Title: Her Boy
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Characters: Winona, Jimmy
Disclaimer: Just world-building for an AU, without pay. Don’t mind me.
Summary: Riverside ‘verse; a Kirk childhood piece that follows along with Along Comes a Stranger and its sequel Many Bells Down. Winona does her best as a single mother with a young son.

Winona turned around at the slam of the kitchen door and balked.

Jimmy froze in his flight like a deer caught in headlights and stared at her, wide-eyed.

He wasn’t just dirty; he was filthy. His hair was the color of cow manure (oh God, she thought, don’t let it be that, or she’d have to soak him in the bathtub for three days) and his clothes couldn’t pass muster in a pig-penning contest.

She began, “Jimmy, what…”

At the sound of his name, the little boy’s brain flipped back on and he bolted through the kitchen and into the laundry room. Sighing, his mother placed her dishtowel next to the sink of unwashed plates and, after a moment’s thought, kept her apron on—just in case the muddy disaster that was her son decided to spread his condition on more than her kitchen floor.

“Jimmy?”

She found the boy trying to shove his dirty jacket into the washing machine. He was barely tall enough to stand level with the machine, and when his small hands reached for one of the dials, she hurried over and took both of them in her own. He jerked back and she let him go, surprised.

Winona fetched the jacket from within the washing machine with the question, “What have you done to your clothes?”

“Put it back!” The word burst from her son like a gunshot and his thin arms tried valiantly to fight with her over the jacket. She gave it up to him after spying the wet sheen to his eyes and crouched down to his level.

“Baby,” she said, turning his angry face to look at her, “what’s wrong?”

Jimmy shook his head, mute, and some of the dry, caked mud in his hair loosened and dropped pitifully to the tiled floor.

Winona looked at the ruined jacket between his hands for a long moment before saying almost sadly, “I had hoped you would take care of that, Jimmy.”

And the soft admission, more than nettling at him with questions, broke through his stubborn silence. Jimmy’s face crumpled. She took his shaking shoulders in hand and pulled him into the circle of her arms; George’s jacket pressed between them, staining her apron.

Winona rubbed his back until he was ready to do more than cry into her shirt, crooning, “It’s all right, baby. We can fix your daddy’s jacket.” Lord, she hoped silently to herself, let it be fixable. She would take it into town to the dry cleaners and beg them to do something. She can’t afford the cost (they’re barely scraping by as it is) but George’s jacket is, in a way, priceless to her. More so, perhaps, to her son, who hasn’t many connections to his father. Not for the first time, her eyes burned at the thought that Jimmy doesn’t have a single memory of George. Not a single memory—only the stories she can tell him at night, which sound like fairy tales even to her ears.

She swallowed, forcing the knot of sorrow, of depression, from rising too far into her throat and choking her. She won’t let Jimmy know how badly she’s broken; he has no one but her and if he doesn’t have her…

She tightened her hold on him and pressed a kiss to his hair, not caring about the mud.

When he was ready to stand on his own again, she let him go.

Jimmy scrubbed fiercely at his eyes with the back of his sleeve. Seeing the state of the back of that sleeve, she pulled his arm away from his face and wiped at his eyes with a clean corner of her apron. He flinched and she realized, beneath the dirt, the side of his face was tender and somewhat swollen.

Something fire-hot, worse than anger, seared Winona down to her core as she inspected the bruise. “What happened?” she asked in a voice that sounded oddly like an echo of her father’s from years past.

The look on Jimmy’s face was probably very similar to her own, the first time she heard that hard tone as a child. She saw the emotions play across his face (a habit she knew would lessen as he grew and gained control of himself; it would also herald something she didn’t look forward to—an unreadable teenager) and waited, watched as his loyalty to the idea of being a good son warred with his instinct to lie.

At last, Jimmy’s shoulders slumped. “’e hit me first” came the mumbled response.

She had to know. “He—a child or an adult, Jimmy?” Her blue eyes pinned his.

His mouth pinched in dislike. “Finny.” The name was clipped, even coming out of a seven-year old’s mouth.

Something in her relaxed marginally. She stowed away all thoughts of her father’s old shotgun in the back of her closet, laughing nervously to herself. She’d learned how to shoot at an early age but had always vowed never to pick a gun up in anger. Apparently having a child means she is going to be willing to break a lot of promises she has made to herself over the years.

Winona pried the jacket out of her son’s reluctant hands and laid it over the top of the dryer. “It needs to be cleaned in a special way, Jimmy,” she told him to quiet his protests. Then she marched him to the downstairs bathroom for washing up and personal aid.

The boy fidgeted on the closed lid of the toilet as she carefully cleaned his face and then his hands.

She asked as she worked, “Is there a reason you got into a fight with Finny?”

Jimmy muttered something like “stupidhead Finny” and breathed heavily through his nose.

“Sweetie,” Winona said, “if you don’t tell me I’m the one who’s going to look stupid when I go to his parents.” She paused. “You didn’t fight in school, did you?” Surely the principal would have called her by now and complained. Jimmy’s elementary school principal seems to think he is a trouble-maker. (Personally, she thinks the principal is the troublemaker, not her little boy.)

“Uh-uh,” answered Jimmy. Words came out in a rush. “We was playing with his new ball his daddy got ‘im—I don’t like him anyhow but he kept talking about how far he could throw and I know I can throw better ‘n he can—and he got mad ‘cause I could throw it real far and I said I could show him how to do better but he got madder—”

At this point, Jimmy clammed up while she wiped the washcloth over his mouth and then picked back up where he left off like there hadn’t been an interruption to his story.

“—and said he was better ‘n me anyhow ‘cause he had a daddy and I didn’t. So I called him a stupidhead.”

She looked at him.

He finished, “…and maybe pushed him a little… but the rest weren’t my fault, Mama! Finny’s bigger ‘n me and I had to kick him there ‘cause he tried to steal my jacket ‘cause he knows it was my daddy’s jacket!” The boy’s fists balled up at the idea of Finny with the jacket.

She’s surprised the house telephone isn’t ringing off the hook. Finny’s mother is a righteous stuck-up person, probably the most righteous in the whole town because she’s from money, and the woman would raise a fuss about anybody—especially Winona’s boy—touching her spoiled brat of a son, let alone kicking Finny in the groin.

She tried hard to stop her snickering. She did, but it escaped anyway

Jimmy grinned, the world suddenly less dark now that he knew his mother wasn’t too upset.

For the sake of being a good parent, she sobered up and said, “We shouldn’t laugh, Jimmy. It’s not right to hurt other people.”

The boy swung his legs from his perch and wanted to know, “Even if they hurt you first?”

She sidestepped that by saying, “Didn’t you shove Finny first?”

Jimmy’s mouth turned down. “But he said hurting words.”

“Hurtful,” she corrected absently. Winona sighed again (and wondered how many times in the next decade she would sigh over her son; enough for a world record?) and touched his un-bruised cheek. He was too precocious, her boy. “Baby, it’s a hard thing to know when to hit somebody and when not to. Even I don’t know the right answer.”

He didn’t look convinced of that. She wished then and there she was less human and more deity. She hated the thought of Jimmy one day realizing she was as fallible as everybody else.

Would George have known what to say to his son?

She smoothed a band-aid over a cut on his hand. “Promise me you will try to think of another way than hitting to solve a fight with someone.”

He considered her, looking too much like her father mulling slowly over a choice between what he wanted and what was asked of him.

Jimmy’s shoulders rose and fell, and he downcast his eyes to pick at a dry patch of mud on his pants. “I promise…” he said in a sighing voice (not unlike hers, she realized, astonished). Then he added with a flash of his blue eyes, “But I might have to hit ‘em anyway.”

She kissed his clean cheek. “I know, Jimmy. I know.”

He squirmed under the affection. “I’m hungry,” the child complained, seeking to get away from her grasp. “Feed me!”

“Now why would I feed you? Do I look like your mother?” she shot back, eyes dancing.

“You are my mama!” he said. One of his flailing arms knocked over a bottle of lotion on the sink counter and he scrambled after it.

She rose to her feet and looked at him in the mirror then at her own reflection. Jimmy had her eyes, her mouth, her wheat-colored hair. George’s nose, and her father’s stubborn jaw.

The boy tugged on her arm in a plaintive yet hopeful fashion. “Pie?”

She smiled down at him, her heart inexplicably warm. “Do bad children get pie?”

He nodded.

“Why?”

“’Cause you love me. Don’t matter if I’m in lots and lots of trouble.” For all of the bravado in his voice, Jimmy worried his bottom lip as he said this.

She couldn’t imagine not agreeing, couldn’t bear the thought of him ever thinking otherwise. “I do love you, Baby—even when you’re bad.” Her voice wavered. “I hope—I hope you’ll understand why I am not going to make you a pie tonight, because even though I love you, there is a consequence to being bad.”

He tucked his head against her side. “Can I get pie later?”

She told him, hearing his unspoken question, “Yes, later. Just not tonight.”

Beneath her hand, his head bobbed in a nod. Then the child pulled back and asked, small face solemn and slightly afraid, “Can I wear the jacket again, Mama?”

It’s too big on him, a leather jacket for a grown man, and she had only recently gotten him to stop wearing it to bed at night. But Winona knows what the jacket means to him.

“We’ll get it cleaned first, Jimmy. Then you can have it back… but maybe you could wait to wear it until you’re older, when it fits better?” She didn’t expect him to agree to that suggestion.

But Jimmy blinked up at her, stating, “It won’t get dirty in the closet.”

“No, it won’t. It’ll just stay there and wait for you to grow up a little more. I promise.”

“’Kay,” he said. “But it’s the only coat I’m gonna wear when I’m big.”

She laughed. “I don’t doubt it, Jimmy. I really don’t.”

The boy loped out of the bathroom like a hound racing after a coon, heading toward the kitchen. She only remembered belatedly that she had said she wouldn’t feed him pie.

And there was yesterday’s pound cake sitting innocuously on the kitchen counter.

Rolling her eyes, Winona shouted after the vanishing figure of her son, “Jimmy, stay away from the cake until dinner!”

The echo came back, “Where’s the mashed potatoes? Ewww, peas!”

She abandoned straightening up the bathroom and hurriedly closed its door, a hand flying to her hair to inspect with dismay its loosened bun. Then a loud bang and the resonation of laughter sounded throughout the house, followed by a period of silence, and she forgot about her appearance in lieu of the cloud of smoke coiling slowly into the hallway from the kitchen.

“Jimmy!” she shrieked.

Jimmy bellowed back, “Maaaama! The peas are on fire!”

Oh good Lord. George, she thought as she flew down the hall, this boy is all your fault! I hope you know that!

She imagined George was laughing at her right now; and she imagined he would be proud too, both of Jimmy and her for surviving without him.

-Fini

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