He pauses his game and looks up, and does a double take, his face contorting through several expressions. “Wow, Mom, you look…” he struggles for a word. “Different.”
I laugh. “Hot, you mean, right?”
He fake barfs. “No! Eew! You’re my mom—I’m not allowed to think you’re hot!”
“So I just lookdifferent, huh?” I press, just to watch him squirm a little.
And squirm he does. “Well, yeah. I mean, you always look nice, but…” He hesitates. “I can just see a lot of your…legs.”
I almost never dress up anymore, so I imagine it’s kind of weird for him to see me like this. I kiss his forehead. “I’m just messing with you, buddy.” I ruffle his hair—which is platinum blond, like his father’s. “Ready to go see Grandma and Papa?”
“Yep!” He turns off the Switch and puts it into his backpack. “I’m gonna eat a whole pizza all to myself.”
Being single and childless, Cora has by the far the cooler car of the two of us—a yellow convertible Mini Cooper. She has the top back, and Aiden is chattering a million miles a second as he sets his backpack behind the passenger seat, opens the driver’s side door and climbs behind it into the back seat. He spends almost as much time in Cora’s car as he does mine, so she keeps a booster seat for him in her trunk, which she’s gotten out and placed in the back for him.
He buckles up, fishes his gas station aviator sunglasses out of a front pocket of his backpack, and slides them on his face.
“Ready to go, Maverick?” I ask, sliding into the passenger seat.
“Maverick? Who’s Maverick?”
“Only the coolest fighter pilot ever!” I say. “Although, you may be a little young forTop Gunreferences.”
“I feel the need—!” Cora starts, as she backs out of my driveway.
“The need for speed!” I finish, as she guns the throttle enough to bark the tires.
“What are you guys talking about?” Aiden asks.
“It’s a movie, bud,” I tell him, as Cora navigates our way out of my subdivision—safely, and within the speed limit, I might add—toward my parents’ house which is five miles away. “We’ll watch it when you’re older.”
“Why not now?”
“Because there are bad words in it.”
“So? Tommy MacMillan saysdammitall the time.”
“He shouldn’t,” I say. “And neither should you.”
“I won’t. I promise!”
Cora eyes me over the top of her sunglasses. “You know, we watched that movie when we were around his age.”
“Yeah, and we got in trouble for quoting it at school.” I lift an eyebrow pointedly. “Or rather,yougot in trouble for telling Isaiah Roberts to take you to bed or lose you forever.”
“I was nine and I didn’t know what it meant,” she says. “You sang ‘I’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’ all day every day for a week and a half, until Mrs. Thompson threatened you with a week’s worth of extra homework if you didn’t stop.” Cora laughs. “And babe, youcan’tsing.”
“Then why you do make me do karaoke?”
“Because it’s hysterical! You’re so serious about it! Like, give you three or four glasses of cab sav and you think you’re Whitney Houston or something. I love it.”
“See if I let you drag me out to karaoke night ever again,” I grouse.
She snorts. “You’re helpless to resist me. I have the Force.”
Uh-oh—aStar Warsreference…Aiden is off and running now, babbling breathlessly about Han and Luke and Chewie and lightsabers and that one scene where—
I laugh at Cora, who used that reference on purpose, because her favorite pastime is winding Aiden up on his favorite subjects and watching him go.
