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Ian: Put a pin in that. Cameron just pulled up and I need to bask in the annoyance in his face.
Me: Weirdo. Have a good day.
“Who are you texting?” Sage asked, plopping on the couch and snuggling into my side. With a happy sigh, I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and pulled her tight against me, dropping a kiss on the top of her head.
“Totally ready for school? You grabbed your homework folder from the kitchen?”
I could practically feel the eye roll. “Yes. You already asked me about the folder last night.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes asking a question seventeen times is part of being a mom.”
She tapped my phone. “Yes, I’m ready. Yes, I have my lunch and a snack and my water bottle. Now who were you texting? Can I see?”
“My friend Ian. I told you about him last night.”
She nodded, trying to tilt my phone screen so she could read the text exchange. While she did, I settled into the sweet weight of her body against mine. Cuddling was a luxury I didn’t get from her as much anymore.
When she got to the end where he called me stubborn, she snorted. “Grandma says you’re stubborn too.”
Yeah, except Grandma’s use of the word held a bit of a different edge to it than Ian’s, but I decided not to point that out. “She does.”
“Seems like he knows you really well.”
I nodded. “From kindergarten until the end of high school, he was my best friend in the whole world.”
“You never talked about him while we were in New York,” she pointed out. My little skeptic.
It wasn’t like I could answer her truthfully. I didn’t talk about Ian because some subjects were left untouched out of sheer self-preservation.
So far, Sage hadn’t shown any sort of abandonment issues. No gaping, obvious wound from having no father in the picture to teach her a different perspective. That wound would show eventually, but I did my absolute best to be both parents.
There were a lot of really hard things about being a single mom. No one could shoulder any of the burden with me, especially when we were still in Manhattan. When I was sick or exhausted or sad, I was still the only person who could handle the shit that needed to be handled. But out of that hard grew a really special relationship between Sage and me.
We talked about everything, and I made it a point very early on that I wouldn’t hide the truth of my life from her because I wanted her to understand the trade-off of the choices we made in life.
It was probably the bias talking, but my kid was the absolute best. A million hard days were unquestionably worth it if it meant we had little pockets of good like this—a cuddle on the couch before she left for school.
My daughter, who’d rather knock over every obstacle in life with tight fists and a vicious gleam in her eyes, wasn’t much of a cuddler anymore. Only when she was sick or a little tired. She was tough as hell, which I loved, and so self-sufficient. Both of those things came from a mix of genetics, the place she’d been raised, and a bit of necessity.
“You’re right, I didn’t talk about him.” With my shoulder, I nudged her. “Because we both moved on to different places, and I was a little busy raising you to keep in touch with people from home,” I said. “But he’s back in town too, and it’s nice to be able to have an old friend back in my life.”
When her eyes flicked briefly up to mine, she was chewing thoughtfully on her bottom lip. “Was he ever your boyfriend?”
“No,” I said with a short laugh. “It was never like that with us. He was just … Ian. The guy who gave me a coat on the playground when I was cold. And listened to me talk about the books I wanted to write, and helped me pick out a prom dress when the cute football player asked me to go with him.”
“He sounds all right, I guess. For a boy,” she added distastefully. We were fully entrenched in the boys are gross and stinky era.
“Some of them are pretty great.” I laughed when her lip curled into a sneer. “Trust me,” I told her, dropping a kiss on her forehead, “someday, you’ll see what I’m talking about.”
My mom popped her head into the family room. “Bus is down the street, Sage.”
Sage popped off the couch, snagging her backpack and waving over her shoulder. “Love you, bye!”
The door swung shut as I told her I loved her too, and I sighed.
Watching your kid get older was the strangest double-edged sword. Feeling your heart break daily because they didn’t depend on you quite as much while wanting to cry from how fucking proud you were that they weren’t a total asshole human being.
“You going to work today?” my mom asked. She was tying her favorite blue gingham apron behind her pencil-thin waist, studying me with a slightly pinched expression.
