Free The Paradise Guest House by Ellen Sussman

But nothing did happen to him. He poured his grief into his art, turning his back on his kids.
    Molly took care of Gabe, choosing to live at home while attending Harvard, so that the two of them could sit at the dining room table, doing their homework side by side, the sound of their dad’s welding tools screeching through the night.
    Their father died a year before Ethan was born, and though Gabe and Molly had reconciled with him, it was always their mother’s death that they carried with them like a stone.
    “You’re not alone,” Gabe said now, his hand drawing smooth circles on Molly’s back.
    “When Ethan died,” Molly said, and Gabe flinched. He returned his hand to the steering wheel. “I felt like I mattered in your life.”
    “You do matter.”
    “You needed me. But what happens when I need you?”
    “Molly, I can’t move back. I don’t want to move back. I’m still trying to make a new life for myself. And it’s here.”
    “You’re going to be alone for the rest of your life?”
    “I don’t know anything about the rest of my life,” Gabe said. “This is what I want right now.”
    “I think you’re just torturing yourself by teaching kids. It can’t be good for you.”
    “It is good for me,” he insisted. He remembered the first day Lena asked him to help out at the school in Ubud, when a teacher got sick. The kids were seven—the age Ethan would have been then. He’d walked through the classroom door as if entering a nightmare. Would Ethan have been loud and rambunctious like that kid? No. He would have waited for a while before he tugged on Gabe’s shirt, the way a boy named Christopher did.
    “What do you need?” Gabe had asked him, squatting to be at eye level with the boy, who had eyes like deep pools. He wouldn’t say a word.
    “Do you want me to help you pick out a book?”
    Christopher nodded, and his curly hair bounced on his head. Ethan’s hair had been lighter, straighter. His eyes were green; this boy’s eyes were blue. Gabe smelled something familiar—did the kid use the same shampoo?
    “Do you like books about animals?”
    The boy nodded again.
    Gabe walked to the shelf as if expecting to find all of Ethan’s books lined up there. No, these were unfamiliar. The boy pulled one off the shelf. A red lion, mouth mid-roar, graced the cover.
    Christopher took Gabe’s hand and led him to the reading corner, tugged until Gabe settled on the floor, and then the boy sat, leaning his bony shoulder into him.
    Gabe began to read and soon the other kids gathered around, trying to sit as close as possible.
    A car honked, and Gabe swerved around a stalled truck in the middle of the road. He glanced at Molly, who had her eyes squeezed shut.
    “It helps me remember him,” he told her. He didn’t tell her about the days that he couldn’t speak because someone said something Ethan-like. Or the days when parents came to complain about their children because they weren’t reading well enough or weren’t making friends and Gabe found himself shaking with sudden anger. What he would give to have problems like that.
    “I remember his voice,” Molly said. “When I’m lying in bed at night I listen for him. If I could hear him say Mollipop again—just that would make me happy.”
    Gabe imagined Ethan at the beach on the Cape, shouting for his aunt to come in the water. Mollipop! Jump waves with me! He was brown from a summer in the sun, and his hair had turned blond. He hopped around the edge of the surf, a boy with too much energy. When Molly ran toward him, he leapt into her arms and wrapped his body around her like a monkey.
    A bus driver blasted his horn behind them, and Molly startled.
    “They call this paradise?” she grumbled.
    Molly had been single for two years, ever since the man she loved moved to Germany and didn’t ask her to join him. She wanted a child, she wanted love in her life, she wanted to belong to someone else’s family if she couldn’t have her own.