There was probably some psychological name for it. Maybe some German word with fifteen syllables. Basically, she’d tried her damnedest to make sure he was happy, healthy, and whole, without getting too creepily codependent about it.
She just wasn’t sure if it had worked, especially when it looked like he was alone and doing nothing to change that condition. She knew enough to know that long-term isolation wasn’t good.
For him, anyway. For me, it’s fine.
“What about you?” he asked. “You meet anybody?”
“Eww,” she replied reflexively, and he laughed.
“Just sayin’。 You’ve been divorced for five years, and now you’ve got the place to yourself,” he pointed out. “Time to cut loose.”
“Ugh. You know I hate that,” she said. “I went to Deb’s book club, and there was a vibe of that—like a Sex and the City thing. Which, okay, they can do what they want, and I’m sure I sound judgy as hell. But they were pushing the whole ‘single and ready to mingle’ mindset. Sort of insistent that the best was yet to come, and that they were just as hot and beautiful and desirable as they were when they were young.”
“I am not going to say my mom is . . . gack, I can’t even hint at it,” he said, shuddering and wrinkling his nose, “but . . . I guess they have a point? I mean, age ain’t nothin’ but a number, right?”
“First: if you were here, I’d smack you on the back of the head,” she shot back. “Because no way are you quoting philosophical wisdom from R. fucking Kelly, especially considering he produced that song for a fifteen-year-old that he then married.”
“Oh. Yuck.” Kit grimaced. “Good point.”
“Second: I have changed markedly since my twenties,” she said. “I don’t want to wear bandage dresses and club all night . . .”
Kit made gagging noises. “Ack! Brain bleach!”
She ignored his outburst. “I’m not saying that other women can’t wear whatever the hell they want and feel however they want to feel. My point is, at this age, I don’t want to get negged by some fifty-year-old douchebro who thinks I care about his opinion, just because he wants to sleep with me. I don’t want to wear makeup or shave my legs or buy matched underwear . . .”
“I regret everything,” Kit groaned. “You’re right. You’re old. You don’t need to date, and I never want to have this conversation ever again.”
She grinned at his pain. “Although, you know, the guild is all guys, except for me. I could probably have my pick.”
“Mom!” He looked shocked. “Hook up with somebody you meet online? Are you trying to get on a true-crime podcast?”
“I’m just saying, they’re friends with Deb—or somebody in her church, or something,” she teased. “So they’re not complete strangers . . .”
Kit paused, studying her. “You’re just messing with me, right?” he asked suspiciously.
“Of course I am,” she said, bursting out in laughter. “Fuck’s sake, there’s a guy named BigDorkEnergy. He’s pretty much what you’d expect.”
Kit finally relaxed, chuckling in response. “Are they all tools?” he asked. “I’ve been playing a lot of Vicious Squad 4, just joining online groups. And yeah, there’s a lot of dickheads out there.”
She shrugged. “They’re actually pretty decent,” she admitted. “In skill level and manners.”
“Did you bribe them?”
“Shamelessly,” she said. “Totally worth it. Between that, my stats, and my smack-talking, they have accepted me as one of their own. Leader’s really good too. Keeps things calm, schedules our games, helps out where he can. He’s a healer, if you can believe it. He even offered to protect me when I played with my level twenty-seven. Chivalrous.”
Kit’s eyes narrowed, even as he smirked. “Sounds like you like him.” Now his eyes popped wide. “You wouldn’t date him, would you?”
She snickered. “These kids are all in community college. I think they’re probably your age, eighteen or nineteen. Maybe in their twenties. That’s not dating. That’s grooming.” She mimicked a vomiting sound, and was gratified to hear Kit’s laugh.
“Nobody wants that,” he admitted. Then he looked at the clock. “Guess I’d better go. Toby’s gonna be back soon, I think.”
Toby. The roommate.
“You’re going to go back to the book club?” he pressed. “I just don’t want to come home for Christmas break and find you wearing a tinfoil hat, speaking in tongues, because you haven’t interacted with a human in real life in months.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t want to hear that you’ve been wearing the same clothes all semester, wearing Febreze as cologne,” she pointed out, “and that you’ve been communicating solely in grunts or simplified pantomime, okay? Get out there and say hi to someone.”
He rolled his eyes.
“Just one person.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“Hey, I went to book club! I’m ahead of the game!”
His look was askance. “So if I do one token thing, we’re square?”
Dammit. “And . . . I’m going to Deb’s house again,” she said slowly. “She’s having some football thing Saturday. For the Washington State game.” After the debacle of her showing at the book club, she was frankly surprised that Deb had followed up on her invite, much less that she’d been insistent. Perhaps she should be nicer to the woman and more charitable about these social outings.
“The Cougars. Boo, hiss,” he said with a grin/wince. They were his college’s nemesis. “But you hate football.”
“Well, I can say hi to her dog,” she said. “I didn’t get a chance to at the book club. So that’s something.”
“All right. I will”—he frowned—“check out the anime club on campus.”
“Pics or it didn’t happen,” she said.
“BEGONE, THOT!” he yelled.
Any other mom—or at least, any other mom who knew that “thot” essentially meant “whore”—would be horrified. She just laughed, knowing that he was quoting a YouTuber and that . . . well, she’d laughed, too, when she saw the gamer playing and yelling at the character on screen.
“We are so weird,” she said. “Be careful, have fun. Make good choices.”
“Oh, shut up,” he said, shaking his head, then smiled. “Love you, Mom.”
“Love you, too, kiddo.”
They signed off, and she sighed. She hadn’t wanted to go to Deb’s thing. She’d just sort of ignored it when they’d talked about it at the book club. And then she’d ignored the mentions in the group text （and she hated the fact that she was on a group text with the rest of the book club） and replied tepidly to Deb’s personal nudge. But she knew that she could take another picture, and maybe . . . okay, just maybe she could guilt Kit into trying harder. He knew how much she hated social stuff. After all, he came by his antisocial tendencies honestly.