Chapter 6

I liked Saturdays, mostly because Mom doesn’t work until the afternoons. Most kids my age would probably try to stay in their rooms, hiding from their parents, and they’d almost certainly find me looking forward to spending time with my mom Saturday mornings to be weird. They probably also hadn’t grown up traveling the country, or at least the eastern seaboard, with their parents, never stopping in one place.

I’ll admit it made for a strange mother-son relationship, but I was happy about it. I won’t go so far as to say she was my best friend, but since I hadn’t had many opportunities to make friends my age, I probably couldn’t say she wasn’t either.

Since we moved into the trailer and finally set down roots, we did the same routine every Saturday. She’d make pancakes and we’d tell each other about our week since we didn’t get a chance to talk much during the week itself. Over the summer, these conversations usually revolved around her telling me about her week at work, since I hadn’t done enough to talk about.

“So,” she said, setting the plate of pancakes between us, “anything interesting happened this week?”

I gave her my best ‘un-amused teenager’ look.

“Fine, be that way. I guess I know how the beginning of the week went. Tell me about everything else. How was your first week at school?”

“Actually, really good. The one plus side of this,” I said, pointing my fork at my medical boot covered foot, “was it introduced me to Hanna. She’s taken pity on me and introduced me to a bunch of other kids at school. I spent the first couple of days sitting with them.”

“Only the first couple of days?”

“Uhh, yea. There’s this girl in my English class. We were partnered up on my first day on a group project and kinda hit it off. She invited me to sit with her friends.”

“I take it they were more interesting than Hanna and her friends since you stayed sitting with them?”

I’d tried to keep my voice neutral, but clearly, I hadn’t been successful since Mom had a glint in her eye and had started fishing.

“Most of them are okay, well except for one girl who seems really shallow.”

“Not this girl, though?”

I gave her the look again.

“What’s this girl’s name?”

“Rhonda.”

“Do we need to have a talk about birds and bees?”

“God, no. Besides, we’re just eating lunch together.”

She laughed at my obvious discomfort.

“I take it you want more than just lunch though, right?”

“I guess.”

She still had the evil glint in her eye, but thankfully let the subject drop.

“What about your classes?”

“Some good, some bad. Most of my classes are pretty good, except for math. I’m really having a tough time.”

“I know I probably didn’t do you any favors there. Math was never my best subject either. I was worried you might be under-prepared. I’ll admit I was a little worried about how you’d do transitioning into public school.”

“It hasn’t been so bad. Mostly they talk for a little bit then hand out worksheets. Except for my history class.”

“They don’t give you worksheets in history?”

“They do, I meant most of my classes weren’t so bad except for my history class. The teacher is one of the football coaches, and the kids I got in a fight with are some of his favorites or something. He really has it in for me.”

“Has he treated you unfairly? Do you want me to call the school?”

“No, at least not yet. We haven’t really had that much in the way of graded work yet, so I don’t know if he’ll grade me unfairly. What we have had were questions with one right answer, so it would have been hard for him to grade me differently. Mostly he’s just gone out of his way to be a jerk to me.”

“Well, if it’s just attitude, you’re going to have to suffer through. We can talk to the school if there’s actual grading you unfairly, but you’re never guaranteed to have teachers that like you.”

“Yeah. I wasn’t planning on doing anything. I just thought I’d mention it.”

“Ok. So how was your first day at work?” she asked.

“Good. Hard, at least working in the kitchen. I worked with the guy who took care of the sides, and everything goes really fast. Everything has to be ready the moment the main part of the dish is ready to go in the window. Plus, it’s hot as hell.”

“I was a little worried when you mentioned this, but now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I think it’s a good thing. It’ll teach you responsibility and self-reliance. God knows your father and I weren’t the best examples of that growing up, living the way we did.”

“Willie, the musician that plays there, gave me my first lesson. It was amazing. Some of the people Dad played with sometimes showed me stuff, but nothing like this. He explained why things are played this way or that. He’s apparently an old school blues guy, so I was expecting him just to teach me some songs or whatever, but this was like a real lesson.”

Mom tried to keep her face passive, but she didn’t do a great job of it.

“Just don’t let that interfere with what you’re being paid to do. It’s fine you to like playing, but you don’t want to get fired because you’re too busy with your hobby.”

It was my turn to try and keep my emotions off my face. Mom was never going to accept me playing music beyond just a hobby. While I wasn’t sure it was what I wanted to do as a career, I wanted to keep the options open.

Mom just saw the same dead-end where Dad ended up. It was a little hard to get my head around how much she disliked me spending time practicing guitar when she’s been so supportive of Dad for nearly my entire life. She’d never been as enthusiastic about me learning as Dad had been, but she’d been supportive of it right up to the day Dad was sentenced.

That was one thing I still hadn’t gotten my head around. Looking back, it was as if she’d become a different person that day. She started looking for a place for us to settle down the same day he was walked out of the courtroom in handcuffs, and within a week, we were headed to our new home in Wellville. That was the same day she started making comments any time I picked up my guitar.

We finished our breakfast, and I went to work on homework. I was still stuck on some of my math and marked a few problems that I’d ask for help with on Monday. That meant I’d have to beg off sitting with Rhonda, but there were now several things I didn’t understand, and just ignoring it to sit with a girl I kind of liked wasn’t a great plan for the future.

Eventually, Mom headed off to work. As soon as she was out the door and in the car, I pulled out my guitar and took the opportunity to practice. I wanted to work on some of the stuff Willie had shown me the night before. If I was honest with myself, I was trying to get what he’d shown me down so I could show him how hard I worked and that I could learn what he was teaching me.

Hanna showed up earlier than I expected before I’d gotten ready, which annoyed her. I’d lost track of time, which happened a lot when I was practicing. One of the things Hanna seemed to hate more than anything else was to be kept waiting.

I thought she was going to rip into me as I packed up my stuff and got ready to go, but instead, she said, “Sam called and asked if you’d go with him to Trianglecon, in April.”

“What’s ‘Trianglecon?’”

“It’s some sci-fi convention thing. He went last year, and I swear it’s all he would talk about for months. It’s in Raleigh, but they call it that I guess because of the research triangle.”

“I’m not really into science fiction.”

“I get that, but you should know this is a big deal for Sam. You could have probably guessed he exists in his own little world and doesn’t have a lot of friends. Mom thinks he might be on the spectrum, but Aunt Shirley refuses to have him tested or whatever. Anyways, his inviting you is a pretty big deal, since he’s never invited anyone to pretty much anything before.”

“I only said like four words to him. Why would he want me to go?”

“Aunt Shirley said he talked about you a bunch all the way back to Raleigh. You apparently made a big impression on him.”

“I’m going to have to go, aren’t I?” I said, figuring out where this was heading.

“Pretty much. It won’t be so bad.”

“You better hope not, ‘cause if I have to go, then his favorite cousin has to go with me.”

“Wait...”

“Nope, that’s my price. I’ll go to Sam’s convention thing with him, but you have to go too.”

“Fine,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Let’s go to work, we’re going to be late.”

On the way to the Blue Ridge, I decided to bring up something that had been bugging me.

“I’m confused by something.”

“It was bound to happen. You see, when a young man reaches a certain age, his body starts to go through changes...”

“Smartass,” I said, interrupting her.

She gave a self-satisfied grin at her little joke and said, “What are you confused by then?”

“You, actually. The first day - at the hospital, and then at dinner with your mom - I seemed to be an annoyance, more than anything else, to you. After the first trip to the Blue Ridge, you did a one-eighty and inviting me to lunch with your friends and talking me up. Since then, you don’t seem nearly as annoyed by the rides your mom’s making you give me as you did when she first brought it up. I’m confused. What caused the change of heart?”

Hanna didn’t say anything at first, just looking out the window as she drove us to work. I thought for a second I’d said something wrong and pissed her off before she finally replied, not glancing over at me.

“My sophomore year and the beginning of last year I’d had some friends that were ... not the best. It led to some problems, which I’m not going to talk about. Mom pointed out the other night after you came over for dinner that she thought it was time that I started making actual friends again and suggested that I should start with becoming your friend.”

“You seemed to have a lot of friends at lunch?”

“I’m actually fairly new to that group, and we basically just eat lunch together because we didn’t have any other groups that we fit into really. We don’t hang out after school or anything. I mean, sure, we’re friends and all, but that’s about it. Anyways, I pointed out that you were a lot younger than me and we didn’t really know anything about you. She said that we knew what you did for Sam and that was enough. I thought about it and I figured what the hell, which is why I invited you to eat with us. I may have overcompensated a little since it’s been a while since I’ve actually tried to become friends with someone, and back then, it was ... different.”

“Ohh,” I said, not sure how to respond. “Thanks, I guess.”

“Just don’t annoy me too much.”

She said the last part with a smile, so I knew she was joking. Mostly.

“So, I’m on probation?”

“Yep. Bribes wouldn’t hurt your standing with me, though.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

When we got to work, Willie was sitting out on the front porch waiting for me with two guitars. Hanna went inside and I sat down with Willie, who picked up on what he’d been teaching me the night before. I continued to be surprised by the technical detail Willie got into, with a lot of what he went into feeling more like something I’d hear in a classroom setting than from an old-school musician.