Chapter 2

I didn’t set my alarm because the next morning was a Saturday. When I woke up I smelled bacon. Mom liked to make pancakes, bacon and eggs on Saturdays. It was kind of a tradition. The fact that I smelled that made me feel better, because that meant my mother was not cowering in bed and was at least trying to act normal.

I think the normalcy of that bacon scent is why I did what was normal for me, too. That was to bounce out of bed and, wearing the boxers I already had on, went to get breakfast.

Mom was there, wearing her Oriental kimono robe, which was made of silk and had pictures of cranes on it. Birds, not machines. I’d seen it a hundred times, but this time I realized how short it was, and how well it showed her legs off.

“Where did you get that robe?” I asked, without thinking.

“I sold a woman a house and she gave it to me as a gift,” she said. “Good morning.”

“Hi,” I said, suddenly awkward.

“Thank you for taking care of me last night,” she said.

“No problem.”

“I’m sorry you had to see me like that.”

I decided to try to lighten the mood.

“You’re not that hard on the eyes, for an old lady,” I said.

She blinked, the spatula dangling from one hand.

“I meant the drinking part,” she said.

“Oh.” It was awkward again.

She turned back around and finished cooking the bacon. The pancakes were already stacked up, with the eggs next to them.

We ate for a while before either of us spoke again. She stared at me a lot. She kept looking at my shoulders and chest, for some reason. She was the one who broke the silence.

“I don’t like to dip into my regular money for frivolous things,” she said. “That’s why I let Maureen talk me into posing.”

I knew that income in the real estate industry could be spotty. If you didn’t sell, you didn’t earn. The market wasn’t something the agents could control, either. So in a hot market, the smart agent set something aside for the lean months that could come without warning. And, in the lean months, you may have to moonlight sometimes.

“You’re a grown woman,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with what you did.”

“But my baby saw me like that,” she said.

“I’m not a baby anymore, Mom,” I complained.

“No ... you’re not,” she said, looking at my chest again. “When did you grow up into a big, strong man?”

“When did you turn into a smoking hot woman?” I asked, again, not thinking before I spoke.

“I’m not ... that,” she said.

“Were you not paying attention when my three ignorant friends accosted us last night?” I asked.

“Them?” she almost sneered. “Typical males. They’d want to jump anything with breasts.”

“True,” I admitted. “I think you overwhelmed them a little bit.”

“Men are so disgusting,” she growled.

“That’s a little harsh,” I said.

“No it’s not.” She put her fork down and stared at me. “Maybe it’s time.”

“Time for what?” I asked.

“I’ve never talked about your father,” she said.

Now I put my fork down. I also leaned forward.

“I wanted to wait for the right time,” she said. She frowned. “But there never seemed to be a right time. Maybe I should just get it over with.”

“Yes,” I agreed. I bit my lip. I shouldn’t have said anything. She was talking and I should just let her do that without interruption.

“When I finally got to high school,” she started, “I was so happy. I wanted to be a cheerleader. It’s all I could think about. I had practiced for years, and I made the varsity squad, just like I had dreamed of. A lot of other girls were jealous of me, but all that did was make me proud. It never occurred to me that some of those girls would be so spiteful they might set me up for failure.”

I stayed silent. So far, this didn’t seem to have anything to do with my father, but she was still talking.

“There was a party,” she said. “The quarterback was paying attention to me. He was a senior, and for him to want to dance and talk with a lowly freshman made my head whirl. I didn’t intend to drink any alcohol but some girls put Everclear in some fruit juice and I didn’t know it.”

I had experience with Everclear. Every college kid does. It’s a cheap drunk when you mix it with Kool-Aid or whatever. I’ve heard it called jungle juice, among other things. It’s potent, not only because it’s a hundred and ninety proof, but also because you can’t taste it and you therefore drink it too fast.

“They got me in a bedroom with the quarterback and helped him take my clothes off. I kept trying to tell them no, but I couldn’t. And then he said he loved me and he had sex with me. He told people we were going together. He wanted to have sex ... a lot. I didn’t know anything. My parents never talked to me about sex. I thought you had to want to have a baby for that to happen. You’ve heard people say they’re trying to have a baby, right?”

I nodded, still unwilling to stop this unexpected torrent of information.

“When I got pregnant, he walked away. His parents were rich, and they threatened to sue my parents for defamation if I kept insisting their son was the father. He denied it all, of course. He had the balls to claim he was still a virgin.”

“Fuck,” I muttered. I didn’t mean to speak. It just leaked out.

“My parents home schooled me after that. So I had you, and moved on and never looked back,” she said.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” I said.

She looked at me and blinked a few times, as if she had just realized how much she’d told me.

“Is that why you’ve never dated?” I guessed. She leaned back in her chair.

“Men hit on me all the time, Bobby. They always have. And they all just want one thing, the same thing your father wanted. All they want is sex. They don’t care about what the woman wants. They don’t care about how what they do can affect a woman for the rest of her life, even destroy her life.”

“Maybe not all men,” I said, gently.

“You’re not like that, are you Bobby? Please tell me you don’t love a girl and then leave her.”

“Mom, I’m still a virgin,” I said. Nobody could have been more shocked than I was at that admission. Especially since it was to my own mother!

She leaned forward, putting her elbows on the table, and cupped her face in her hands.

“What have I done?” she moaned.

“Nothing!” I said, maybe too loudly. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Mom.”

“I ruined your life,” she moaned.

“How?” I asked. “By posing nude for an art class? That didn’t ruin my life. If anything, those guys you met last night will have made me a legend by now.”

“What?” Her head came up.

“I guarantee you they’ve spread it around about what a hot babysitter I had, and how I still know her. Even better, now I get to see her naked!” I grinned.

“This isn’t funny,” she said.

“I know,” I said, getting serious again. “But it also hasn’t ruined my life. I still love you. I just get to see more of you than the average son does.”

“It sounds like you’re going to keep coming to class,” she said.

“Of course I am,” I said.

“Even though it’s ... me?”

“It’s not you,” I said. “It’s my hot babysitter ... remember?”

She leaned back again and stared at me.

“The average kid doesn’t put his drunk babysitter to bed,” she said.

“Well ... I owed you,” I said.

“I was naked when I woke up this morning,” she pointed out.

“I thought you’d sleep more comfortably that way,” I said.

“And you’d already seen me without a stitch on.”

“True.”

“And it wasn’t ... weird?”

“It was definitely weird,” I said. “But not because of anything you did.”

She just stared at me.

“You are a man, now,” she said.

“I try,” I joked.

“Are you really still a virgin?”

That caught me off guard.

“Are you really different than ... other men?”

“Mom,” I said, reaching across the table for her hand. “You got a raw deal. There’s no doubt about that. And a lot of guys are dickheads. But not all of them. There are plenty of good guys out there. I’m one of them because my mother taught me to be. Lots of other moms taught their sons to be good guys, too.”

“You’re sweet,” she said.

“I’m who you made me,” I countered.

“And you really don’t mind if I continue to pose?”

Now I leaned back. She’d been honest with me. I owed her at least the same.

“Actually ... no. I don’t mind.”

“Why?”

I owed her this honesty, but that didn’t mean it was easy to give it.

“I guess some part of me - a guy part - appreciates how you look.”

“I see,” she said.

“Are you disappointed?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I have to think about that.”

“Why?”

“Well, you said there are at least some men out there who don’t think only about sex. And then you turn around and say you like looking at me ... like that. That suggests things, Bobby.”

“I said there are good guys out there, Mom. I didn’t say they never think about sex. They just control themselves. They do care how the woman feels.”

“So you thought about ... think about it, too,” she said.

“Of course. I’m normal.”

“Bobby, I don’t think you’re supposed to think about your mother that way.”

“You’re right,” I said. “But then again, I’m not the first son to do that.”

“What?”

So I told her about what we’d studied in my English Literature class, the previous semester. We’d gone over Sophocles’ Theban plays, in which Oedipus accidentally fulfilled a prophecy that he would end up killing his father and marrying his mother. I had to explain the whole story to her, but ended up by saying that if all this had been written about thousands of years ago, then the concept of a son getting turned on by his mother wasn’t anything new. I also explained about how Sigmund Freud thought it was actually common.

“I wish I could have gone to college,” she said, when I wound down. “You get to learn the most fascinating things.”

“That’s easy to say when you’re not the one being tested on all that material,” I said.

“So,” she said, staring at my chest again, “if a mother thought her son was handsome and even ... sexy ... that wouldn’t be the end of the world?”

Her meaning was clear. I felt zings in my testicles.

“I guess not,” I said, weakly.

“Good,” she said. “I feel better. Now. I have a house to show at eleven. I’d better get ready to go.”

And just like that, the earthquake that had shaken my world for the last twelve or so hours, settled down.

I never thought about the fact that most earthquakes usually have aftershocks.

If this were a made-up story on a porn site, then the next chapter would be where I stumbled into the bathroom while my mother was taking a shower, or something like that, and things went crazy and I had torrid sex with her, or she fucked me relentlessly or whatever. But this isn’t that kind of story.

Everything was just as normal as pie for the next week, except that I kept trying to get more out of her about my dad. And my friends kept trying to get more out of me about my old babysitter. Like where she lived, and if I was banging her. If you’re a guy, then you know how guys are. If you’re a girl, trust me, you don’t want to know. I was able to ignore that part, but I couldn’t get out of my head the image of a high school senior climbing on top of a helpless cheerleader and basically raping her.

It was two days later when, at breakfast again, I asked, “So, do you know where he is?”