**Part 1**
Where the Boys Went on Weekends
“When is my son coming home? He’s been spending every weekend at your place!”
It was eight-fifteen on a Saturday morning. I was standing at my kitchen counter in my bathrobe, holding a cup of coffee, looking out the window at the leaves turning orange on the maple in the backyard.
I almost laughed.
“Denise,” I said, “what are you talking about? Nathan’s been at your house since yesterday.”
Silence.
The kind of silence that has weight to it. That presses on your ears.
“Laura,” Denise said slowly. “I haven’t seen your son in weeks.”
I nearly dropped my coffee.
“But he goes to Cole’s every Friday.”
“And Cole tells me he’s staying with Nathan!”
My stomach dropped through the floor.
Our boys had been best friends since kindergarten.
Nathan and Cole. Cole and Nathan. You couldn’t say one name without the other. They met on the first day at Cassidy Elementary, when Cole cried because his mom left and Nathan walked over and gave him half of a peanut butter sandwich. They’ve been inseparable ever since.
They learned to ride bikes together. They broke their arms together, falling out of the same tree in my backyard the summer they were eight. Nathan’s left, Cole’s right, so they could sign each other’s casts. They had matching Halloween costumes until they were thirteen and decided it was embarrassing.
Both sixteen now. Both juniors at Lafayette High School in Lexington, Kentucky. Both tall and gangly and constantly hungry and allergic to answering text messages.
And for two months, they’d spent nearly every weekend together.
Or so we thought.
“Denise,” I said. My voice sounded strange. Far away. “When did you last see Nathan?”
She was quiet for a moment. Thinking.
“Early August, I think,” she said. “Before school started. He came over for a cookout. What about Cole?”
I thought about it.
“Same,” I said. “August.”
Eight weekends.
Eight.
Every Friday since the end of August, Nathan had packed his backpack, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “I’m going to Cole’s. Back Sunday.”
Every Friday, Cole had told Denise the same thing about our house.
And neither of us had checked.
Where on earth had our sons been sleeping?
I hung up and called Nathan.
Straight to voicemail.
Hey, it’s Nate. Leave a message or don’t, whatever.
I called again.
Voicemail.
Again.
Nothing.
My phone buzzed. A text from Denise.
Cole isn’t answering either!!!
I opened Nathan’s last text to me. From Friday night. Eight-forty-two p.m.
Mom, Cole and I ordered pizza. Don’t wait up. Love you.
I’d read it Friday night on the couch, half-asleep, watching a cooking show. I’d smiled. I’d sent back a heart.
I looked at it now. Love you.
I typed: Nathan, I know you’re not at Cole’s. Call me now.
I hit send.
Delivered.
Not read.
Denise came over at nine-thirty.
She lives four streets away. She didn’t drive. She ran. In her pajama pants and a Kentucky Wildcats sweatshirt and sneakers without socks. Her hair was in a messy bun. Her face was white.
She stood in my kitchen and stared at me.
“Laura,” she whispered. “What if something happened to them?”
“Don’t say that.”
“What if they’re in a ditch somewhere? What if they got in somebody’s car? What if—”
“Denise. Don’t.”
But I was thinking it too. I’d been thinking it since the second she said I haven’t seen your son in weeks.
We called their friends.
Every single one. Every number we had.
Marcus Thompson, who plays basketball with them. His mom said Marcus hadn’t seen either of them outside of school in weeks. “They’ve been kind of weird lately,” Marcus told me, when his mom put him on the phone. “Like, they leave right after school on Fridays. Real fast. They don’t hang out anymore.”
Jaylen Ross. Nothing.
Emily Park, who Nathan had a crush on in ninth grade. Nothing.
The kids from the robotics club. The kids from the youth group at St. Peter’s that they stopped going to in September. Nothing.
Nobody knew anything.
Denise drove past all their usual hangouts.
The skate park off Tates Creek Road. The basketball courts at Woodland Park. The Waffle House on Nicholasville Road where they used to go at midnight after football games. The McDonald’s. The movie theater at Hamburg. The batting cages.
No sign of them.
I stayed home. In case Nathan came back.
I sat at the kitchen table with my phone in front of me and stared at it. I checked Nathan’s location on the family plan. He’d turned it off. When? I scrolled back. September first.
The first Friday.
He’d planned this.
At noon, I went into his room.
I hadn’t been in Nathan’s room in months. Not really. Not past the doorway. He’s sixteen. He wanted privacy. I respected it. I thought that’s what good mothers did.
It looked the same as always. Unmade bed. Clothes on the floor. A poster of a band I’d never heard of. His old guitar in the corner, the one he’d stopped playing in middle school.
But there were things I’d never noticed.
On his desk, there was a box of medical gloves. Purple nitrile. The kind nurses use.
Under his bed, there was a printout from a website. How to Care for Someone with Advanced Liver Disease. Highlighted. In three colors.
And in his trash can, a receipt. From a Walgreens. Dated two weeks ago. Bandages. Saline solution. Ensure Plus, vanilla, 24-pack. Adult incontinence pads, size L.
Adult incontinence pads.
I sat down on his unmade bed.
I didn’t understand.
I didn’t understand anything.
At midnight, Denise came back over.
She’d been driving around all day. She’d gone to the police station at four o’clock and they’d told her the boys were sixteen and it hadn’t been twenty-four hours and they’d probably turn up. She’d gone back at eight. Same answer.
We sat at my kitchen table with our phones in our hands.
The house was quiet. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere outside, a dog was barking.
“Has Nathan been acting strange?” Denise asked.
I thought about it.
I pictured his face every Sunday night when he came home. Exhausted. Gray. Dark circles under his eyes like he hadn’t slept in days. I’d thought they stayed up playing video games all night.
I pictured the way he rushed straight upstairs and into the shower the minute he walked in the door. Every Sunday. Before he even said hello. I’d thought it was teenage hygiene finally kicking in.
I pictured how he’d stopped telling me what they’d done.
“How was Cole’s?”
“Fine.”
“What’d you guys do?”
“Nothing. Hung out.”
I thought about his hands. One Sunday in September, I’d noticed his knuckles were cracked and red. Like he’d been washing them over and over. I asked about it. He said it was from basketball.
I thought about the night in October when I came downstairs at two a.m. for water and found him sitting at the kitchen table in the dark. Just sitting there. Staring at nothing.
“Can’t sleep?” I’d asked.
He’d looked up at me. And for a second, his face did something. Crumpled, almost. Like he was going to say something.
Then it closed.
“Yeah,” he said. “Just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Nothing, Mom.”
He went back to bed.
“I thought he was just growing up,” I said to Denise.
Denise buried her face in her hands.
“Cole’s been the same,” she said through her fingers. “Exactly the same. Tired. Quiet. He asked me last month if I knew how to make chicken soup from scratch. Cole. Cole, who eats cereal for dinner. He wanted to know how to make soup.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I showed him,” she said. “I thought it was cute. I thought he had a girlfriend who was sick.”
By three a.m., neither of us had said anything for an hour.
By four, we were about to call the police again. Denise had her phone in her hand. Her thumb was over the nine.
“If we call them again,” she said, “they’ll have to take it seriously. Thirty-six hours. Two minors. No contact.”
“Call them,” I said.
She pressed the nine.
Then, at 4:37, a key turned in my front door.
I knew the sound. I’d know it anywhere. The way the lock sticks a little. The way you have to jiggle it.
I jumped up so fast my chair fell over backward.
Denise dropped her phone.
I ran down the hall.
The front door opened.
Nathan.
“Where have you been?!”
I was screaming. I couldn’t stop. Thirty-six hours of terror came out of me all at once.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve put us through?! Two days! Two days, Nathan! I thought you were dead! I thought you were in a ditch!”
He stood in the hallway.
Alone.
No Cole.
Behind me, I heard Denise make a sound. A small, strangled sound.
“Mom, I—”
“Don’t you dare lie to me!” I was shaking. “Two months! Eight weekends! You told me you were at Cole’s! Cole told Denise he was here! Where have you been spending your nights?!”
He slowly raised his head.
The hallway light was on behind me. It fell across his face.
And for the first time in two months, I really looked at him.
All my anger vanished.
Just like that. Like a candle blown out.
His face was gray. Not tired. Gray. Like somebody who hadn’t slept in days. His eyes were swollen almost shut. Red-rimmed. Wet.
He’d been crying. For a long time.
His hands were hanging at his sides. They were shaking. There was something dark on them. Dried. Brownish-red. Caked in the creases of his knuckles. Under his fingernails.
Blood.
There was blood on his shirt too. His gray Lafayette Generals T-shirt. A big dark stain down the front. Spatters across the sleeve.
Not his. I could tell. He wasn’t hurt. He was standing up straight. No wounds. No bandages.
Somebody else’s blood.
And over the bloody T-shirt, he was wearing a jacket.
An old jacket. Olive green. Faded almost gray. Army issue. Too big for him. The sleeves came down past his wrists. There was a patch on the left shoulder. A screaming eagle. The 101st Airborne.
And on the right chest, above the pocket, a name tape. Black letters on olive drab. Stitched on with thick thread.
RHODES.
I grabbed the doorframe.
My knees buckled.
I knew that jacket.
I’d washed that jacket. Folded that jacket. Pulled that jacket off a man passed out on my kitchen floor at three in the morning. Put that jacket in a black garbage bag and set it out on the porch the night I changed the locks.
Ten years ago.
“Oh, God,” I whispered. “Nathan. What have you done?”
He was crying. He didn’t try to hide it.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I said.
He opened his mouth.
“Mom,” he said. His voice broke into pieces. “It’s Dad.”
I need to tell you about Greg.
Because none of this makes sense without Greg.
I met Greg Rhodes in 2005. At a bar in Lexington. I was twenty-three. He was twenty-six.
He’d just come back from his second tour in Iraq. Hundred and First Airborne. He had a buzz cut and a crooked smile and he laughed louder than anybody in the room.
He asked me to dance. I said no. He asked again. I said no again.
The third time, he got down on one knee in the middle of the bar and sang the chorus of “Friends in Low Places” at the top of his lungs, completely off-key, while everybody stared.
I danced with him.
We got married a year later. Nathan was born in 2010.
For a while, it was good. Really good. Greg got a job as a mechanic at a garage on Winchester Road. He could fix anything with an engine. He bought a beat-up old Ford Bronco and spent every weekend restoring it in our driveway. He built Nathan a crib with his own hands. He sang to him every night. Badly.
But something came home with him from Iraq. Something he never talked about.
He started drinking. A beer after work. Then three. Then a six-pack. Then whiskey.
He had nightmares. He’d wake up screaming. Sometimes he’d be on the floor next to the bed before he was even awake, crouched, like he was taking cover.
He hurt his back at the garage in 2013. The doctor gave him pills. Oxycodone.
The pills were worse than the whiskey.
I tried for three years.
I took him to the VA. I took him to meetings. I poured bottles down the sink. I hid the car keys. I flushed pills down the toilet. I called his sergeant from Iraq, a man named Hollis, who drove all the way from Tennessee to sit with him for a weekend.
Nothing worked.
The last night was in April of 2016.
Nathan was six. Greg was supposed to pick him up from school. He didn’t. The school called me at work. I left in the middle of a meeting and drove there and found my six-year-old sitting alone on the curb in front of the school with his backpack. The last kid. The teacher standing over him looking at her watch.
I took him home.
Greg’s Bronco was in the driveway. Crooked. Half on the lawn. The driver’s door was open. The engine was still running.
He was in the kitchen. Passed out on the floor. In that olive green jacket.
There was a bottle of pills on the counter. And a bottle of Jim Beam. Both almost empty.
Nathan stood in the doorway and looked at his father on the floor.
“Is Daddy dead?” he asked.
Greg wasn’t dead.
I called 911. They took him to the hospital. They pumped his stomach. He lived.
I packed his things that night. In black garbage bags. Everything. His clothes. His tools. His records. That olive green jacket.
I set the bags on the front porch. I called a locksmith. At midnight. I paid him two hundred dollars to change every lock in the house.
I filed for divorce the next morning. And a protective order.
The judge gave me full custody. Greg didn’t fight it. He didn’t even come to court.
He called a few times. In the first year. Drunk. Crying. Begging to see Nathan.
I didn’t answer.
Then the calls stopped.
I heard things. Over the years.
That he’d lost the job at the garage. That he’d sold the Bronco. That he was living in his car. That he’d been arrested for public intoxication. That somebody saw him outside a liquor store on Limestone, panhandling.
Then nothing.
For years. Nothing.
I didn’t look for him.
I told myself it was for Nathan. To protect him. To give him a stable life. A safe one. Without a father who passed out on the kitchen floor.
And it was.
But it was also for me.
Nathan never asked about him.
Not when he was little. Not when he got older. Not once.
When his friends talked about their dads, he’d change the subject. When there was a father-son thing at school, he’d say he had a headache. When he turned thirteen, Denise’s husband, Cole’s dad, offered to take both boys fishing. Nathan said no thanks.
I thought it meant he didn’t care.
I thought he’d moved on.
I was wrong about so many things.
“It’s Dad,” Nathan said.
He was standing in my front hallway at 4:37 in the morning. In a bloody T-shirt and his father’s army jacket. Shaking.
“He’s at UK Hospital,” he said. “In the ICU. They took him in an ambulance. At midnight. He was throwing up blood. So much blood, Mom. It was everywhere. Cole and I tried to stop it. We didn’t know what to do. We called 911.”
I couldn’t speak.
“They wouldn’t let us stay,” Nathan said. “In the ICU. They said we’re minors. They said they needed an adult. A legal guardian. Somebody who could sign papers.” He wiped his face with the sleeve of the jacket. “And Dad doesn’t have anybody. He doesn’t have anybody but me. So the social worker said I had to go get you.”
He looked up at me.
“My phone died,” he said. “At the hospital. Around ten. I didn’t have a charger. I didn’t see your texts. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Where’s Cole?” Denise said from behind me. Her voice was shaking. “Nathan, where’s Cole?”
Nathan turned and looked at her. Like he’d just noticed she was there.
“On the porch,” he said. “Outside. He’s scared to come in. He thinks you’re going to kill him.”
Denise pushed past me. She yanked open the front door.
Cole was sitting on the porch steps. Hunched over with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. In the cold. In the dark. He had blood on him too. On his jeans. On his hands.
He looked up at his mother.
“Mom,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I lied.”
Denise didn’t yell.
She sat down on the cold porch steps in her pajama pants and her Wildcats sweatshirt and pulled her son into her arms. Blood and all.
She held him. She rocked him back and forth.
Cole started sobbing.
I turned back to Nathan.
He was standing in the hallway with his arms wrapped around himself. Inside his father’s jacket.
“How long?” I said. “How long have you known where he was?”
“Since August,” Nathan said. “August twenty-fourth.”
“How did you find him?”
He took a shaky breath.
“I didn’t find him,” he said. “He found me. Sort of.”
He told me in the car.
I didn’t think. I just grabbed my keys and my purse and pulled a coat on over my bathrobe. I didn’t even put on real shoes. I drove to UK Hospital in my slippers.
Denise followed with Cole in her car.
Nathan sat in the passenger seat. He held onto his seatbelt with both hands.
And he told me.
August twenty-fourth. A Saturday. Nathan and Cole had driven to a gas station on New Circle Road to get Slurpees. Cole had just gotten his license. They were celebrating.
Nathan went inside to pay. When he came out, there was a man sitting on the curb by the ice machine.
Thin. Very thin. Gray beard. Yellow skin. Not tan. Yellow. Like old newspaper. His stomach was swollen out under his shirt like he was pregnant, even though the rest of him was all bones.
He was wearing an olive green army jacket. In August. In ninety-degree heat.
Nathan walked past him.
Then he stopped.
He turned around.
He looked at the jacket. At the screaming eagle on the shoulder.
At the name tape.
RHODES.
“I knew it was him,” Nathan said. “I knew right away. I didn’t even have to see his face. I remember that jacket. I remember him wearing it when he carried me on his shoulders. I remember the patch. I used to trace the eagle with my finger.”
I gripped the steering wheel.
“I stood there,” Nathan said. “In the parking lot. With two Slurpees. And I couldn’t move. And he looked up. And he saw me.”
He swallowed.
“And he said, ‘Nate?’”
“Cole was in the car,” Nathan said. “He saw the whole thing. He got out. He came over. He said, ‘Dude, who is that?’ And I said, ‘That’s my dad.’”
Nathan laughed. A broken laugh.
“Cole just stood there,” he said. “Then he said, ‘Okay. What do you want to do?’”
“What did you do?”
“I gave him my Slurpee,” Nathan said. “Blue raspberry. I didn’t know what else to do. I just held it out.”
Tears were running down his face.
“And he took it,” he said. “And his hands were shaking so bad he could barely hold it. And he started crying. My dad. Sitting on the curb outside a Speedway. Crying into a blue raspberry Slurpee.”
Greg was sober.
That’s the first thing Nathan told me. Before anything else. Like it was the most important thing.
“He’s sober, Mom,” he said. “He’s been sober for three years. Three years and four months. He has a chip. He showed me. He keeps it in the pocket of the jacket.”
Greg had gotten sober in 2022. At the VA. After he collapsed outside a homeless shelter and woke up in a hospital bed with tubes in his arms and a doctor telling him his liver was failing.
He went to rehab. He went to meetings. Every day. He got a room in a VA housing program. He got a part-time job at an auto parts store.
He was doing everything right.
And then, in May, he got a diagnosis.
Liver cancer. Advanced. From the hepatitis he’d picked up in the bad years, and the drinking before that.
The doctors gave him six months. Maybe less.
“He lost his housing in July,” Nathan said. “Because he couldn’t work anymore. He was too sick. The VA was trying to get him into a hospice. But there was a waiting list. And he didn’t want to go to a hospice anyway. He said he spent too many years in places where people die. He didn’t want to die in another one.”
“So where did he go?”
“The Starlite Inn,” Nathan said. “On Versailles Road. It’s a motel. Thirty-nine dollars a night. He was paying for it with his disability check. But it wasn’t enough for every night. So some nights he slept in the bus station.”
I closed my eyes. Just for a second. Then I opened them again. I was driving.
“He was dying alone, Mom,” Nathan said. “In a motel room. With nobody. He couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom by himself some days. He couldn’t cook. He couldn’t clean. He couldn’t change his own bandages.”
He looked at me.
“He’s my dad,” he said.
So the boys took care of him.
Every weekend. Friday afternoon to Sunday night. For eight weekends.
Nathan told me every Friday he was going to Cole’s. Cole told Denise every Friday he was coming to our house. And then they drove to the Starlite Inn on Versailles Road.
They slept on the floor of room 14. On a pile of blankets Cole took from his basement.
They cleaned the room. They did Greg’s laundry at a laundromat down the street. They bought groceries with money from their part-time jobs. Nathan bags groceries at Kroger on Saturdays. Cole works at a car wash. They spent every dollar on their weekends at the Starlite.
They made him soup. Cole learned how from Denise. Chicken soup from scratch. Because Greg couldn’t eat much else.
They helped him to the bathroom. They helped him shower. They changed his bandages where the doctors had drained fluid from his stomach.
They learned how to give him his medications. They wrote it all down in a notebook. What pills, what time, how many.
They paid for extra nights at the motel when his disability check ran out. So he wouldn’t have to sleep in the bus station.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said. “Nathan. Why? Why didn’t you just tell me?”
Nathan was quiet for a long time.
“He made me promise,” he said finally.
“What?”
“The first day,” Nathan said. “At the gas station. I said, ‘I’m going to call Mom.’ And he grabbed my arm. Really hard. And he said, ‘No. Please. Don’t tell her.’”
“Why?”
“He said you’d earned your peace,” Nathan said. “He said he took ten years of your life and turned it into a nightmare. He said he’d put you through enough. He said, ‘I’m not going to make her watch me die. She already watched me die once. On the kitchen floor.’”
My hands were shaking on the steering wheel.
“He said if I told you, he’d leave,” Nathan said. “He’d disappear. He’d go somewhere I couldn’t find him. And I’d never see him again.” His voice broke. “And I just found him, Mom. I just found him. After ten years. I couldn’t lose him again. Not yet. Not until I had to.”
“And Cole?” I asked. “Why did Cole go along with this?”
Nathan looked out the window. At the dark streets of Lexington going by. At the streetlights.
“Because Cole’s dad left too,” he said quietly. “Remember? When we were thirteen? After the fishing trip I didn’t go on?”
I remembered. Mike Carter. Denise’s husband. He moved to Nashville with a woman from his office. Cole hasn’t seen him since.
“Cole said, ‘At least your dad wants to see you,’” Nathan said. “He said, ‘Mine doesn’t even call on my birthday. Yours is dying and he’s still trying to protect your mom. That’s a dad, man. Even if he messed up. That’s a dad.’”
Nathan wiped his face.
“And Dad taught him stuff,” he said. “Taught both of us. How to change oil. How to fix a carburetor. How to play poker. How to play guitar. He had a guitar at the motel. A cheap one from a pawn shop. He taught me chords. He said I used to sit on his lap when I was four and strum it while he did the chords.”
I remembered. Greg on the couch. Nathan in his lap. A tiny hand on the strings. Greg’s big hand on the neck.
Friends in Low Places.
“Cole calls him Mr. Greg,” Nathan said. “He made Cole a little wooden car. With a pocketknife. Out of a piece of a pallet he found behind the motel. It took him three weeks because his hands shook so bad.”
We pulled into the parking garage at UK Hospital at five-twelve a.m.
Denise pulled in behind us.
We all walked to the elevator together. Me in my bathrobe and coat and slippers. Denise in her pajama pants. Two sixteen-year-old boys covered in blood.
Nobody said anything in the elevator.
The doors opened on the ICU floor.
The social worker was waiting at the nurse’s station.
Her name was Marguerite. She was about fifty. Short gray hair. Glasses on a beaded chain. Purple scrubs. She’d been on shift since seven the night before. She looked as tired as I felt.
She saw Nathan and her face softened.
“You came back,” she said.
“I brought my mom,” Nathan said.
Marguerite looked at me. At my bathrobe. At my slippers.
“Mrs. Rhodes?”
“I’m not Mrs. Rhodes anymore,” I said. “We’ve been divorced for ten years.”
“I understand,” Marguerite said gently. “But your son is Mr. Rhodes’s only family. And he’s a minor. We need a parent or guardian to help us make some decisions.”
“What decisions?”
Marguerite looked at Nathan. Then at me.
“Can we talk privately for a moment?”
She told me in a little room with a box of tissues on the table.
Greg had a variceal bleed. Blood vessels in his esophagus, swollen from liver failure, had burst. He’d lost a lot of blood. The doctors had stopped the bleeding. For now. But his liver was shutting down. His kidneys were starting to fail.
“He’s stable at the moment,” Marguerite said. “But Mrs…. Laura. He doesn’t have long. Days. Maybe a week. Maybe less.”
I didn’t say anything.
“He has an advance directive,” she said. “He did it at the VA in May. When he got his diagnosis. No resuscitation. No machines. Comfort care only. He wants to be kept comfortable. He wants to be awake as much as possible.”
“Okay.”
“And he listed an emergency contact,” Marguerite said. She slid a piece of paper across the table. “On the directive. In May.”
I looked at it.
Emergency contact: Nathan Rhodes. Son. Phone: (unknown).
Do not contact Laura Rhodes under any circumstances unless Nathan requests it.
She has earned her peace.
I put my hand over my mouth.
“He wrote that in May,” Marguerite said quietly. “Before your son found him. He didn’t even have Nathan’s phone number. He just wrote his name. In case.”
I couldn’t speak.
“Your son requested it,” Marguerite said. “Tonight. In the ICU. When we told him he had to go home. He said, ‘Can I bring my mom?’ And Mr. Rhodes said…” She paused. “Mr. Rhodes said, ‘Only if she wants to come. Don’t make her. Promise me you won’t make her.’”
I sat in that little room for a long time.
I thought about the kitchen floor. The Jim Beam. The pill bottle. My six-year-old in the doorway. Is Daddy dead?
I thought about ten years of not answering the phone.
I thought about Nathan, sixteen years old, kneeling on the floor of a thirty-nine-dollar motel room, changing his father’s bandages. Learning to make chicken soup. Sleeping on a pile of blankets. Spending every dollar he earned bagging groceries to keep a roof over a dying man’s head.
Lying to me. Every Friday. For eight weeks.
Because his father asked him to.
Because his father wanted to protect me.
She has earned her peace.
“Can I see him?” I asked.
