Role Playing(7)

He let out an impatient breath. “Tell me you’re not going to go all Howard Hughes in that house.”

“I’ll stop short of peeing in jars,” she assured him, with a sarcastic edge of her own. “Besides, again—this is not different than before you went to school. I wasn’t waiting for you to go off to college to suddenly party my ass off, kiddo.”

“I just don’t want you to go full hermit.”

“Kit, what do I keep telling you?” she said, gently but firmly. “I’m the parent. You’re the child. Relax.”

He waited a beat. “Okay. I’m playing the no-hypocrisy card.”

“Wait, what?”

“You want me to get friends, but you won’t get friends?” He paused a beat. “That’s not exactly fair, is it?”

“Mac’s my friend,” she protested.

“Harrison’s my friend,” Kit countered. “Maybe I won’t make any IRL friends. Maybe I’ll only leave my room for classes and eating, and not talk to anybody I don’t have to. I mean, it works for you, doesn’t it?”

She tried desperately to see a loophole in his argument, but ever since Trev left, she’d largely abandoned “do as I say, not as I do” edicts because she hated how unfair they were. God knows, she’d gotten enough of them from Nana Birdie and Papa Chris growing up, and Trev had a stance that when you were an adult, you could do what you wanted—but as a child, you did what you were told. It was how he’d been raised and a big part of why he’d left his large and overbearing family behind in California. Trev’s family had been well meaning but intrusive. His parents had wanted him to go to college rather than working the manual-labor jobs he’d chosen, first in construction, then in logging. His grandparents had wanted him to take over their hardware store, but he hadn’t wanted that either. Also, as much as they’d been friends with Maggie’s grandparents, they hadn’t been thrilled when he’d started seeing Maggie. She often wondered if marrying her, as well as moving out of state, was a “fuck you” to them, since both had managed to get Trev cut off from his family completely. Kit had never even gotten to know his paternal grandparents. It was funny, then, that Trev had gotten just as autocratic when he’d become a parent.

Long story short, she wanted to teach Kit about parity, and while it wasn’t always feasible, she tried desperately not to simply impose her will on him.

On the plus side, it made their bond closer. He knew that when she told him to do something, it was because she had a damned good reason for it, not because she was being tyrannical or impulsive.

On the minus, it did mean he’d developed arguing skills a trial lawyer would envy and thought that everything was open to debate. She’d made a tactical error on that one, one that Trev would probably rub her nose in like a puppy with shit if he were still in the state and they were still communicating.

“What if I did something social?” she said. He laughed again. “Okay, now that’s getting insulting.”

“First of all, What’s social in Fool’s Falls?” he asked. “And secondly, What’s social in the Falls that you’re actually interested in going to?”

“As it happens, I bumped into Deb at Tasty Great when I went food shopping, and she invited me to her book club tomorrow. I thought I’d drop by.”

“You’re going . . . to a book club? By choice? With Ms. Deb?” The incredulity was palpable. “No way.”

“Yes way,” she said, even as her stomach fell a little at the thought that she would have to do the thing. “So, what about you? What are you going to do?”

His following pause was long, and she realized he was nervous.

“How about you go to a club meeting too?” she said. “Something you’re interested in. They’ve got to have something. Game design. Asian heritage . . .”

“Mom, I’m a quarter Asian,” he countered quickly. “I don’t even really look Asian. I seriously don’t think going to a club where they think I’m a fetishist is going to help.”

She winced. “Okay, maybe not,” she agreed. “But they’ve got to have something. If I go to book club, you’ve got to at least try to go to something. Agreed?”

He paused again, then sighed heavily. “Pics or it didn’t happen,” he finally said.

“I will selfie as proof,” she said, feeling a little victorious. “Now, what are you going to do?”

“Harrison and I are going to do a dungeon run on DeathCharm Vengeance tonight, I think,” he said.

“Okay, tell him I said hi. And make sure you get some sleep, okay?”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday, and sleep’s for the weak,” he said, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “Love you, Mom.”

The sudden slash of missing him was like one of those cuts with a sharp kitchen knife, where you don’t even know how deep it is until it starts bleeding . . . where it doesn’t hurt until it stings like fuck.

“Love you, too, sweetie,” she said, then hung up as tears welled.

Well, this was stupid, she told herself, wiping at her eyes. She’d always scoffed at parents who talked about empty nest and how it hurt. She had made the primary aim of her life getting Kit off to school, or trade school, or whatever it took to make him a healthy, relatively happy, as-well-adjusted-as-could-be-expected adult human. But even as she felt thrilled that he was finally on his way, she missed him, so much.