I contemplate what to make for Sunday night dinner (usually it’s beef, beef, beef, since we are a cattle ranch), but nothing in the freezer looks good. The sun pools on the kitchen floor, and I want to get out. Go do something. Something preferably fun.

That’s when I decide to track down the boys and see if any of them are up for a matinee movie.

Cooper and Bo enthusiastically endorse the idea. Hank, my oldest, declines, says he has homework he needs to finish. I suspect it isn’t true, but I don’t push it. I’ve learned the hard way that you can’t make someone enjoy being with you. Instead, I go online to check movie listings at Fandango. Because we’re in the middle of nowhere, everything’s a drive, and the question is whether we can make do with one of the movies showing at the Brazos in Mineral Wells, a twenty-minute drive, or do we have to make the trip all the way to Weatherford, which is a forty-five-minute drive.

Fortunately, the boys find a movie they want to watch in Mineral Wells, and if we leave now, we’ll just make it in time. We arrive as the previews are showing, and since the movie’s been out a few weeks already, the theater is almost empty and we have no problem finding good seats.

It’s not my kind of film, but as the only female in the family I’m used to our diet of action-adventure thrillers. I sometimes miss the days of Disney and Pixar films, but there are also advantages to having bigger kids. I don’t have to take them to the bathroom. I don’t worry (as much) about them being kidnapped. I know they can cross a street and navigate traffic and drop and roll should their clothes catch fire.

Still, they’re my kids, my boys, and I glance at them once, twice, during the film, as enamored of their faces as I was when they were newborns. These two, my youngest two, look so much like my brother Cody that it’s uncanny. Cody was a redhead, too. And funny. And brilliant. And bipolar.

And just maybe schizophrenic.

But I don’t know if that’s true. My brother Blue called Cody a schizophrenic at Pop’s funeral four years ago, but Mama says Cody was just a lost soul. Brick said he was a drug addict. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

Bo leans over, hisses in my ear that I’m supposed to be watching the movie.

“I like watching you better,” I whisper back.

“Wow. Scary,” he answers before turning back to the big screen.

Emotion tugs at me, and it’s bittersweet. Bo has no idea how much I worry about him. And I do worry, because Cody wasn’t always a lost soul. Cody was once my best friend, the brother who never left me behind, the brother who gave me rides to the games and then out to pizza or burgers after.

If I loved Cody as much as I did, and it couldn’t keep him together, what does that mean for Bo?

Bo grabs my hands, gives a squeeze to my fingers. “Watch. The. Movie. Mom.”

I lift his hand to my mouth and kiss the back of it before letting it go so we can watch the movie.