he knows Will needs to study for a big test coming up or work on a class project, Will’s dad hangs around the boatyard later than usual after his shift to down a beer or two or five with the other dockworkers instead of drinking at home. He won’t be a distraction, the sad man taking up too much space in the worn out recliner in their living room when Will needs to be focused, won’t risk his son’s future like that.
Will is at home pinning insects onto a thrifted scrap of corkboard, repurposed from another project that had been graded and returned earlier in the school year, when his father dies. A roll of distant thunder outside brings vague concern, a half-formed thought as he carefully pierces through a cicada’s thorax that Dad had better hitch a ride with whoever’s the most sober before it starts raining again. It’s bad enough that none of them takes the role of designated driver seriously enough to do more than cut back maybe a drink or two at most no matter who draws the short straw when the roads aren’t wet.
The drunk driving always itched at the back of Will’s brain worse than whiskey-soured breathing or the sad twang of guitar from a crackling old stereo and muffled bitten-back utterances from down the hall ever could, though he learns to stop voicing his worries when they’re only met with a quick side hug and an amused snort. “Who’s the parent here again? It’s my job to fret about you, kiddo, not the other way ’round.” In the end though, it isn’t drunk driving that leaves Will Graham half-orphaned a few months shy of thirteen after all. It’s only one careless slip backwards on a rain-slicked pier, a tumble into night-dark waters that sends the other guys into a laughing fit, until it dawns on them as their guffaws and giggles die down that there is no splashing or disgruntled cursing under the boards beneath their feet and one of them jumps in after him seconds later. None of them had heard over their own laughter the crack of Levi Graham’s skull against a damp splintering post or a snap as the angle of impact twisted his head roughly to one side. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway if they had.
He spends a few weeks with a foster family that owns a ranch while the social workers desperately scramble to figure out a way to contact his absent mother. The chores they have him do in the stables after school lets out in the afternoons are a nice distraction. He even warms up a little to one of the other foster kids working alongside him, an older boy named Peter who was kicked by one of the horses about a year back and now has a stutter and an atypical motor response. Peter doesn’t blame the horse or the owners, and Will isn’t as surprised as he wants to be that the incident somehow didn’t result in them losing their access to all the free labor.
He is far more surprised when Child Services finally manages to track his mother down that she doesn’t leave him in the care of the ranchers, and instead is waiting for him, sitting stiff and awkward on their ugly monstrosity of a hide leather couch in the sprawling, oversized living room decorated like a tacky homage to Clint Eastwood and John Wayne films one afternoon after the bus drops him off. The television is on despite no one watching—a rerun of Gunsmoke the rancher’s wife must have had on in the background before Eleanor arrived, now playing on mute—and the cicadas scream in the oak and chestnut trees outside as the screen door swings shut behind him.