only a minute, but I must have drifted off, because it was halftime before I opened them again, and Dwight was sound asleep. I quietly put away the folded clothes and went out to the kitchen to make a salad to go with the hot chicken sandwiches I planned for supper.
He woke up when the kids came back and sat up yawning. “Want me to run them over to Kate’s?”
“No, I’ll do it. You watch the rest of the game.”
Instead of heading toward the garage with us, Cal sat down on the couch beside Dwight and I realized that he and Mary Pat must have butted heads over something, because they didn’t bother to tell each other goodbye.
Mary Pat claimed the front seat as her right now that she was almost ten, while Jake buckled himself onto the booster seat that the state requires and that he’d have to keep using for another couple of years, to his chagrin.
“You and Cal have a fight?” I asked when we were under way.
She shrugged and didn’t respond, but Jake said, “She called Cal a scairdy cat.”
“Shut up, Jake,” she said tightly.
“Scared of what?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she muttered.
“He’s too scared to—”
Before Jake could tell, she rounded on him. “I mean it, Jake. Shut up!”
“I don’t think your mom would appreciate that kind of talk,” I told her.
We rode in silence till we reached the end of our drive and were out on the hardtop, then she looked at me and said, “How come you won’t adopt Cal?”
I was so startled by her question that I almost ran off the road.
“What?”
“He thought you’d adopt him when Mom and Dad adopted Jake and me, but you didn’t and now he’s too scared to ask you why. Don’t you love him?”
“Well, of course I do.”
“Then how come?”
“I didn’t know he wanted me to,” I managed to say. “Are you sure he does?”
She gave a firm nod and I heard murmured agreement from Jake.
“And he wants to call you Mom, not Deborah. Like Jake and me call Aunt Kate and Uncle Rob Mom and Dad now.”
“Do they know about this?” I asked.
She shook her small head. “Cal made us promise not to tell them, but he never said I couldn’t tell you.”
Even though I was shaken to the core, I was still amused by the way she could split hairs like a budding lawyer.
“I hope you’ll both keep that promise a little longer,” I said.
That evening, after Dwight had tucked Cal in for the night, I went down to his room alone and sat on the edge of his bed. I hadn’t felt this nervous and unsure of myself since the night Dwight proposed.
Enough light spilled in from the hall for me to see Cal’s puzzled expression as he looked up from his pillow. Bandit lifted his furry head from the other side of the bed, then settled back beside Cal with a doggy snuffle.
Fingers crossed that I could come up with the right words, I smoothed his hair and said, “Mary Pat told me why she called you a scairdy cat.”
He seemed to freeze, then pulled the covers up to his chin with his fists clutched in the quilt. “She’s a big blabbermouth,” he blurted angrily.
“But is she right, honey? Do you want me to adopt you?”
He pulled the covers even tighter and gave a shrug so like one of Dwight’s that I wanted to hug him then and there. “I don’t care,” he muttered.
I put my hand on one of his clenched fists. “Adoption’s a serious thing, Cal. I love you and I’d really like to be your legal mother, not just your stepmother, but you have to want it, too.”
He didn’t say anything, just looked at me wide-eyed.
I made myself smile. “Of course, there are drawbacks. You won’t be able to say you don’t have to mind me because I’m not your mother.”
That almost got an answering smile from him as we both remembered that incident from last summer, and I felt a slight easing of tension in his fist.
“And you don’t have to stop loving your first mother either. Look at how many new people you’ve learned to love this year—Granddaddy, all your new uncles and aunts and cousins. That doesn’t make you love Dad or Grandma less, does it?”
He shook his head solemnly.
“So you think about it,” I said, “and if this is something you really want, we can talk to Dad about it in the morning, okay?”