He stared at me for a second longer before he turned without a word and stomped back into the bathroom.
Kids.
I sat back on my heels, pushing up off my knees to stand. “Come on, time to go potty,” I told the covered mound next to me. Nothing. Shaking my head, I lifted the blanket off the black-haired, sausage roll of a dog hidden underneath. “Don’t you ignore me.”
Said sausage roll glared up at me, and I swore if she could talk, she’d be telling me to fuck off. You’d have thought she was seventy rather than six by the way she acted. If food wasn’t involved, she wasn’t interested.
She was a short-haired, miniature dachshund and had been a puppy no bigger than my hands back when we bought her. I remembered back then that we’d had her for a few days, and for the life of me I still hadn’t been able to pick a name. So, like the genius woman I was, I decided to let my two-year-old name her.
“What’s your favorite thing?”
“The rug!”
“Okay, what’s your second favorite thing?”
“Pants!”
And thus, Rugpants was named. Genius woman, indeed. I nudged her limp form, “Come on Rugsy, outside, let’s go.”
She rolled off the couch like a potato on a kid’s project ramp and trotted her short, stubby legs toward the patio door. It was literally two feet away, but she still found time to stretch and yawn on the way over.
Yanking on the handle, I forced the door to slide open as far as I could while it fought against me. I sighed, mentally adding ‘call the landlord to fix patio door’ to my never ending to-do list.
Rugpants looked up at me, pure sass in her buggy eyes. “Don’t give me that look, it won’t open any farther. You can fit.” I nudged her out, leaving the door ajar so she could make her way in when she was done.
Walking backward, I plopped onto the couch, closing my eyes and listening to the cicadas serenade me through the opening and praying no mosquitoes took advantage of my laziness.
Jamie would come back any minute with a book, and I was dreading it. Not because I didn’t enjoy reading with him, I loved his interest in books, but because reading time meant nighttime, and nighttime meant schoolwork. No matter how much I tried to enjoy them, the evenings were never long enough.
I allowed myself one more minute of self-pity and then sat up, breathing deeply and clapping my hands together. “It’s bedtime, let’s go!”
I heard the faint clatter of something in the bathroom—I didn’t even want to know what an eight-year-old boy was doing in there—before the creak of the door echoed out, and he darted into his room.
“Are we reading out here or in there?”
“In here!” he yelled.
Of course, we were. Lazy bum. Slapping my hands on the couch, I heaved my butt up and trudged toward the first bedroom in the hall, directly across from the bathroom.
We’d moved in last week, and Jamie had been so excited to have his own bedroom and bathroom. It’d been a struggle not to burst into tears at his excitement over something he’d always deserved to have.
I crawled into bed next to him, shoving my toes under his legs to warm them and biting back a laugh when he hissed and slapped at me. We didn’t fit on his twin mattress, but I’d keep squeezing in as long as he’d let me.
“I have several chapters I have to read for class later, so do you mind doing most of the reading tonight?”
He shrugged. “Sure.”
I settled in, leaning my head on his shoulder and listening to him read a novel about dragons. We were currently on book three of an ongoing series, and he was loving them.