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“I know, son. I am too. The chicken nuggets will be done in ten more minutes. Do you think your tummy can wait that long?”
“No,” he said, grinning up at me.
“Oh, yes it can!”
I started tickling Malcolm, making him giggle, and when I stopped, he looked over at my cellphone. I had laid it beside me, on my bed, and it was face-up with the screen clearly showing that someone was still on the other end of the line.
“Is that mommy?” Malcolm asked.
“No, it’s one of my friends.”
“Mermaid Stevie?”
It surprised me that he automatically thought it would be her. I was often on the phone after work, discussing a case with Bash or another one of my colleagues while Malcolm was in the living room with me or in whichever room that I happened to be in. Not only that, but it’d also been almost a week since Malcolm and I had gone swimming with Stevie. I hadn’t mentioned her name since then except for telling Malcolm on Tuesday evening that I’d given Stevie his picture and that she loved it. He smiled when I told him that and then asked me about her tail. He wanted to know if it’d grown back. I said that it was resting again when I’d seen Stevie, and then Malcolm ran off to play while I cleaned up our dinner dishes. It went without saying that this story of a beautiful blond mermaid with a sparkly blue tail was just going to keep evolving between my son and me.
“No, a friend from work,” I told Malcolm.
He kept looking up at me and finally said, “I’m gonna color another picture for mermaid Stevie.”
And there’s the next evolution,I thought to myself while smiling inside.
“Okay, buddy. You go do that and then we’ll eat dinner.”
He hurried down out of my lap to go to his room and when I could no longer hear his footsteps down the hallway, I picked up my cellphone off the bed.
“Are you still there?” I asked Stevie.
“Of course I am.”
“Sorry about that little interruption.”
“Don’t be sorry. It was the sweetest thing listening to you two talking, and I’ll get Malcolm’s picture from you later.”
“Okay,” I chuckled.
“Zac, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but has Avery called to talk to Malcolm since she’s been gone?”
“I don’t mind you asking. Feel free to ask me anything you want and I’ll answer you. And about Avery calling to talk to Malcolm? No, she hasn’t. But it’s typical of her.”
“What’s the longest she’s been away from home?”
“Three weeks and a day.”
“And during that length of time, did she call Malcolm?”
“No.”
“Not even to check in with you?”
“She has called to check in with me before, but only to tell me that she mistakenly had her Amazon order shipped to our address instead of her parents’. She wanted me to mail it to her there after it arrived, which I did to keep the peace.”
Stevie let out a long sigh. “Has Avery contacted you about anything this week?”
“No. If she had I would’ve told you.”
“I felt like you would have but I had to ask. All of this is so new to me and I want you to know I appreciate how you’re being about it. I hope I’m not coming across as nosy or petty.”
“You’re not, so stop worrying.”
