Going Down Easy (Boys of the Big Easy #1)(19)

“I don’t think I realized there were changes in your bed and exercise routine,” she said, casually taking a bite of chicken.

Gabe rolled his eyes. “Really, Mom?”

She shrugged. “Just that I know you . . . make your bed pretty often, but your brother doesn’t usually feel the need to comment on it.”

Logan snorted and finished off his potatoes.

Cooper frowned. “Dad doesn’t make his bed.”

Logan laughed outright at that and reached for more chicken. “Oh, sometimes he does, buddy. Trust me. He . . . tucks things in really tight.”

And this time his mother snorted.

For God’s sake. Gabe punched Logan in the arm. “How about we talk about something else?”

Thankfully, his mother came to his rescue. “Yes, Cooper, tell your dad about the alligators.”

Gabe looked at his son. “Alligators?”

Cooper’s eyes had gotten round. “Did you know that Louisiana has the largest population of alligators in America?”

“Nope, didn’t know that. I did know we have a lot.”

“The most,” Cooper told him, again setting his fork down.

Why the child couldn’t multitask was beyond Gabe.

“And they lay eggs!” Cooper told him. “Like birds!”

“That I did know,” Gabe said. “How many eggs do they lay at a time?”

“So many,” Cooper told him enthusiastically. “They can lay fifty at a time!”

“Wow, that is a lot,” Gabe mused. He loved when Cooper got into something. He didn’t multitask with his interests, either. When he was into something, it was 110 percent all about that one thing and nothing else. And Gabe always learned a lot. The interest might only last for a few weeks before Cooper would move on to his new obsession—though in the case of Star Wars and fire trucks, it had been for a few months each—but when he was interested in something, that was all he talked about, read about, looked up on the computer, and wanted to play with. It looked like Gabe might need to find some toy alligators soon.

“And they breathe like birds, too,” Cooper told him. “It’s super weird.” But the way he said it and the expression on his face said that it was completely fascinating.

“We were talking all about alligators today,” Caroline told Gabe. She gave him a little smile that said they had literally talked about them all day, and she was ready for someone else to listen to alligator trivia for a while. “So, I was thinking maybe Cooper would like to go on one of those swamp boat tours. They take boats out on the bayou, and you can see alligators right where they live.”

Cooper’s eyes got wide, and he looked from his grandmother to Gabe slowly, as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard this information correctly. “They do that?” he asked Gabe.

Cooper had many interests—though, one at a time, of course—and he really did immerse himself fully in whatever the current one was, but he wasn’t an outside kid. That was the best way Gabe could explain it. Cooper loved reading about things and watching online videos and collecting toys and playing with them. But he didn’t have a lot of interest in the real versions. When he’d been into construction equipment—bulldozers and cement trucks and cranes—he read books and did coloring pages and played with miniature versions and watched a DVD called Diggers and Dump Trucks over and over and over. But when Gabe had taken him to a building site so he could see the equipment in action, he’d been scared and had wanted nothing to do with it all. Gabe had been disappointed. He’d arranged with the foreman to show Cooper around and had even gotten him a little hard hat. The same thing had happened with fire trucks. Gabe had taken him down to one of the local stations, and the guys had been happy to show Coop around, let him sit in the trucks, and give him a plastic firefighter hat. Cooper had buried his face in Gabe’s leg and hadn’t even touched one of the trucks.

Cooper was just a quiet, bookworm type of kid. He loved to learn new things, but he didn’t really want to do new things.

So Gabe had to ask him, “Are you sure you want to do that, buddy?”

Cooper looked at his grandmother, who gave him a little nod. Then he looked at Gabe and nodded. “Yeah, I want to.”

Gabe glanced at his mother, but Caroline was concentrating on her beans.

“You want to ride on a boat and go out and see real alligators?” Gabe reiterated. He was all for it. It sounded like a good time to him. He’d been on an airboat on the bayou before, and it was great. And he’d love to see Cooper getting more active with things he was into.

But suddenly Cooper was looking like he was having second thoughts. “The muscles that open an alligator’s mouth are really weak,” he said. “A human can hold an alligator’s mouth shut. But they are super strong closing. Like if they close on something and don’t want to let go, no way can a human can’t get their jaw open.”

Gabe just said, “Wow, really?” knowing that Cooper was processing everything.

Cooper nodded. “They don’t usually attack humans, but they can. If they feel scared or have to protect their territory.”

“Cooper,” Gabe said. When his son looked at him, he went on. “I would never let anything happen to you. If we went on a boat ride, you would be totally safe.”