Raising Children is an Ongoing Test You Haven't Studied For

Chicken stir-fry. Vincent put his finger between the pages and lay Lily's spine-cracked recipe book flat on the counter. Quick, simple, tasty and, most important so close to grocery day, something they had ingredients for. He scooped his hair into a slapdash ponytail and began scrounging for the correct pots and pans.

Vegetables were scattered on the counter in varying degrees of readiness, water was on the boil for the rice, everything was on hand to complete the stock, including raw chicken on the cutting board, when the front door opened.

"Hey, Dad."

"Off the counter, please."

Jordan obediently picked up his bicycle helmet and ran a hand through flattened chestnut hair, already due for another trim. Short hair suited him better, the straight, compact lines of his springy fourteen year-old body. So did tucked-in shirts and pants without holes in the knees, but that was something he had demanded his own way on. And Tifa had eventually given in, though she still muttered, "Oh god, he's going to school dressed like that?" under her breath when he went out the door in the morning.

"What are you making?"

"Stir-fry." He began to cut the chicken into bite-sized chunks, stopping only once to pop a broken snow pea into his mouth.

Jordan gave a dramatic sigh of relief and leaned against the kitchen doorway, pushing at the heels of his sneakers with his toes. "Good. I thought you were making that chicken catch … catcha-whatever again."

"Cacciatore?"

"Yeah, that's it." He kicked his shoes negligently into the hall and rolled his helmet after them.

"You didn't like that? Go put those away properly, Jordan."

"I guess it was okay." He stepped back out of the room, and Vincent heard the untidy sound of shoes and helmet being piled willy-nilly into the closet.

A simple recipe, cacciatore, though it took a while in the oven. With a quiet sigh, Vincent scratched it from the internal repertoire he kept of things his son would eat. "How was school?"

"All right." Jordan came back into the kitchen and padded around his father to pick at the water chestnuts, flick the switch to the coffee maker and fold the corners of a newspaper left on the table. Then he peered into the fridge, opened a cupboard, and eventually made his way back to the counter. He spent a few seconds restlessly fingering the peppers a moment before catching up with Vincent's elbow.

Vincent eyed him for a moment, tempted, despite the chicken on his hands, to brush aside a fluttering bang from that young forehead.

Jordan tapped the counter idly for a moment like he might have been trying to communicate something through Morse code. And then he seemed to get bored. "Need help with anything?"

"You want to help me with dinner?" The water was boiling. Vincent picked up the bag of rice and turned to the stove. The best way to deal with Jordan, he had learned through experience, was indirectly, with patience and polite ignorance.

"Something wrong with that?"

"No." He finished pouring the rice and turned the burner down a notch. "But I will ask you what you've done with my son."

Vincent didn't need to see him to know Jordan was rolling his eyes. He smiled a little to himself. "Those mushrooms need to be cut up." He pulled a second cutting board out of a drawer and placed it on the counter – without eye contact, and close enough to inspire conversation in confidence. Sometimes it only took a tiny bit of encouragement to bare that early soul.

A few minutes passed in silence as they minced their separate vegetables, Vincent discreetly taking his time as smaller, unpracticed fingers slipped over the mushrooms and struggled to keep the knife straight.

"Um, Dad?"

"Mm?"

He scooped a handful of diced green pepper and dropped it liberally into the pan. Cooking, Tifa had teased him once, was one of the few things he allowed himself to be liberal about. As if Lily had instilled in him a love for food that he simply couldn't back out of. And maybe she had been right, but he had still muttered some excuse and changed the subject.

"Did Mom tell you … " His mind seemed suddenly very preoccupied with making sure the mushrooms didn't move even a millimeter as he sliced them. " … about my science grade?"

So that was bothering him. Vincent pursed his lips and made a show of glancing around the counter for the next ingredient to go under his knife. "She told me."

"Are you supposed to have a talk with me?"

Vincent silently admitted to having purposely procrastinated. He couldn't exactly remember his schooling, but he was sure he wouldn't have appreciated someone constantly looking over his shoulder and commenting on his failings. "If you're trying your best, I don't know what to tell you. We've offered to help with your homework."

"Yeah, I know." He glanced over and made a face. "Eww, broccoli?"

"I thought you liked broccoli."

"Not in stir-fry."

Vincent sighed in defeat. Some things you just accepted gracefully. "I'll make sure not to put any on your plate."

Jordan picked up a pepper seed from the counter and flicked it into the sink. "It's not the homework." He started sawing at a mushroom until it was past saving. "It's … it's the class."

"The teacher?" Vincent gave the rice a few swipes with a spoon.

"No. It's … "

He wasn't so much cutting as mutilating now. Unobtrusively, Vincent switched cutting boards. Maybe Jordan didn't like broccoli, but at least he could take his frustration out a floret without completely destroying it.

"Dad … "

"I'm listening."

"What's it like … " He seemed to lose the question for a second, his fingers folding into his palms. "What's it like, being in love?"

Vincent wondered where he might have missed the turn-off from school to love. He glanced at the clock and realized with a certainty that Tifa was not going to come in and save him from having to answer this one. His son was having trouble in science? He could handle that. But matters of the heart … ? He frowned to himself and began to concentrate on the mushrooms. "Why are you asking?"

"Dad." Exasperated, embarrassed, as any fourteen year-old would be asking the same question. "Just tell me, okay?"

Under the weight of that expectant glare, Vincent took a breath and mentally set everything else aside in the hopes of making an acceptable reply. Lucrecia, followed by years of feeling angry and betrayed and burned; and then Tifa, and the years he had spent so far feeling happy and complete – and it suddenly felt as if he didn't know a thing. Jordan was still a child, and Vincent could remember teaching him to tie his own laces like it had only been a few weeks ago, and where oh where was Tifa when he needed her?

"It's different for everyone," he began, trying not to sound as if he was stalling.

"But there are signs and things, right?"

"Well … "

"Like butterflies in your stomach? And feeling like everything you want to say is coming out wrong?"

Butterflies, yes. He hadn't talked much with Tifa in the beginning, and later she had met him at his own comfort level so he hadn't felt as if he was making forced conversation. But Lucrecia … oh, yes, that had been awkward. "It can certainly start that way."

"But that's not everything, right?" He was busily cutting the broccoli, his production apparently fueled by the hope that it would encourage an answer.

"No, it's not everything." Love was fleeting, but that wasn't everything, either. It was heat, it was hope, it was shelter, it was pain, it was a promise she would eventually break …

Jordan glanced up, and Vincent recognized that look – the abrupt understanding in those astute, inexperienced eyes. "What's it like for you, being in love with Mom?"

That was the million-gil question, wasn't it? It was heaven, opening his eyes every morning and knowing, remembering, hoping. In one hundred years, an exquisite hell of memories.

"Like, how did you know you were in love with her?"

From the moment she had jumped from the bridge. From her first unexpected smile. From that first touch over the card table. And a hundred thousand other clandestine, intimate, aching encounters.

It was time to shift the focus of the conversation.

"What is this about? Is there someone at school you think you might … ?"

After a moment, the question hung where it was, and he cursed his own reluctance. Love was not an easy topic. Easy enough to feel sometimes, despite yourself; harder to think critically about; less attractive to talk about to a budding teenager. He was suddenly very grateful that Tifa hadn't had a daughter.

Jordan stabbed at the broccoli restively, his expression tight with emotions society conversely labeled healthy and something to be secretly ashamed about. "There's this girl in my science class," he mumbled toward the floor.

And suddenly everything was falling into place. Falling grades, falling in love.

"There was this presentation," Jordan continued in a murmur, spinning the knife indolently on the counter. "I couldn't remember my notes. She just kept looking at me."

Vincent felt a stab of sympathy. First love could be a cruel, exhilarating thing.

"She told me she liked the sleeping cat I drew for art class. My teacher hung it in the hall." He rolled the broccoli around on the board with a finger. "I thought of drawing something, just for her, but I don't know what."

Flowers had seemed so overrated. But the moment Lucrecia had pointed out those sweet-smelling apple blossoms, he had been up in a tree collecting them for her. Oh, years and years, and he still didn't know the remedy for the human condition.

The rice was going to be done long before the frying, he realized abruptly. Forcing himself back into the present, Vincent quickly sliced up the last of the mushrooms and reached for the broccoli under his son's hand.

Jordan dropped his arm and sighed heavily. "Should I do anything?"

Vincent turned up the heat under the pan. It was the same question he had asked himself so long ago, when Lucrecia had smiled at him and he had been torn between the paradise she had seemed to offer and the strict obligations of his job.

Though, Lucrecia, and love …

He blinked. Love for Jordan would never be anything like that. It would never be anything he couldn't handle, or face, or embrace. There was no job, no Hojo, no eternity in his way. Simple answers, as clear as day, as easy, as complicated as perimetered life – love was different for everyone. "She would probably appreciate a picture," he stated quietly. And love was always a gift that Jordan, if he could help it in any way, would never have any trouble giving.

"Yeah, I guess." He kicked at the cupboard under the sink until the tap was dripping. "I guess I could draw her another cat." He was chewing at his lip. "This one could be orange, and maybe I could have it chasing a bird or something."

Vincent smiled to himself and added the chicken into the stock with the vegetables. Nothing he couldn't handle. "Go wash your hands, Jordan."

"Why? They're not dirty." He was just balancing between the child and the adult; a fourteen year-old who never cleaned his room and left the milk on the counter and invented indoor games out of particularly well-conceived outdoor games.

"Because your mother is going to ask," Vincent told him. Love, he would eventually realize, was also about following a set of rules. "Now go."

Jordan left the kitchen at a run, still young enough to subsist on the energy of bursting sunlight and crisp autumn air.

Tifa came into the living room after dinner, while he was reading, and sat heavily on the couch. "Today was a long day," she sighed. "Thank you for cooking supper, and for doing the dishes."

"Not a problem." Routine was never the chore Tifa seemed to think it was. "Was the store busy?"

"Very. I think flu season has come early this year." She ran a hand through her hair and leaned back, closing her eyes. "Don't mind me if I'm coughing and sneezing tomorrow."

A little more gray hair, a few more wrinkles. Every now and again he noticed, as if something new drew his attention. But it was just Tifa, and Tifa couldn't help changing with the years.

"Jordan was in a good mood." She smiled and opened her eyes. "Anything particular resolved?"

He took a moment as if to think. "We might've had a talk."

"And I thought you said you didn't know anything about science." She was grinning, and he was suddenly sure it was the grin that had made him fall in love.

Oh, when would a fourteen year-old have been so upset about anything to do with school? "It appears I had the answers after all."

"I knew you would."

"And you know everything, don't you?"

She merely smiled. And Vincent, knowing something she didn't, kept his mouth shut.