Mom got home pretty late, which meant she’d been working overtime down at the bank. She was a secretary, but she put in overtime because they were training her to be like an assistant bookkeeper or something. She said the money would be better, and in the meantime, she got time and a half for the extra hours. It was a little after seven, because The Simpsons reruns had just started.
The headlights of the Ford swept across the windows of the front room, where I was watching TV. I got up and went to the hall door, because I figured if she’d gone food shopping I’d go out and help her with the bags. But it wasn’t completely dark out yet, so I could see she hadn’t gone shopping. She got out the driver’s side door and didn’t walk around to the other side, just headed straight for the front door.
I opened the hall door and flicked on the outside light, and she switched directions and came in that way. She looked tired, so I didn’t ask her about not going shopping or what we might have for dinner. It’s not like she was starving me, so I don’t want it to seem that way. I’d just polished off a bag of Doritos while I was watching TV.
It’s just that lately it seemed like I was hungry all the time. Forget about snacks in between meals, I needed snacks in between snacks. I guess that’s normal. My mom would watch me shovel it in and call me a “healthy, growing boy.” I hated that, because it made me sound like a tomato or something, like my only job in this world was to expand, but I guess that’s sort of how it works. I was definitely beginning to fill out some, and you don’t go from being a skinny kid to a grown man without chowing down plenty along the way.
Anyway, she got in the door and kicked it closed behind her. That was another thing about me getting bigger; sometimes it sort of surprised me how small my mom was. When she moved past me and dropped her purse on the chair by the phone, she barely came up to my shoulder. It seemed like she should still be bigger than me, that she should always be bigger than me, but I guess that was just left over from being a kid and spending so many years looking up at her.
Even without me asking, I guess she knew I’d be thinking about dinner. Like I said, I was getting pretty predictable that way. “Pizza?” she said.
“Heck, yeah!” I said. And that was the good thing about overtime. She must’ve worked till just about seven, so that’s two extra hours, but she’d get paid for three. That’s what I meant by time and a half. So now it was like we were going to spend some of that money and get pizza delivered. I was all for food and spending money and any combination of the two, so she walked off to get the menu and I clicked off the outside light and stood there thinking about what toppings I wanted.
We ended up compromising on that, because I didn’t like peppers and she thought three meats was two too many. So we got a large sausage and onions, which was awesome. Mom ate slowly. She wasn’t super into pizza, which was weird, but Mixer’s mom wasn’t, either, so maybe that was a mom thing. I knew ordering pizza was more for me than it was for her, and I guess I sort of appreciated that, because I decided to sit down in the living room and eat it with her. Usually, I took my dinner to the front room to eat in front of the TV, but I knew she liked it when I sat at the table. That was definitely a mom thing.
We didn’t say much, but it didn’t seem to matter. I thought about telling her about Tommy, but what was I going to say, Tommy flipped his desk over and got suspended today and I haven’t heard from him since? She knew what kind of kids we were. We got in trouble, broke things. We served detention, got suspended. She didn’t need any more reminders of that. We were having some nice pizza here, so why bring that stuff up?
Then I thought maybe I’d tell her how we’d been paid a buck each to carry what we were pretty sure was roadkill. I was going to make a joke about how I was going to start a union to get better wages, like the Roadkill Luggers of America or something. I laughed a little when I thought of that and a strand of cheese blew out of the side of my mouth.
“What’s so funny?” she said.
I had a second to think about it while I plucked the cheese gob off the table and stuck it back in my mouth. “Nothing,” I said when I finished chewing, because roadkill probably wasn’t the kind of thing she’d want to hear about at the dinner table, either.
Mom had seen one of my uncles in the sandwich shop at lunch, so she passed along some family info and I pretended to be interested in it. And that was pretty much it for the conversation. I didn’t ask her about her day, and she didn’t ask me about mine, because she’d probably worked too hard, and I probably hadn’t worked hard enough, and that was just the way it was. Plus, I just wasn’t that kid, the one who talked about classes and grades, the one whose mom was hoping he’d become a doctor or a lawyer or whatever. My mom was just hoping I’d graduate, and if it looked at any point like I might not, she trusted me to tell her.
When we finished up, we each took our own plate into the kitchen. She ate a grand total of one slice, so even though I ate a lot, there was still some left over. I figured I’d have one slice later for a snack and another one for breakfast. Cold pizza was one of my favorite things in the world. Cold pizza and I don’t know what else. It’s kind of weird to think about your absolute favorite things. Summer vacation and my friends, I guess. I liked beer, but to be honest, I was still kind of getting used to the taste. Sleeping in was good. My mom.
The Descent came on cable at ten. It’s a pretty good horror flick, plus it’s basically all hot chicks, so it’s kind of like the perfect movie, if you think about it. I sat there eating cold pizza and watching these creepy crawlers chase after the chicks in the dark. It was a pretty good night, all in all. The one thing I didn’t do was read any of that book.