So he got extra if he vacuumed or dusted. More if he took on the bathroom or mopped the kitchen floor. And he needed cabbage for whatever kids needed cabbage for, so he did both, often.

But I didn’t want our time together that day, a Saturday that was a full day off for me, to be about laundry and cleaning. I wanted it to be about hanging and doing shit we liked.

I wasn’t a big fan of grocery shopping, but Ethan was, so I got the crap stuff out of the way so that when he got home we could focus on the good stuff.

“Somethin’ funny?” I asked, feeling my lips quirk, even after the day I’d had and the lingering hangover that I’d had to manage without an Egg McMuffin but with pills and a fried egg on toast.

“Mom,” Ethan said through his laughter, sweeping his hand to our cart. “We got diet orange, Diet 7UP, Diet Cherry 7UP, Diet Coke, Diet Dr. Pepper, and two different kinds of Fresca. How much diet crap do you need?”

“I have to look after my girlish figure,” I retorted.

“Yeah, right,” he muttered, putting his hands to the cart and starting to push. “You do that real good with your candy stash.”

I didn’t look in the cart because I didn’t have to. We’d hit the candy aisle already and we were loaded up. My kid liked sweets, but I was a candy junkie. I had some every day, sometimes more than “some.”

I had a lot of bad habits.

I could drink my fair share of booze.

I had three drawers of makeup in the bathroom.

I knew I should filter some of the shit that came out of my mouth, but I didn’t bother.

I dressed in a way I knew people thought was more than a little skanky, but I liked it. It made me a dick magnet of the extreme variety, but even knowing this, living and breathing it, I still didn’t change. I just couldn’t bring myself to tone it down. I liked the way it looked—it was me—and I’d learned the hard way to be nothing but me.

And I ate lots of candy.

I followed my son, sharing my wisdom, “The diet pop negates the candy bars.”

“It sucks that that makes sense and is probably true,” he muttered, turning the corner into the snack aisle. Another bad habit…for both of us.

“Considering your concern for my nutrition, maybe we should skip this aisle and go straight to the carrots.”

He lifted his eyes and gave me a look.

I grinned at him.

He rolled his eyes, the ends of his mouth curling up, and went right to the microwave popcorn.

I followed him, thinking about how in a couple of years, he’d be taller than me. A year or two after that, his voice would drop. A year or two after that, he’d be dating. A year or two after that, he’d be on his way to building his own life.

In other words, this time was precious.

Every moment was precious—I knew that—but this time it was even more.

I’d had ten, nearly eleven years where he was mine. I shared him because I was generous that way.

But still, he was all mine.

That time was more than half over.

Seven more years and…

“Theater style or cheddar?” Ethan asked, breaking into my thoughts.

“Uh…duh,” I answered as my phone in my purse rang. “Both.”

That was when Ethan grinned full-out at me.

Yeah, Trent had given him good. My boy would be handsome when he got older because he was cute as hell right now.

Though, those were my eyes that were bright with humor, so my genes didn’t fall down on the job.

Ethan got both kinds of popcorn and tossed them into the cart.

I dug my phone out of my purse and looked at it.

The instant my eyes hit it, the balm of being with my son disappeared and that thorn drove in deeper, twisting, the prongs at the sides tearing at flesh.

The screen said, Merry Calling.

I dropped the phone back in my purse.

“Who’s that?”

At his question, I looked to my kid.

I did not lie to him. Lies were bad and I didn’t want him to catch me in one and be disappointed or get the idea lying was okay (this was going to be hard to keep up if Trent and Peg actually pulled their bullshit).

I tried to give it to him straight. Sometimes I softened it. Sometimes I shielded him from things he really didn’t need to know or was too young to know. But as best I could, I gave it to him straight.

This had led to us having some awkward conversations, especially the last year or so. He was growing up, as were the kids around him. Shit happened, was heard, seen, watched on TV, or caught in movies, and Ethan had been taught he could come to me with anything.

So he did.

And I gave it to him straight.

So when he asked the question that was simple to him but not to me, I did what I always did.

“Merry,” I answered.

His brows went up. “Why didn’t you take the call?”

He asked because he knew Merry was a friend. He knew this because, being a friend, we had occasions to be together outside me serving Merry drinks at J&J’s, times when Ethan was around. Parties. Barbeques. Picnics. Basketball and football games Colt would organize with adults and kids. Hanging at the carnival at Arbuckle Acres during the Fourth of July. Heading out with Colt and Feb and their speedboat to a lake.

Merry was in his life. Merry liked kids, dug Ethan, and often passed a ball or Frisbee with him, teased him, shot the shit with him, ruffled his hair, squeezed the back of his neck, laughed when Ethan was funny, made Ethan laugh by being funny.

There was no reason Ethan could imagine why I would not take a call from a good guy who might not be a staple in Ethan’s life but definitely had a firm foot in it.

“’Cause I’m with you at the grocery store and some stuff has gone down with Merry that’s pretty intense, so when I chat with him next, I wanna give him all my attention.”

This was the truth, thankfully.

Ethan’s head tipped to the side. “What stuff?”

“His ex-wife got engaged to someone else.”

Ethan was no less confused. “He still into her?”

That thorn drove deeper.

“Yep.”

Ethan nodded like he was a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old wise man with a twelve-foot-long white beard, sitting on a mountaintop, a pilgrimage destination for folks who wished to beg his wisdom.

“I see that,” he muttered solemnly.

“You got an ex-wife I don’t know about?” I asked, reaching for a bag of Funyuns as we made our way down the aisle.

“Three of them, actually,” Ethan answered.

I swallowed a laugh and tossed the Funyuns in the cart. I still grinned at the back of his head as he grabbed a bag of Fritos Scoops.

“Too bad you didn’t have a momma who taught you how to treat a woman right,” I remarked.

“Nah, me that got rid of them, seein’ as they didn’t treat me as good as my momma,” he shot back.

Suddenly, I needed to hold on to something because I felt weak in the knees.

My dad drank, slapped my mom around, then gave her the best gift he could: he fucked around on her with a woman he preferred, so he left us to be with her and then minimized contact in order not to deal with his responsibility, but it made it so we didn’t have to deal with his garbage.

I didn’t like school so I screwed around, graduating by the skin of my teeth, too young and too stupid to know one day I’d need it.

I liked wild because it felt good, so I found it everywhere I could find it and ended up with men so far worse than my father, it wasn’t funny.

I ate shit because I’d bought it and I ate shit because that was life.

But in all that, I’d done something right. Something so right, it was the anchor of my life that kept me steady and whole instead of allowing me to get chewed to shit and spit out, bloody and beaten.

I’d made Ethan. I’d kept Ethan. And I made sure my boy knew he was loved right down to my soul.

Which meant he loved me that way right back.

“You know I love you, baby?” I whispered.