Page 40 of Vegas Heat

She holds up a paper that must be from preschool. There are raw noodles glued to it in the shape of a baseball, and a few have fallen off.

“Look! You were even into the game when you were in third grade!”

“Third grade?” I repeat. “I made that inthird grade? I thought I wasthreewhen I did it based on the terrible artwork.”

“Yeah, you weren’t very artistic back then.” She shrugs. “Not everyone’s a Picasso, honey.”

“Clearly. What do you want me to do with all that?”

“I don’t know, but it was just sitting in a bin at the house and I don’t really need it, so I thought maybe you’d want it,” she says. She flips through more papers, and it seems like she kept virtually every single thing I ever did. It’s all a disorganized mess, but at least she wrote the grade and year on the back.

“I guess I’ll go through it and keep what I want for the memory book,” I lie to make her feel better. The second she’s on a plane back to Chicago, it’s going in the dumpster.

“At least keep the noodle baseball. Oh! And this paper on Jane Eyre. Your insight was incredible for a high school junior.” She holds up the paper.

“Correction. Sparknotes had incredible insight on the book, not Cooper Noah.”

She purses her lips and rolls her eyes. “Don’t tell me. I don’t even want to know.”

“I made it to the big leagues, so I guess I did something right along the way, right?”

She sighs. “You just don’t tell a teacher these things.”

“You teach first grade, Mother. I hardly think your first graders are looking up plot summaries for Dr. Seuss.”

She purses her lips again, clearly annoyed at the direction of this conversation. “You just never know. My job is to keep those kiddos honest.”

“Your job is to teach themhowto read, not to worry about whether they’re looking at Sparknotes.”

“Touché.” She sets down the Jane Eyre paper with a clear look of disapproval, and my phone buzzes with a notification that tells me I have a delivery down in the lobby.

“I’ll be right back,” I tell her, and I head down to grab my package. Or mypackages, I suppose.

It’s a big load, so the doorman grabs a cart to help me out. I take it all upstairs, and my mom’s brows dip when she spots me and my big load.

“What’s all that?” she asks.

I open the box and pull out packing tape, unprinted newspaper, and two tape guns. I open the other rather large box and pull out an assortment of brand new boxes that aren’t even taped together yet.

“I’m putting you to work, ma’am,” I say. “I need to pack up this place so I’m ready to move to Vegas.” I gloss over the fact that Gabby’s coming next weekend and I don’t want any baseball shit out. I don’t have much since it’s an apartment that came furnished, but I do have a closetful of clothes, a kitchen full of dishes, and a pantry full of beer.

And a few priceless items of memorabilia that dear ole Mom can help me pack while she’s here in town.

Plus, of course, the assortment of schoolwork from my tenure in education.

I tape up a huge box and set it beside her, and then I start heaving the papers she brought me into it. This’ll fit nicely in the dumpster once she’s gone.

She snatches the noodle paper out of the box and hangs it on my fridge as I continue shoveling the stuff she brought right into the box.

“You’re not even going to look?” she whines. “Maybe I should just take it all back home.”

“What are you going to do with it? It sat in your basement for the last fourteen years.”

She presses her lips together and nods. “That’s right. Fourteen years since you graduated high school. Remind me how long your girlfriend has been out of high school?”

I blow out a grunt of frustration. “I thought we were letting that go,” I say.

“We are, we are. But it felt like it merited mentioning again.”

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