“Hey, have you seen an Alabama licence plate yet?” Mark asked, glancing in the rearview mirror to look at his son. Dylan was colouring peacefully, clearly tired, but Mark felt guilty for leaving him for so long.
Thanksgiving and Christmas had been easy enough. He’d been able to get time off, his family had been around, and babysitters had been everywhere when he’d needed one. Spring break was a different story entirely. He hadn’t seen Dylan in over a week, and he hadn’t realised how much he’d miss him until then.
Dylan was the only person Mark really had in the world. Without him at home, sleeping in his office a few nights a week had seemed like a better deal than driving back and forth to work every single day. He’d been miserable the whole time.
“No,” Dylan responded after going through the checklist in the little notebook he was carrying. They’d started the game when Mark had dropped Dylan off with his sister-in-law, and were continuing it while they drove home to New York.
“He’s a long way from home,” Mark said. “How many you got left?”
“Eleven,” Dylan said after a pause. Sometimes, it was weird that he could count at all. Mark remembered him as a tiny baby, gripping his fingers and grinning up at him. He’d grown up a lot since then, but the memory of him being small enough to hold in one arm was still there.
Not that Mark wished he was still that tiny. Dylan had gotten more fun to be around as he’d aged, developing his own personality, learning stuff about the world. Mark hated that he didn’t get to spend nearly as much time with Dylan as he wanted to. When he’d been little, it hadn’t made so much difference. Now that he was school-age, he knew how often his dad was away. He cared.
Leaving him with Alyssa had been hard. He couldn’t keep doing it. There had to be another solution.
Aside from getting married again, which he didn’t think was about to happen. No one wanted to take on a widower with a kid. Mark wasn’t even sure he was ready to love again.
“Eleven including Alaska and Hawaii?”
“Got Alaska,” Dylan responded.
“Oh, yeah!” Mark smiled as he remembered how excited Dylan had been when he’d spotted it. “Nice. So which ones are left?”
“Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia.”
“Maybe we’ll go visit some of those one day. Maybe in the summer,” Mark said, knowing that it wasn’t going to happen. He had no idea how he was going to manage over the summer holidays. When Dylan had been young enough for day-care, it’d been fine, but now that he was in school and there was no one to look after him over the holidays, Mark was screwed. Single parenting was hard, and he had no idea how so many people just did it. He could barely remember how his mom had managed.
She’d had family nearby, though. As an only child, Mark had no one. Not anymore.
“Okay,” Dylan said. It was obvious that he didn’t believe it, either. Mark had never felt more like a bad father than he did now. He’d missed so much of Dylan’s life already, and without help, he’d miss even more of it.
Alyssa had offered to take him on full-time. The idea had made Mark cringe at the time, the thought of losing the only thing he had left in his life too horrifying to really consider. It might have been best for Dylan, though. The stability of always having someone at home when he needed them was more important than Mark’s feelings.
What he actually needed was a nanny. He wasn’t sure those still existed outside of sitcoms, but he could find out. If they worked like he thought they worked, it might serve as a solution to his problems.
He had a spare room, after all, and that room had its own bathroom. He could have someone else living in the house.
The thought was daunting--bringing someone into his life like that, having to share his home with a stranger--but then, the thought of leaving Dylan with Alyssa permanently--or even over the summer--was much, much worse. Mark wasn’t sure he’d survive that.
He glanced in the rearview mirror again and saw that Dylan had fallen asleep. When he was awake, he was all questions and excitement, but asleep, it was impossible to forget that he was still a baby. Six years old wasn’t nearly old enough to understand why Daddy was never around. Why he had to stay with his aunt over the school holidays.
For Dylan’s sake, he’d have to deal with it. He wasn’t going to let his kid grow up feeling like his father didn’t love him. If that meant living with a stranger, fine.
It was much better than having to miss Dylan all the time, or only getting to spend time with him when he was trying to get him fed and bathed and to sleep, or up for school in the morning so he could go in extra early for before school care. That wasn’t fair, either. He deserved to live as normal a life as Mark could give him.
When they got back, he’d look into how nannies worked in the real world. It couldn’t hurt to do a little research. Looking it up didn’t mean he had to do it.
He definitely had to do something, though.
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