Read Online When You Were Older by Catherine Ryan Hyde - Free Book Online Page A

could only see a two. So, two minutes? Twelve? Twenty-two?
    I reminded myself not to panic, or hurry. After all, Ben wasn’t going to hurry his tantrum. The whole idea was in the timing. In the way we would meet up at the end.
    ‘Cool on a wire rack.’
    I plowed through what seemed like every cupboard, and found no wire rack. They’d just have to cool on something else.
    I cut eight, and then sat at the kitchen table with my head in my hands while they baked. I purposely didn’t go back into the TV room with Ben. I couldn’t. I couldn’t unhook from his tantrum. Watching him, listening to him, made me feel like I was falling apart, just as surely as he was.
    After a while I put my hands over my ears. Hard.
    About fifteen minutes after that, I was using a spatula to lift eight cookies on to a yellow plastic plate, noting that Ben’s voice had gotten hoarse and quiet. In fact, I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
    But I still knew.
    I stood at the open door of the TV room, cookies in hand. I think he smelled them. I saw him miss a step.
    ‘Look, Buddy. I made you cookies.’
    He stopped.
    Oh my God. He stopped.
    It’s hard to describe the relief.
    He’d been crying. His eyes were red, his face streaked with tears. And his nose was running. I mean
running
. Not a little. Buckets.
    I got him a box of tissues from my mom’s bedroom, and, when I got back, he was sitting in one of the stuffed chairs, eating a cookie.
    I handed him five or six tissues, but he just held them in one hand and kept eating. So I took them back, and wiped his nose.
    It was a low moment in our relationship.
    I threw away the tissues and then just sat watching him.
    ‘Can I have a cookie, too?’ I asked.
    ‘Yeah.’
    And then, after a long pause, he held the plate out in my direction. But all I could think about was the running faucet of his nose.
    ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘They’re all for you.’
    ‘Mom’s are better.’
    And that’s what I get for being a nice guy. That is, if I am.
    ‘They’re both made from exactly the same dough.’
    ‘But hers are baked right. This is burned. Right here.’
    He showed me the bottom of the cookie. He was right. It was blackened all around one edge.
    ‘Sorry. I did my best. But I’m not much of a baker.’
    Oddly, as I said it, I thought about that girl who was. Even though I’d only met her the one time.
    ‘It’s OK. I’ll just give the burny part to …’
    I waited for him to finish the sentence. But he never did. But he tipped his hand on where he’d been headed with that thought. He reached the burned edge of cookie out and down toward the floor. To about dog level.
    So, he remembered. Even though maybe he didn’t remember that he remembered. Or maybe I’d just gotten him thinking about dogs by showing him the picture.
    But … no. You can think about dogs all you want, but if you’ve never had one, as best you can recall, you don’t automatically give them your only-slightly-less-than-edible leftovers. That’s not instinct. That’s habit.
    ‘Who?’ I asked.
    ‘Who what?’ As if he’d forgotten the entire proposition.
    He set the burned edge of cookie on the very outermost edge of his plate.
    ‘Who were you going to give that to?’
    Ben thought that over for a time.
    ‘That’s a hard question,’ he said.
    He looked up to the TV screen. The cartoon show was over. I glanced at my watch. Seven minutes after eight. So much for Patty Jespers’s declaration of ‘Not a minute sooner. Not a minute later.’
    I watched his eyes go wide.
    ‘Time is it?’ he asked nervously.
    ‘Seven minutes after eight.’
    He dropped the plate on to the floor. Cookies rolled in every possible direction.
    ‘Past my bedtime.’
    ‘It’s just a few minutes.’
    ‘But I go to bed at eight.’
    ‘It’s just—’
    ‘I have to brush my teeth. I have to go to work tomorrow. I can’t be tired. Mr McCaskill wouldn’t like it if I was tired.’
    He hurried off – as best Ben knew how to