I wait for a moment, wondering if Josh will come out to greet me. There was an age when Mommy coming home was followed by the scrambling of little feet and a warm body hurling itself at my knees. Those kinds of greetings are less common now that Josh has turned ten years old. He still loves me, don’t get me wrong, just not quite so emphatically.

Sure enough, a second later, Josh stumbles into the foyer in his bare feet. This is the last week before school starts, and he’s taking advantage of it by spending ninety percent of his time on the sofa. Either watching television or playing Nintendo. I shouldn’t let him do it, but soon enough, there will be school and homework and sports teams. His big thing is Little League, and that doesn’t start till the spring, but when it gets closer, he’ll want me to take him to the park to practice.

“Hi, Mom!”

I hold out my arms, and he falls into them, not entirely reluctantly. “Hey, kiddo. How was your day?”

“Okay.”

“Did you do anything besides sit on the couch?”

He grins at me. “Why would I?”

Josh brushes his brown hair out of his eyes. He needs a haircut, which, if history is any indication, will be done in the bathroom over the sink. But he’s definitely getting a haircut before school starts. Every day, the kid looks a bit more like his father, and with his hair shaggy like that, the resemblance is enough to make my chest ache.

A timer goes off in the kitchen, and I head in that direction as the smell of baking chicken intensifies. God, I miss home-cooked meals. My mother used to cook most nights, but I hadn’t lived under her roof for a long time before I moved here for good last month, following her death.

I approach the kitchen just as Margie is pulling a tray out of the oven. Margie is a local grandma who is going to be watching Josh when I am working. He tried to protest that he didn’t need a babysitter, but I’m not comfortable with him being alone for hours while I am forty-five minutes away—at a prison. Besides, Josh is only ten years old. And he’s not exactly a mature ten.

“That smells incredible, Margie,” I say.

Margie beams at me and tucks an errant strand of gray hair behind one ear. “Oh, it’s nothing. Just roast chicken pieces with butter garlic sauce. And of course, rice and asparagus on the side. You can’t just eat chicken.”

Hmm, you can’t? Because I am pretty sure that over the last ten years, there have been plenty of nights when Josh and I have eaten nothing but chicken. From a bucket with a smiling colonel on the side of it.