I was trying to squeeze blue icing onto a grocery-store sheet cake when my eighteen-year-old son walked into the kitchen looking like somebody had just told him the world was ending.
Across the cake, in slightly crooked letters, I had written:
CONGRATS, ETHAN!
One side of the frosting was collapsing, and the final exclamation point looked more like a blue worm than punctuation.
Normally, Ethan would have laughed.
That afternoon, he didn’t.
He stood in the doorway of our little kitchen in Westbridge, Ohio, gripping his phone so tightly his knuckles had gone white.
I lowered the piping bag.
“Okay,” I said. “That face is concerning.”
Nothing.
“Did you eat Grandpa Walter’s leftover potato salad?”
Still nothing.
“Because I warned you. Anything involving mayonnaise that has been sitting in his truck all afternoon is basically a science experiment.”
Ethan swallowed.
“Mom.”
Something in his voice erased the joke from my mouth.
“Can you sit down?”
I stared at him.
Nobody tells their mother to sit down because they have ordinary news.
I wiped frosting from my fingers onto a dish towel.
“If you got somebody pregnant, I need about ten seconds before you tell me. I’m not emotionally prepared to become a grandmother before forty.”
