Free Nowhere to Go by Casey Watson

brown eyes, it wouldn’t have been beyond the bounds of possibility to think we were mother and son. Or, okay, if you were feeling less charitable, grandmother and son. It had been Kieron who’d pointed it out and it had tickled me. All those kids we’d fostered – both short and long term – and this was the first time we’d had a child in who looked so much like me. But when I turned around to see what it was that had so transfixed Tyler, it was to find myself looking at a lad who
really
looked like Tyler – so much so that there wasn’t a shred of indecision in my mind. In a dim light they could almost be twins. This had to be the very little brother who we’d just been discussing.
    It was. ‘Yo, Grant!’ Tyler called, slipping out from behind the trolley he’d been pushing for me, and jogging the ten feet or so that separated them in the washing powder aisle. It was a perfectly natural and perfectly obvious reaction to seeing him, and for half a second I smiled and thought – ‘Ahh, how nice is that?’ Specially when the two boys briefly hugged.
    It didn’t even strike me as any sort of incredible coincidence; I already knew the family didn’t live a long way away from us, and though that was unusual – you didn’t usually foster kids who lived very close to you – it was always going to be odds on they might shop here from time to time.
    But within another half second I realised that the other boy wasn’t on his own. A few yards behind him there was a woman, not pushing a trolley but carrying a basket, and who was now standing stock still, bar the hand that she’d lifted to her face, and with which she was looping a hank of blonde hair behind her ear.
    Then she spoke. ‘Grant! Come back here!’ I heard her call to him. The tension in her voice thrummed towards me on the air.
    ‘Grant!’ she said again, at which point he turned back towards her, uncertain. And it was then that I knew, beyond any shred of doubt, that we were going to have a scene. That there would be a kicking off.
    I took in the details, realising that she was not as I’d imagined her. She was young – probably late twenties, no more than that – very tall and lean, with the sort of pinched look that set bells ringing in my brain straight away, but which thought I pushed away. Who was I to make assumptions? I didn’t know anything about her, did I?
    ‘Mu-
um
,’ Grant was saying, as he and Tyler drew level, and I watched older and younger brother greet each other with evident pleasure. I pushed the trolley towards them and plastered on a breezy smile. I wasn’t exactly going to say ‘Well, fancy meeting you here!’ but I felt that something along those lines would probably do. Show the boys that we could play nicely. At least that’s what I’d intended. But something told me she didn’t want to speak to me. She certainly didn’t seem to want to meet my eye.
    ‘Grant, will you do as you’re
fucking
told!’ she snapped, causing the heads of the other couple of people cruising the aisles to duly snap up in surprise. ‘And come right back here this minute!’
    At which point I might have said something conciliatory – there was really no need for that sort of response, surely? But Tyler beat me to it.
    ‘He can talk to me if he fucking wants to,’ he roared at her, ‘so leave us alone, you bitch!’
    ‘Tyler!’ I started, reaching to grab a hold of him. It was almost automatic. And he was ready for it, and wrestled his arm free.
    ‘Leave me alone!’ he screeched back at me. ‘He’s my fucking little brother! I can talk to him if I want to!
She
can’t fucking stop me!’
    Except, obviously, she could. The aisle cleared, then, one pensioner even breaking into a trot. ‘Tyler,’ I said again, firmly but not aggressively. ‘Don’t make this worse than it already is, okay? Come on, come away …’
    But he completely ignored me. For all the things that he was and might be – he was still something of an