Page 113 of Rook

“Yes!” my mom parroted. “I printed out an animal checklist. We’re gonna see how many critters we can find.”

“I expect pictures.”

“Gotta get my camera!” Hawk cheered, wiggling.

“Let’s do that. Plus anything else we might need,” my mom said, setting Hawk down, taking his hand, and walking into the house.

Watching my mother with my son had healed something in me.

Tessa asked me once, as she caught me watching them play in the backyard, if it hurt or made me resentful to see my mom giving my son the childhood that I didn’t have.

I maybe even expected to feel that way myself.

But it was never that.

It was, I don’t know, validating in a way. That everything I believed down to my core about my mother was true. That she had the capacity for so much love and positivity. That it was just her mental health that held her back.

I’d gotten snippets of my mom’s goodness.

My son got all of it.

It was a beautiful thing.

“Okay. We got a change of clothes, sunblock, bug spray, his water bottle, and his camera,” my mom said when the two of them reemerged a few moments later.

“Sounds like you have everything you need. You guys have lots of fun, okay?” I said, rubbing my son’s head.

“Have a nice day with your wife,” my mom said, giving me a smile before walking off with my son.

I stood there on the lawn, watching them pull away.

I made my way back into the house, seeing traces of all three of us scattered around. My laptop was still open on the coffee table next to three of Hawk’s wilderness books and Tessa’s chunky inventory notebook for the office supply store.

In the kitchen, my circuit breaker mug sat next to Tessa’s mermaid one and Hawk’s breakfast plate that he’d made at a pottery place with my mom and had little bees and flowers painted on it that had been outlined by my mom and messily painted by my son.

I’d barely gotten a chance to clean the dishes before I heard the front door close and the jingle of Tessa’s key.

“My son just waved at me from the back of a passing car,” she said, coming into the doorway of the kitchen in one of the flowing sundresses she started wearing when pregnant and had just gotten attached to, watching me with her head tilted to the side.

“He’s being kidnapped.”

“Oh, good,” she said, making me smile. “Off to do something outdoorsy, I assume.”

“Always.”

“It’s weird how little he got of the two of us,” she said, shaking her head.

“To be fair, the only way we could get him to sleep sometimes as a baby was to tap away on creamy keyboards.”

“True,” she agreed.

Hawk had been a terrible sleeper. I wasn’t sure he slept through the night until he was two.

If we’d ever entertained the idea of having more kids—and we honestly hadn’t, ever since Tessa had finally delivered Hawk, held him for the first time, and declared, ‘I love you. I love him. But I amneverdoing that again.’—his refusal to sleep erased that.

As much as my club brothers all seemed to like to breed entire litters of kids, we were more than happy with our one little dude.

“So,” I said, grabbing her hips when she drew closer. “We have a day all to ourselves.”

---