Page 65 of Fierce-Michael

He handed the yellow egg off to his son to put on the table while he returned the chair.

“Only one more to go,” Ty said. “Where could it be?”

“You checked all the rooms on this floor?” he asked.

“I did,” Ty said.

“Even the bathroom?” he asked.

“Ewww,” Ty said. “No. But I will now.”

He laughed as his son ran down the hall to the half bath and came back holding a blue one.

“Where was it?”

“On the back of the toilet. Why would he put it there?”

“Maybe he needed to take a pit stop and set it down and forgot about it?” he asked.

“Noooooo. Rabbits don’t use toilets.”

“But the Easter Bunny is no ordinary rabbit. Remember that,” he said. “Did you notice there is no basket? That’s not right. I bet he hid that on you too.”

Ty slapped his hand to his forehead as if it didn’t even occur to him that he didn’t notice an Easter basket waiting for him.

“Where could it be?” Ty asked.

“I don’t know. Why don’t we check around?”

He made a production of walking around the house and steering Ty in every direction but the mudroom where he’d set the basket on the bench that Ty sat at to remove his shoes and coat daily.

After five minutes he made his way there and Ty saw it right away screaming as he ran down the hall waving his arms around like a silly goof.

He knew he got those exaggerated maneuvers and craziness from his mother but brushed it off.

There was no reason his son couldn’t be a kid. But if he was doing those things at eighteen, that’d be a different story.

Ty struggled to pick up his basket, so Michael grabbed it and brought it to the breakfast table where all the plastic eggs were gathering and let his son start to take everything out.

“I’m hungry,” Ty said. “What’s for breakfast?”

“What do you want?” he asked.

His son was neat and organized and was lining up the coloring books and crayons on top of each other, then the matchbox cars in another pile. There were trading cards, a Nerf gun and foam bullets. The last pile was candy. Just a small one. He’d get more candy from his grandparents later today and there was no reason to overload him with sugar.

“Can I have a pop tart?” Ty asked.

“How about pancakes?” he said. “I’m dying for them. No reason to only make them for me.”

“Yes, please,” Ty said. “With blueberries?”

“Blueberries coming right up,” he said. One of his tricky ways of getting fruit in his kid. Not that Ty ate poorly, but any time he could nudge him away from a processed breakfast he did.

He had those things in the house because they were nice treats for a kid, but not something to eat all the time. They weren’t rushing to get out of the house like some days so a nice cooked breakfast was better.

Ty was playing with his cars, having opened most of them up, when Michael heard his phone go off on the counter.

He picked it up to see the text from Kelly wishing him Happy Easter. He knew she was going to her parents’ today. To him this was any other Sunday they’d spend apart.

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