Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 82060 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 410(@200wpm)___ 328(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82060 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 410(@200wpm)___ 328(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
(Like his father.)
Nor had I met a sweeter, more thoughtful and compassionate kid in my life.
(Also, like his father. Gah!)
“I don’t need a phone call at work tomorrow, asking me to bring something into school,” I replied.
He leveled his warm, brown eyes on me. Though warm, they had a tinge of a spark.
“When’s the last time I asked you to bring something to school that I forgot?”
“Last week.”
Those eyes rolled.
“You did,” I asserted.
And he did. I’d learned part of the teenage hormonal growth cycle included not only selective hearing, but significant short-term memory issues.
“Tomorrow is the last day. I don’t have anything I need to take to school,” he reminded me.
“How about this? Next year, you do you,” I suggested. “If you 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 things comfortable for us, way more.
(Again, his father, even though his father didn’t know I knew it was from his 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 to Sonic to get me a diet cherry limeade so he could drop it by the office to help get me through the afternoon and buy a bag of Sonic ice for us to use at home because that ice was the shizzlesticks.
I just didn’t think giving a sixteen-year-old something as huge as a car just because I could was a good idea.
If this was a different world, I could talk to his father about it.
Since it was this world, I was going to talk to his father about 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 decided that morning, which, considering how things had been the last few years, I wasn’t sure his father was going to embrace.
“Let me think about it,” I mumbled, shifting my attention back to using the forks to pull the pork apart.
“That’s what you said the last time I mentioned it,” Liam told me. “And the time before. And the time before that. And the time—”
I looked up at him, and that up was far. He was tall.
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 end of his comebacks of a snappy “So?”, which was a habit he got into when he was eleven and testing the boundaries of my authority. We had a countdown to the end of him dribbling his damned basketball in the house when he was thirteen. We had a countdown to the end of his annoyed “But why?” when he wanted to update his room from Transformers to Tupac when he was fourteen (no shade on Tupac, and I got it my kid going into high school didn’t want to have little boy stuff around him—it was just that he had to learn, you don’t get stuff just because you want it—though, full disclosure: his room went from Transformers to Tupac, but even though Liam didn’t know it, that was his father).
But I loved my boy, so he was getting a warning.
“I’m making a calendar about that eye roll,” I shared.
Another eye roll.
I nearly started laughing.
I didn’t only because he teased, “Absent-minded professor? You’re such a goof.”
“What?” I asked. “You’re going to be a professor.”
He leaned against the island in a casual way that had one effect on high school girls, that effect something I refused to think about, and another effect on his mother. This effect pushing me to think about those high school girls and how I once was one and I caught the eye of a certain handsome, popular boy who had command of his body at a young age, a kind smile, a great sense of humor, and an amazing streak of loyalty, which ended up with me being Liam’s momma.
“I’m going to be a lawyer, then a senator,” Liam stated.
I tried not to quell my son’s ambitions. In fact, the opposite.
But I was a paralegal. Before that, I was a court reporter. I had a lot of experience with the legal system. And I didn’t keep a database or anything, but off the cuff, I felt I could say with a good deal of authority that five-sixths of attorneys were pure a-holes.
I didn’t want my son to become an a-hole.
I opened my mouth to share (again) he could teach law, this being a prelude to rehashing our conversation from that morning to make sure the decision he’d made was one he wanted to move forward on, when the doorbell rang.