Songs For Your Mother Gordon MacMillan (good books for 7th graders .txt) 📖

careless child crime. I stretch my right arm over my head and scratch my upper back. How many parents has this woman dealt with in similar situations? I am guessing quite a few.

‘I seem to have lost my… a small boy. He was standing right there and then he was gone.’

‘What does he look like?’ she asks.

‘Small, dark hair, five and quite fast,’ I say.

‘They’re all like that, they always come back, you have to keep your eye on them,’ she says.

My face is hot, and I imagine my cheeks are glowing a furnace red of embarrassment at this point.

‘I feel stupid; he was right next to me,’ I say.

‘Mine were the same, they’re there one minute and gone the next. Let’s see if we can’t find him,’ she says.

‘Does this happen all the time?’ I ask.

‘About five times a day and we always find them except for one lady who only remembered after we had spent twenty minutes combing the shop from top to bottom that she had left her children in the car with her mother. She was exhausted, poor love,’ she says.

We both laugh at this, although I think my laugh is slightly more nervous than hers. Now that I know how easy this child-losing malarkey is I do have sympathy for the mother with the car. The story does, however, spark dread inside me about how I am going to tell my mother about her new instant grandchild. It’s another conversation I’m not sure how I will begin. I can almost hear her ask, ‘Have you lost him yet?’ to which I would have to reply: ‘Technically, yes, but it was a rookie error.’

I follow the woman back past the checkouts and then down the cereal aisle towards the back of the store where they have clothes and household goods and an entertainment section with a rack of books and cheap DVDs stubbornly hanging on in there. I can see him sitting on the floor, and Susan is kneeling next to him. He has pulled a pile of DVDs from the shelf, and they are scattered on the floor. There’s another child, a small blond boy, who is maybe a little younger, watching Luke curiously as his thirty-something blonde mother reads the back of a novel, not paying the slightest bit of attention to her child. I consider offering her pro tips before I rein myself in.

‘Look who I found,’ Susan says. ‘He was hiding by the DVDs.’

‘There you are, sir; your wife has found your little boy.’

Susan makes an ‘oh’ with her mouth as if to say ‘lucky me, I’m the wife in all of this’. I am about to correct the supermarket supervisor, but I don’t quite get a chance. Besides, Susan looks distraught by the whole thing and I can’t help being amused. Susan gives me a small shake of the head to confirm her disapproval.

‘Is Auntie Susan your wife?’ Luke asks.

‘No. Auntie Susan is my friend,’ I say.

‘Was Mommy your friend?’ Luke asks.

‘She was,’ I say.

‘Mommy’s my friend too,’ says Luke.

And it isn’t because the supermarket supervisor says ‘aah’, or because Susan is brushing her hand over Luke’s head, or because the blonde woman standing next to us, with the romantic comedy paperback in her hand, looks over and says, ‘What a lovely child you have, that’s adorable,’ no it isn’t because of any of that at all. I don’t know what it is and I am not going to explain it, as I am not sure I fully can. It hits me like a wave, and it crashes over me, and I start to well up. I am having one of those little moments where I am overcome, and there’s not a thing I can do to stop it apart from ride it out. Susan is the only one who sees what’s happening and she bites her bottom lip and raises her eyebrows as if to say it is going to be all right. I have a small sniff and swallow, and with my thumb brush away some damp from the corner of my left eye.

‘Thanks for the help. I’ll definitely keep a closer eye on this one,’ I say to the supervisor, who smiles kindly and heads off back towards the front of the store.

‘I wasn’t hiding,’ Luke says. ‘I was looking.’

‘Well, you must be a good looker as you found the best part of the store,’ I say.

‘Yes, you did, Luke, didn’t you,’ Susan says.

‘Do you know what films you want?’ I ask.

Luke looks at the assembled DVDs on the floor and starts to move them around like they are pieces of a puzzle that need to be slotted into position. He picks them up and puts them down again before looking up at me and handing me Disney’s Cars 3. Luke pauses as if waiting for me to say something. When I don’t, he hands me another film. It’s Toy Story 4.

‘I want this one too,’ he says, pausing.

Luke hands me another film. This time it is Finding Nemo, which has a picture of a big shark on the front cover with sharp-looking teeth.

‘That looks like a scary shark,’ I say.

‘Sharks are scary,’ Luke says, nodding sagely. ‘It’s my favourite.’

While there’s no denying the universal truth to Luke’s statement, sharks are indeed frightening, is there a link between Jaws and Nemo? One film being a scary movie for adults and the other a scary-looking one for kids. Is this the kind of movie a five-year-old should be watching? Don’t kids and scary movies equal nightmares? Or are animated Disney adventures okay? I realise I’m trying to make a parental decision without the aid of the years of experience that most other parents would have. I turn the DVD box over and read the back and immediately do an involuntary double take. The story of the movie begins with the death of a mother and a father in search of his son, Nemo, and I am thinking about Lauren. I