Saturday Morning
The best things in life are worth the risk
The sun rises on a spring morning. A tad colder than the boy likes but, with all the noise the birds were making, carrying the promise of a warm afternoon.
As he lay in bed, his ears strain, listening for the sounds of someone, anyone, else awake on this particular Saturday morning. He hears nothing. The morning is his! If he plays his hand right, it’ll be a good one too; Mom came home late last night, again.
Bingo night. All those old ladies smoking menthol cigarettes, drinking wine coolers and talking away. Stamping their hearts away and screaming “Bingo!” every so often. Anyway, the important part to the boy is that Mom ALWAYS sleeps in after bingo night.
Just because Mom is asleep, doesn’t mean the boy is free to do anything he pleased, though. But, out from under her gaze, he is free to do more than he could with her awake, and that is what matters.
He knows, with an adult’s clarity, that nothing he does must wake her before she is ready. He shivers as he recalls the last time he made THAT mistake; he lost the Nintendo controller for a whole week! Usually, her heart isn’t behind her punishments, so she lets him have it back a couple of days into the ‘grounding’.
Like when he lost all electronics privileges when she thought his nerves before…
