“He did the right thing,” Ethan declared. “You don’t get enough sleep, Mom.”

And maybe it wasn’t good my kid was so sweet. It made capping the gooey at one hit a week nearly impossible.

“And it sucks that Merry lookin’ out for us and holdin’ your hand and stuff doesn’t mean he’s your boyfriend,” Ethan stated. “He’s super cool. He’s almost as cool as Colt.”

And there it was again.

Ethan liked Merry, but more, Ethan liked Merry for me.

Honestly, there would never be a way to decipher the many varieties of how my life sucked. The suckage of my life was like pi—it went on endlessly.

“Yeah,” was all I could say, because my son was right.

Ethan stared at me.

Then, without warning, he leveled me.

“You need a boyfriend.”

I did a slow blink with the addition of a head jerk.

“It’s, like…totally crazy you don’t already have one,” Ethan continued. “All my friends think so and I do too.”

“Uh…” I pushed out, but Ethan was far from done.

“You’re, like, the coolest mom on the planet. I have to dole out sleepovers ’cause all the guys wanna come over here.” He gestured to the TV with his controller. “They can’t believe you play video games with me. Brendon’s mom only lets him play video games for half an hour a day. That’s totally crazy. And she’d never play with him. No way.”

“Perhaps she doesn’t have your momma’s awesome eye–hand coordination,” I teased, lifting the controller in my hands.

“No. She’s just got a stick up her butt,” Ethan returned.

“Kid,” I said quietly, liking he was sweet and sharp but not ever wanting him to be nasty. “Be cool.”

“It’s true,” he replied. “Thirty minutes, Mom? That’s just mean. And Everest’s mom lets him eat sweets, get this, only on a birthday. His or his sister’s or his mom’s or dad’s, and it’s only ever cake. They have broccoli every night. Broccoli looks gross, smells gross, and tastes gross. But he has it, like, every night. He says he reckons if that keeps up, he’s gonna turn into a broccoli.”

At this news, I could see why Ethan’s sleepovers were popular; I always laid out a spread for his friends. And I wasn’t certain we’d ever had broccoli in our house since the day he was born.

I smiled at him, but the truth of it was, I should make my kid eat more broccoli and green beans and shit like that, and less Pringles, Oreos, and M&M’s.

I wondered what Peggy would do if she ever learned how bad I let my kid eat.

Shit, maybe I should take a turn down the veggie aisle, and not just to pick up wonton wrappers for those sausage things I liked to make during football games.

“See why they wanna come here?” he asked me. “Because you dress cool and act cool and you don’t make us put our pop cans on coasters and stuff. And if the Xbox acts up, you know how to get back there and wiggle the right cables to get it working. Teddy’s mom makes us wait until his dad gets home because she doesn’t know anything about the TV, at all. I mean, what kinda guy, kid or grown-up, wouldn’t wanna be with a lady who’s cool like you?”

God, he was going to make me cry and I wasn’t sure my tear ducts even worked anymore. They’d dried up after Lowe fucked me over. If the waterworks turned on again because my kid was being all kinds of sweet, it could be catastrophic.

In other words, I had to put a stop to this immediately.

In an effort to do that, I warned, “You’re earning me exceeding my quota of gooey this week.”

He turned fully to me, and I realized he was being very serious, or more serious than I’d realized he was being (and I’d already figured he was being serious).

He had something to say that meant something to him.

This meant I needed to shut up and listen.

“Well, whatever. Be gooey, I don’t care,” he declared. “But I’m not gonna be here forever, Mom. Five years, I’m gonna have my license and be on the football team. That means practice after school and conditioning and swimming on the weekends. And I’ll have a babe and I’ll need to take her out. I’ll be gone a lot. Then what are you gonna do?”

“Ethan,” I muttered, dreading that time, upset that he recognized that time would come and he worried about me.

“No, I wanna know,” he demanded. “I’m almost eleven. You think I don’t know how hard it is for you to look out for me? But you don’t seem to know I don’t need it. Okay, like, I get it that you can’t leave me at home alone at night and stuff like that. But I’d be good during the day. I could even walk home from school so Gramma or Vi don’t have to come and get me. It’s not like that’s crazy. Other kids do it.”

Other kids might do it, but they only had a couple of hours to look after themselves before their parents got home. I didn’t get home on early shifts until after eight thirty.

I was cool for a mom, I could see that, but that was too long for a kid Ethan’s age to be by himself.

“That’s not gonna happen for a couple of years, kid,” I told him quietly.

“Right, but you know I’m good, even if you’re not good with it yet, right?”

I could give him that for sure, so I did.

I nodded. “I know you’re good.”

“And, like, that’s gonna be the way it’ll be and then what for you, Mom? If I’m not around, who are you gonna be with? Who’s gonna be around to make you happy?”

God, my eyes felt like they were growing in my head, pushing the boundaries of their sockets, and it hurt like crazy.

“That isn’t something you need to worry about, baby,” I said, and his head jolted.

“If I don’t think about stuff like this, who will?” he asked. “Not you,” he answered himself and kept going. “It’s like you’re all about me, and that’s cool. That’s part of you bein’ a cool mom, you know, bein’ into video games and things like that, but also how you are lookin’ after me. But that’s all you are, Mom. You, like…work, then you, like…look out for me. And that’s it. I mean, Merry’s a super-cool dude and I know he’d be totally into you, but he wouldn’t think to ask because you’re all about lookin’ out for me. He knows he’d get shot down, so why bother?”

Yep, I was right. Even though he wasn’t entirely correct, still, my kid was too sharp for his own good.

“And Merry’s the only cool one left,” Ethan informed me gravely. “He’s really tall, and he’s totally funny, and he wears suits like they’re jeans. The girls at school who know him think he’s hot for an old guy. I mean, there’s Marty and he’s all right, but he’s also kind of a goof. And you deserve someone like Merry, not a guy who’s all right but also kind of a goof.”

This was going on too long, and if it went on much longer, no joke, it might just kill me.

“You’re about to get around six weeks of gooey,” I returned, hoping to shut him up.

He knew what I was hoping and shook his head, exasperated. “You’re just sayin’ that to shut me up when you shouldn’t because this is important.” He leaned toward me. “I liked it when Merry woke me up this morning. He was funny and he showed me how that wire got disconnected in the waffle iron, so if it happens again, I can fix it. And we both were bein’ real quiet ’cause you were sleepin’ and he made that funny too. But I know we both felt good doin’ it, knowin’ you don’t get a lot of sleep.”

God, Ethan really dug having Merry around.

Damn.

“Ethan, honey—”

He threw his controller down on the couch between us and crossed his arms on his little man chest, interrupting me. “I just want you to be happy. I know Gramma does too. She worries. She’s a mom, just like you, but I got you to look after me. She’s a mom with a kid who doesn’t have anyone who’ll look after her.”

And my kid was good at laying the guilt on too.

Shit.

“I’m an adult and I can look after myself, baby. I can look after both of us,” I told him.