William’s basketball team is called the Fire-Breathing Horned Eagles. This, because some of the boys wanted to be hornets, some eagles, and some dragons. Their name, you’ll agree, is the perfect compromise, even if it doesn’t conjure a clear image.
They go by “Eagles” for short.
Standing in front of the gumball machine at the Food Lion, Emma Grace declared she wanted a blue one. I had three quarters, so we decided to buy three gumballs and take two to her buddies who were at Cub Scouts.
We spun the first quarter, opened the door and: Pink! She gasped just a little and looked at me, eyes wide.
Pink has been known to be, from time to time, her Favorite Color.
“Let’s see what else we get,” I said.
A Red, and then another Red.
“Which one do you want?” I asked her. I was kneeling in front of the machine, three gumballs in the flat palm of my hand. I watched her, knowing how badly she wanted the pink one, knowing how she must be thinking pink to be Undesirable to either of the buddies, even if it was a pink Gumball.
“Eeny, meeny, miny mo,” she began, pointing in turn at each of the gumballs. I found myself wondering where she had learned it, and marveled that she knew it so well. Then: “My mother said to pick the very best one and….”
Here the steady rotation skipped a beat: red, red, pink, red, red, pink, red, pink….
“you are it!”
Pink! And she popped it in her mouth. “It’s strawberry!” she said.
The buddies got the red ones.
He had, that very morning, with his brother’s help, voluntarily cleaned his room. He had, later in the day, vacuumed the playroom floor, which is No Small Chore. He had put all of his clean clothes away.
Now he was tucked in his bed, and I was making an adjustment to his dresser drawer: the pull handle had come loose. And here I found, pressed into the top of his drawer, the dress shirt he had worn on Sunday. Not realizing, I suppose, that this sort of thing gets hung in the closet, he had done the best he could to put it away by himself.
I pulled it out and shook it a little, and hung it in his closet.
“Thank you, Everett,” I said, “for all the things you’ve done for me. You’ve been a great help lately.”
This is the sort of thing that embarrasses him. And although I’ve always been his only mother, I am still getting used to his embarrassment, trying to predict it, trying to avoid it. As soon as I had thanked him, I realized what I had done and waited, wondering, for the outcome.
I don’t think he looked up from the Lego project on his bed, but he said, without affectation: “That’s because I love you.”
