Nor had I met a sweeter, more thoughtful and compassionatekid in my life.
(Also, like his father.Gah!)
“I don’t need a phone call at work tomorrow, asking me tobring something into school,” I replied.
He leveled his warm, brown eyes on me.Though warm, they hada tinge of a spark.
“When’s the last time I asked you to bring something toschool that I forgot?”
“Last week.”
Those eyes rolled.
“You did,” I asserted.
And he did.I’d learned part of the teenage hormonal growthcycle included not only selective hearing, but significant short-term memoryissues.
“Tomorrow is the last day.I don’t have anything I need totake to school,” he reminded me.
“How about this?Next year, you do you,” I suggested.“Ifyou pull this absent-minded professor stuff, once you’re in school, you deal.”
“If I had a car, I could come home myself and get it.”
Here we go.
It wasn’t like I didn’t have the money to buy my kid a car.I made good money.And I got an envelope every month that more than made thingscomfortable for us,waymore.
(Again, his father, even though his father didn’t know Iknew it was fromhis father.)
I could buy my kid a car.
And it’d help.Liam used mine, which was inconvenient.
And if he had his own car, after school, I could send him toSonic to get me a diet cherry limeade so he could drop it by the office to helpget me through the afternoon and buy a bag of Sonic ice for us to use at homebecause that ice was theshizzlesticks.
I just didn’t think giving a sixteen-year-old something ashuge as a car just because I could was a good idea.
If this was a different world, I could talk to his fatherabout it.
Since it was this world, I was going to talk to his fatherabout it, I just had to wait until the man got his head out of his behind(again).
And…well, wait until we all got beyond what Liam had decidedthat morning, which, considering how things had been the last few years, Iwasn’t sure his father was going to embrace.
“Let me think about it,” I mumbled, shifting my attentionback to using the forks to pull the pork apart.
“That’s what you said the last time I mentioned it,” Liamtold me.“And the time before.And the time before that.And the time—”
I looked up at him, and thatupwas far.He wastall.
Like his father.
“I’m not done thinking about it.”
Another eye roll and that did it.I was making a calendar.Countdown to the end of the teenage eye rolls.
Liam was used to my calendars.We had a countdown to the endof his comebacks of a snappy “So?”, which was a habit he got into whenhe was eleven and testing the boundaries of my authority.We had a countdown tothe end of him dribbling his damned basketball in the house when he wasthirteen.We had a countdown to the end of his annoyed “But why?”when hewanted to update his room from Transformers to Tupac when he was fourteen (noshade on Tupac, and I got it my kid going into high school didn’t want to havelittle boy stuff around him—it was just that he had to learn, you don’t getstuff just because you want it—though, full disclosure: his room went fromTransformers to Tupac, but even though Liam didn’t know it, that was hisfather).
But I loved my boy, so he was getting a warning.
