Page 40 of 10 Signs You Need to Grovel

His face lights up. “The Cessna 195 is the coolest. Super vintage with radial engines and cowling bumps.” While I hold his book, he flips pages back and forth until he hits an impressive sketch of a fifties-style small plane. “Mom says it’s a class act.”

This kid is a class act, rambling off airplane terminology I don’t even understand. But I understand the brightness in his eyes. This is what he loves. Still, the intermittent drawings in his sketchbook reminded me of the angry boy he drew zooming away from Earth. “Gotta say, your art is amazing. As cool as that Cessna. Bet your mom’s proud.”

He takes the book back from me and slides it shut. “I don’t show her my art. Just the school stuff.”

I glance at Sadie, who’s watching us but quickly busies herself with useless tasks. “Why don’t you show her?”

“I don’t know. She gets . . .” He trails off and flips the corners of his sketchbook pages.

“Too analytical?”

He nods.

An aspect of her that hasn’t changed. Sadie breaks art into its base parts, delving deeper, excavating the artist’s mind. He knows it and doesn’t want her picking through his head.

If he knew I was his father, would he regret letting me in?

That prospect has me grappling for conversation, anything to start building more of a relationship with Max. The only thing that pops into my head is Nice weather we’re having. Feeling antsy, I watch him set up to sketch again and remember an activity Sadie and I used to mess around with, where we’d stare at each other or at knickknacks or buildings, not our pages, drawing cool abstract images without breaking our lines.

“Want to play a drawing game?”

Max side-eyes me. “What kind of game?”

“A speed-drawing contest. We both have to draw blind without looking at the page, and—”

“We can’t lift our pencil from the page?” he finishes excitedly.

I guess Sadie played the game with him too. “I see you know the rules. But I should warn you, I’m excellent at this game.”

He’s already moving, pulling out another pencil and sketchbook from his backpack and handing them over. Endless art supplies. “You won’t be as excellent as me.”

Seems Max inherited some of my cockiness. “I basically have a black belt in blind drawing.”

“There’s no such thing.”

“I also won gold in blind drawing at the Olympics.”

One corner of his lips kicks up. “Is that the same Olympics where you asked a bunch of ten-year-olds to play catch my shadow?”

I bark out a laugh. Kid has a sense of humor. “The exact one.”

I get my phone set up, then we face each other, sitting cross-legged on the ground, pencils poised for our battle. “Ready?” I ask.

“I was born ready.”

The comment is cute and confident and zooms me back to Sadie and me racing to go cliff jumping at Bear Lake, tripping over ourselves to get there first; the two of us at the Smash Shack, stuffing our faces with french fries in a french-fry-eating contest, cracking up the whole time.

All our contests started with me saying, “Ready?”

Followed closely by Sadie’s brash, “I was born ready.”

She’s obviously played tons of games with Max. Hundreds. Thousands. Ten years of fun games. He’s picked up her mannerisms and challenging quips and probably loads of other habits.

And I missed all of it.

Swallowing roughly, I say, “Ready, set . . . go.”

We stare at each other, our pencils moving over our pages. Max’s tongue pokes out of his mouth—his concentration pose. Sadie used to say I looked constipated when I was focused, but I don’t worry about my expression. I focus on Max, drawing his cute tongue, the slopes of his wide lips, his small but strong nose, then his eyes and all those thick eyelashes, never lifting my pencil, loving this game. I get to stare at my son and discover the dusting of freckles on his nose (freckles like Sadie’s), and the slant of his ears (they stick out slightly like mine), and a subtle divot in his chin neither of us have. I get to stare and soak in how he really is a combination of Sadie and me and an X factor that’s all Max.