Same question every night; same answer. The truth is, he usually has a lot of homework, and it doesn’t always get done.
“Look on the bright side,” Jake says, whenever she frets that even with an early diagnosis, academic accommodations, and medication, Mick has shortchanged himself. “We won’t be paying Ivy League tuition when it’s his turn.”
“No, we’ll just be supporting him for the rest of his life.”
“It might be the other way around. He’s an enterprising kid. Maybe he’ll invent a billion--dollar video game.”
Maybe. Or maybe he’ll turn himself around academically, find his way into a decent college, make something of himself . . .
You did, she reminds herself. And if Mom and Dad were still alive, they’d still be reminding you they weren’t so sure that was ever going to happen.
“Did you get your grade back yet on the English test?”
“Which test?”
As if he doesn’t know. She’d spent two hours helping him study for it last Monday night. “The one on literary devices.”
“Oh. That test. Nope.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yep. So stop looking at me like a detective who thinks the witness is lying.” He flashes her a grin. “See? I know what a metaphor is. I bet I got an A--plus on that test.”
“I hate to break it to you, kiddo, but that’s not a metaphor. It’s a simile.”
“That’s what I meant.” Mick settles on a stool with the pile of mail, looking for something to leaf through while he eats, which will take all of two minutes.
“What’s this?” He holds up the brown parcel addressed to Rowan.
“Probably something I ordered for you for Christmas. Don’t open it.”
“Is it the keys to my new car? Because don’t forget, I’m taking my road test in less than a month.”
“It is not”—-she plucks the package from his hand—- “the keys to your new car because there will be no new car.”
“Then what am I going to drive?”
“You can share the minivan with me. And you already have the keys to that, so you’re all set. Here—-” She gives him the red envelope. “You can open Aunt Noreen’s Christmas card.”
“Bet you anything they made Goliath wear those stupid reindeer antlers again.” Goliath is a German shepherd whose dignity is compromised, as far as Rowan’s kids are concerned, by a costume every Christmas and Halloween.
“Don’t worry, Doofus,” Mick says, patting the dog, who lies on the hardwood floor at the base of his stool, hoping to catch a stray crumb with little effort. “We’d never do anything like that to you if we had a Christmas card picture.”
“He wouldn’t know he had a costume on if we zipped him into a horse suit and hitched him to a buggy,” Rowan points out. “Plus we do have a Christmas card picture. I mean, we have had one.”
“When?”
“Back in the old days.”
“When?” Classic Mick, persisting to demonstrate that he, as the youngest kid in the family, has suffered some slight, real or imagined.
It rarely works on Rowan, who as the lastborn of Kate and Jonathan Carmichael’s four children is all too familiar with that technique.
“Back when we lived in Westchester,” she tells Mick. She distinctly remembers having to cancel a family portrait shoot repeatedly to accommodate Jake’s schedule. He was working in the city then, never home.
“Before I was born doesn’t count, Mom.”
“We had a few after you were born.”
“We did not.”
“Sure we did.” Did we?
It’s a wonder they even found time to conceive Mick back then, let alone take a family photo.
“I don’t think so.”
“Maybe not,” she concedes. “After we moved here, I probably didn’t send cards. But God knows we have plenty of family pictures. They’re just not portraits.” Her favorites—-and there are many—-are framed, cluttered on tabletops and hanging along the stairs in a hodgepodge gallery.
“That’s not the same thing.”
“You poor, poor neglected little working mom’s son.”
“Stop.” He squirms away from her exaggerated sympathetic hug.
“But I feel so sorry for you!”