Chapter 7
SEVEN
[Love is…] Being kind. Giving people hugs. That’s all I know about it.
“Mommy?” Oliver asked, his big blue eyes sleepy. “Can you read two chapters tonight?”
I ruffled his hair and snuggled him closer to my side.
This was my favorite moment of every day.
If there was one slice of time I could cut and save to relive years from now, it would be one of these moments—Oliver, sleepy and freshly washed and curled into my side.
It never failed to remind me that although I’d made a lot of mistakes in my life, Oliver was the good thing that came out of it.
I might struggle with my previous decisions—Sunny said I needed to give myself more grace—but I could never regret how all those things had given me my son.
The day I found out I was pregnant, I’d been terrified. I was a twenty-one-year-old wannabe actress with four dollars in the bank and a loser boyfriend whose idea of a job was playing with the band for tips on open mic night. I wasn’t in any place to have a kid.
But when I heard his heartbeat at my first doctor’s appointment, I was a goner. Ironically, the baby daddy was also a goner. As in gone, far, far away. It had been Oliver and me, just the two of us, from the beginning.
“I think we can do that, but we need to talk first,” I said.
Oliver sat up, his little face serious as he looked down at me. “Is this a cookie talk or an ice cream talk?”
This was code. An ice cream talk was a celebration, but a cookie talk…
“Cookie. Definitely cookie.” I patted his arm. “Why don’t you go grab a couple?”
“Cookies in the bed?” His eyes widened. “But we aren’t supposed to eat in bed.”
“I won’t tell if you don’t.”
Without another word, he scrambled off the bed and darted out of the room.
I stared up at the ceiling. With the lights still on, the glow-in-the-dark dinosaur footprints were just faint green blobs but it had taken a whole day to get them arranged the way Oliver had wanted them.
I smiled thinking of how he had bossed Chris around until they were placed perfectly.
“Here’s one for you.” He held out a cookie and climbed on the bed after I took it. “What do you need to talk about?”
“Yeah, that.” I picked at the dust jacket of the book resting on my stomach. “Do you remember when I told you about Ollie’s grandson when Uncle Chris brought you home last Friday?”
“I ’member.”
“Good. Good. Well…”
“Will I get to see him?”
I knew Oliver would handle this better than me. “Actually, yes. You’ll be seeing him a lot. He’s going to be living in a tent in the backyard.”
His little face screwed up in confusion. “Like camping? Why?”
“Because…” My voice drifted off as I figured out a way to explain. “Well, that’s just how it is, okay? He’ll be living in the backyard.”
“When is he coming?”
“On Saturday.” In less than forty-eight hours. I bit back a groan. Not for the first time, I wondered what Ollie had been thinking.
Oliver’s eyes sparked with excitement. “Is he your boyfriend now?”
I sat up slowly and faced him. “That would be a no.”
“Oh.” His shoulders slumped. While he knew his dad was a guy somewhere in the world who sent a birthday card (always a week late) and called on the holidays (sometimes), he’d never expressed much concern about not having a father. And he sure hadn’t asked about me getting a boyfriend.
“Do you want me to have a boyfriend?”
“I want for you to have someone who loves you. Mrs. Sullivan said everyone needs to love someone and someone to love them. We talked about it for Balentine’s Day.”
Ah, yes, the most annoying of all the made-up holidays. “I see.”
“She said there are lots of different kinds of loves like how I love you and you love me or when we help a stranger it’s like love, too.”
“That’s all true.”
“But then she said grown-ups love each other too, like so much they be boyfriend and girlfriend and then get married and she said being married is like having your best friend with you all the time and I thought about how you don’t have a boyfriend and then how will you ever get married?”
Mrs. Sullivan had been Miss Everett last year before getting married over the summer. Clearly, the honeymoon was far from over.
“Do you want me to get married?”
“Yes.” He climbed onto my lap and put his hands on my cheeks, turning my face so our foreheads touched. “You need someone who loves you the best. Like me, but a boyfriend.”
My nose stung from the tears welling up. Gah, this boy was all the good things in the world. I covered his hands with mine. “I love you, kid.”
“I know,” he said and climbed off my lap. After he’d snuggled into his blankets, he smiled up at me sleepily. “You promised two chapters.”
I laughed softly and opened the book.