“It’s a pinkie promise. Haven’t you ever heard of those?”
Eoghanan shook, “No. What is it?”
“It…um…let me show you.” The boy reached for his hand, bending in his thumb and folding his first three fingers over, leaving but the one smallest finger sticking out. “When we wrap our pinkies together it makes the promise stick.”
It made no sense to him, but Eoghanan didn’t question Cooper. “Aye, ’tis our secret then. Just ye and I.”
Chapter 8
“What are you so smiley about?” I flipped the blanket and sheets back just far enough on the bed so that both Cooper and I could crawl in and, after climbing inside myself, patted the top of the bed for him to join me.
“I had the best day ever, Mom.” Clad in his dinosaur pajamas, he climbed onto the bed but didn’t slip beneath the covers, instead he sat on top of the comforter with his feet near my head so that he could face me.
“Ever? I didn’t know you were such an enthusiastic fisherman, Coop.” Placing both my hands behind my head, I settled in for a bit of conversation before sleep.
“I fish with Bebop all the time and I like it, but it wasn’t the fishin’.”
He had both hands extended back behind him to rest on and his feet swayed back and forth, happily.
“Well, what made it the ‘best day ever,’ then?”
“I can’t tell you.”
I rolled over on my side, smiling to the wall as I reached to turn off the lamp, “Oh, okay. Well, goodnight then, Coop. Love you.”
Just as I put my finger on the lamp’s knob, Cooper pounced on me. “No, Mom! Gimme a break. You know I wasn’t through talking.”
Laughing, I released my grip, rolling onto my back once more. “What is there to say if you won’t tell me?”
He jumped from his current position and flipped himself over so that he lay on his stomach and rested his head on the palm of his hands. “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you. I can’t. It’s a secret.”
Now he had my attention.
“Now, Coop, is this a secret someone told you, or one that you learned by spying? Because those are two very different things, and we’ve already talked about this before—it’s not okay to eavesdrop on people.”
I watched him wrestle with my question, his face contorting as he lifted his brow and shifted his lower lip in between his teeth. As always, he didn’t want to lie, but he knew I wouldn’t like the truth either.
Instead, he rolled off the edge of the bed and silently walked over to my side, reaching up on his tip-toes to turn off the light. Enveloped in darkness, he crawled over me and onto the bed, slipping under the sheets on his side.
“I just got real sleepy, Mom. Goodnight. Angels on your pillow.”
I rolled my eyes in the darkness, leaning over to kiss him on the forehead. “Angels on yours too, Coop. It was a little bit of both, huh?”
Silence followed my question for a minute or two, and then his voice, soft and sweet in its confession, answered. “Yep, maybe a little.”
*
I woke early, hoping to get a jump on looking through all the photographs I’d taken the day before and perhaps, get a little writing done on the article. Coop always rose early so it came as no surprise to find his half of the bed empty when I woke.
When he outgrew his crib several years ago, I moved him into his own room with a “big boy” bed. I made it my goal to figure out just what time he seemed to wake up each morning by setting my alarm at a different time each day—continually setting it earlier and earlier if I woke to find him already awake the day before. It didn’t matter what time I set it, Coop’s internal clock was determined to beat it. I would walk into his room every morning to find him playing with his toys. Eventually, I’d given up the effort and settled for rising by six each morning so that even if he woke earlier, he wouldn’t be unsupervised for very long.
I knew he wouldn’t have gone far and suspected he’d made his way downstairs to the kitchen, hoping to lend a helping hand with the breakfast preparations. Still, Cooper’s idea of helping wasn’t always viewed the same way by others. Deciding to forgo a shower for the moment, I brushed my hair and teeth, pulled on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, and left in search of my son.
I heard him before I saw him, giggling at the deep Scottish voice making a gurgled, horrible sound that I could only assume was an attempt at a dinosaur noise. Sure enough, as I descended the stairs, I saw Eoghanan sprawled out on his left side next to Cooper on the floor of the living room.
Each held a dinosaur—Cooper a small one with wings, Eoghanan a large t-rex. While Cooper had the advantage by keeping his dinosaur in the air, Eoghanan had his creature jumping to unimaginable heights for the short stubbiness of the dinosaur’s legs. It sent Cooper into a fit of laughter each time.