He went to get another bite of cookie dough, and hit the bottom of the bowl with his spoon. He tipped it up, looking forlorn, but he was still listening. "So, your mom wasn't-isn't..." Okay, confusing trying to figure out how to refer to people who didn't exist yet. "Will be helping with all of this." That meant Meloni was an apple that managed to fall far from the tree, right? And Bart even further. Well, of course he had! He was Barry's grandson. Though this made an amusing picture in his head of a little crab apple speeding away from an apple grove in his head.
Then the more grim facts. Wally looked at Bart in silence, the wheels turning solemnly behind those green eyes. Flash's had to grow up fast--one way or the other. Sure in ways they managed to maintain some juvenile behavior, cause when life could slow down to minutes a second and hours a minute, you figured out pretty quickly it wasn't fun to spend that time moping or being grim. He just didn't realize how much growing up Bart had been having to do, knowing what laid ahead.
All in five years.
Then he frowned, grabbing another cookie. "Jesse, sure. Linda? Ee..." It was hard for him to keep secrets from Linda. Linda just seemed to have a natural intuition when it came to him and things that were knocking around in his noggin. "That one I can try, or if nothing else, if she does figure something's going on, I'll at least tell her she needs to talk to you about it." Besides, he could entirely understand that you could speak of a thousand things under the sun--except a few items you just don't worry, talk, or think about if you could help it.