Free After the Moment by Garret Freymann-Weyr Page A

said. "She did fundraising."
    "The firm she worked at fundraises," Clayton said. "I think she only did brochure design and things like that for them. She didn't organize the benefits."
    "My mother went to a lot of those," Maia said. "Josh used to buy four or five tables for any benefit she wanted."
    "Does she go to any now?" Millie asked.
    "With friends, yes," Maia said. "But Charles does not go to big parties."
    "That's not a bad thing," Clayton said. "He's a serious man."
    They were all quiet for a minute, not wanting to draw attention to Clayton's implied judgment that Josh had not been serious. Janet had told Leigh a little about Maia's current and previous stepfathers, with Millie filling in the rest.
    Maia's mother, almost three years after divorcing Josh, just as he was headed to prison, had married Charles Rhoem, who was a lawyer at the Justice Department. Maia had been in boarding school for eighth and ninth grades but jumped at the chance to move to Maryland when her mother got married (not to be with her mother or with Charles, but for the chance to visit Josh, who paid for, among other things, Maia's school tuition).
    "Did you ever get to go to them?" Millie asked. "The parties?"
    "Some," Maia said. "Once Mom was sick and so Josh and I went alone. It was fun."
    Millie leaned forward as if to ask another question, but her mother interrupted, saying, "Let Maia eat."
    "No, it's okay, I think I'm done, Ms. Davis, really."
    "Did you have lunch?" Janet asked, looking at Maia's untouched meat loaf and mashed potatoes. "And a snack?"
    "Uh-huh, yes," Maia said.
    "Well, if you're—"
    "Good," Clayton said, breaking into whatever Janet might have been about to say. "So you won't have to eat anything extra. But you need to finish."
    "Mr. Hunter, please—I'm just not that hungry."
    "It's not about being hungry," Clayton said.
    "I know," Maia said, softly.
    "So can you finish?" he asked.
    "No," she said, just as softly. "No."
    "You can," Janet said.
    "Think of seeing Josh," Clayton said. "Remember our agreement."
    "I do think of that," Maia said. "I see him on Saturdays."
    "You won't if I have to call him again," Clayton said. "Your visiting him is contingent on your eating."
    "You know, maybe she doesn't like meat loaf," Millie said.
    Leigh, who also had been thinking that, was too amazed to speak. His father had been the one to make Maia's visits to Josh a reward for gaining weight? How odd that it should have been Clayton who came up with the idea, and yet maybe it fit.
    Even Lillian said that no one was better in a crisis than Clayton.
As long as he can view something as a problem,
she said,
then he can manage it.
Meaning, of course, that he fell apart if the crisis was one in which he had to feel something, like when his mother died. Or when Janet cried because her ex-husband was dead.
    "This is
my
favorite meal," Millie added. "Not anybody else's."
    "Good point," Clayton said. "Maia, what do you feel like eating?"
    The answer was obviously
nothing,
so Leigh piled potatoes on his empty plate and asked Janet to cut him another slice of meat l oaf.
    "Remember when you used to tell me that anything a boy could do, a girl could do better?" he asked Millie.
    "I was ten," she said indignantly, as if it were fifty years ago instead of three.
    "Well, I think we should see if Maia can match me bite for bite," he said.
    "Do you want something else to eat?" Clayton asked.
    "I can make you grilled cheese," Janet said. "Grilled cheese and a milk shake."
    These, it would turn out, were the foods Maia had the easiest time swallowing when she was stressed or unable to meet her calorie requirement.
    "No, I'll just finish this," Maia said, picking up her fork.
    Leigh took a bite of meat loaf. Maia did too. They followed this pattern—him, her, him, her—while Millie told Janet and Clayton about a family of raccoons she had seen near Calvert Park's tennis club. A discussion about rabies, urban sprawl, and the displacement of wildlife