Chapter 7

He did come to my house. Looking back on it now, he had to. By that, I mean we had been best friends for so long, that neither of us could think of a life in which the other wasn't there. Our lives revolved around one another. His choices, from his perspective, were to either go home, or to come to my house. There were no answers at his house. At least that's how he saw it. So he came to mine.

I thought about trying to explain it to him myself. I thought we could go off to the woods on the west side of town, and work through things there, where nobody would hear any shouting. The problem with that was that I couldn't explain it to myself. I knew how I felt, but for the life of me I couldn't remember how I had come to feel that way. And for sure I couldn't explain his mother's side of things.

So when he came into my room, and dropped his book bag on my floor with a thump, and then sat down and just stared at me, I stood up and said, "Come on. We're going to your house."

"Why?" he asked.

"Because we are," I said. "Your mother wants to talk to us."

"My mother wants to talk to us," he said, frowning.

"Isn't that what I said?"

"Why?" he asked.

"Ask her," I said. "I'm tired of you asking me."

Now that sounds like I was all of a sudden in control of myself, like I was saying things with firm resolve, and wasn't going to play any games or get into any arguments. But the truth was that, at that moment, I was tired of him asking questions. I couldn't lie to him, and I couldn't tell him the truth. I also couldn't say that to him. Her voice flitted into my mind saying "I am so fucked," and in a moment of epiphany I understood what she had really meant. She meant things had come to a place where there was great joy ... which would, or at least could, generate great loss. To have one thing, she was sure she was likely to lose another.

I hoped she was wrong.

It is a testament to the depth of our friendship that Scott simply picked up his book bag and followed me. I yelled to my mom where we were going. She acknowledged me, but said nothing further, not even asking if we'd be back for supper.

His mother was waiting for us, of course, sitting in that favorite chair of hers, reading a book. She looked up when we came in. I looked helpless, and Scott looked unhappy.

"Sit down," she said. She didn't specify who should sit where.

We both sat on the couch, directly across from her. I wondered if I should go to be beside her, but there was no place by her to sit, and she had said to sit, so I sat. I was at that awkward place between being a boy and a man. She had glimpsed and was nurturing the man in me, but I wasn't quite capable of doing that myself yet. That didn't matter at the moment, because she didn't look at me. She looked at her son.

"Why is Bobby your best friend?" she asked.

I don't think either of us expected that question.

"I like him," said Scott.

"How about a little more detail than that?" she prompted.

"How much more detail is there?" he asked, his voice sullen. "I like him. Or at least I used to."

She ignored his pout.

"Who else do you like as much as Bobby?"

He might be upset, but he had been trained to always tell the truth, just like I had.

"Nobody," he said.

"Why? What does Bobby have that nobody else in this town has? Why is he so special that you claim him as your best friend?"

He thought about it. I did too.

"We grew up together," he said.

"Is that it? Just because you grew up together, you have to be best friends?"

"No," he said, sounding frustrated now.

Maybe she realized what she was trying to do wasn't working, or maybe it was the frustration in his voice, but she changed her approach. I could see it easily, but I'm not so sure Scott was paying attention. He was mad, and frustrated, and you don't think too clearly when you're in that state.

"Sweetheart," she said, softly. "You want answers to some very important questions. I know this is going to be hard for you to understand, but the fact is you already know the answers."

There it was. Tacitly, she had acknowledged that she knew what he had confronted me about. There was only one way she could know that. Further, she was admitting there was something to talk about. And that meant something had happened. I knew Scott as well as anyone else in the world. His mind worked just like mine, when it came to fantasies about women. His first question, about whether or not his mother had disrobed in front of me, led nowhere if the answer was "No." But if the answer was "Yes," then that led to countless fantastic iterations, none of which were likely to be happy ones for Scott.

He looked at me. "You told her," he said, his voice dull.

"Yes, he did," she said. "As he should have, because your question involved me, Scott."

She had used her parent voice, which was rarely heard in that house. I could count on one hand the number of times she had raised her voice at Scott. I could only remember three times she had punished him. When his dad left, all they had was each other, and both of them had been hurting. They worked as a team to get through that. Maybe that closeness was part of what was bothering Scott, because I don't think he could imagine his mother keeping a secret from him, especially a secret like that. And that didn't even consider the question of why she might have done it. From his viewpoint, there was no possible reason for her to take her clothes off in front of me. It would be like the average teenage boy finding out that on Thursday nights, instead of going to her bridge club, like everyone thought she was doing, his mother did lap dances at the local strip club. It just wouldn't make any sense.

"I don't understand," said Scott, his voice just above a whisper.

"Do you want to?" asked his mother, still using her parent voice. "Or do you just want to be mad at the world?"

He thought about that too. To be honest, I think curiosity won out.

"I want to understand," he said.

"Then answer the question. Why is Bobby your best friend? Why have you two stuck together through thick and thin, for year after year, and never drifted apart?"

He looked at me. I could tell what he was thinking. What did this have to do with the real question?

"It's lots of things," he said.

"Details, Scott!" I hadn't heard this much of her parent voice in years.

"Okay, he's loyal. He sticks up for me."

"That's a good start. Go on." Her voice was softer, now.

"We usually agree on things, but even when we don't, he doesn't make fun of me."

She just waited.

"I can tell him anything, and he won't laugh at me."

He seemed to warm to the exercise.

"He's honest with me." He looked at me. "Most of the time, anyway."

I thought that speed bump might slow him down, but it didn't.

"He's smart, and he doesn't point out how dumb I am. He's generous. He'd give me his favorite thing if I asked for it. We can talk about anything. When I feel like nothing is working he encourages me. We like the same things. He makes me laugh. If I got in a fight, he'd help me, even if it was stupid to get in the fight in the first place. Even when we argue about stuff, and disagree, it's okay because he lets me be who I am, instead of trying to change me around."

He sounded frustrated again, for some reason.

"He's just my best friend!"

"Do you love him?" Her voice was soothing, like she was trying to calm him.

He looked at her, anguish in his gaze. That was a hard question for any boy to answer. It is one thing to love your friend, and know that you do so, but it is entirely another to admit that out loud. Especially in a society that tends to cram lots of extra (and erroneous) meaning into a statement like that.

But "society" wasn't in the room. Only his mother and I were. And that wasn't nearly as dangerous. Besides, she told him she loved him all the time, and he knew it was true. "Love" was something that, in his house, was normal.

"Yes," he said.

"Then you can understand that, since I have known him as long as you have, and have seen the same traits in him that you just detailed ... I might want to love him as well."

You probably could have knocked both of us over just by waving a stiff piece of cardboard at us. I know my jaw dropped. It was just so sudden! She had just dropped it like a bomb. No dissembling, no attempt to soften the blow. She had simply told her son that she loved me for the same reasons he did.

Of course if he'd have thought it all out, attribute by attribute, he'd have realized that she and I hadn't had the time or opportunity to exchange all the things that he and I had. We hadn't had hours long talks under the stars as we camped out in the back yard, talking about anything and everything. She hadn't been bullied by John Timberlake, who then had to face me screaming and waving my arms like a madman, drawing the attention of dozens of other kids (and three teachers.) It had worked too. He thought I was crazy, and he left us both alone after that. There were hundreds of things Scott and I had shared that his mother and I had not.

But he didn't stop to think about all that. Instead, her logic struck a chord in him. She had phrased it in language he could understand, and that made her feelings ... and the actions she might have taken because of those feelings ... less threatening.

It gave him a frame of reference in which to give her actions meaning.

Of course that didn't mean he approved of her actions.

"You love him?" he said.

"I do," she said.

"How?"

I knew he meant "How could this happen?" She did too.

"The same way you came to love him. Aside from you, he is one of the finest men I know."

"You don't know any men!" he blurted.

"Scott, he'll be eighteen tomorrow."

She was right. Tomorrow was my birthday. I'd completely forgotten it in the turmoil that my life had become.

"But he's Bobby!" moaned Scott.

"Exactly," said his mother.

He didn't want to play that kind of word game. He turned to me.

"Do you love her?"

I nodded. "Yeah. I do," I added.

He looked bewildered. We had talked about love, and girls, hundreds of times. But this situation just didn't fit into any of those conversations.

"How long?" he asked. We both knew what that meant too. She answered first.

"For me, it started on June sixteenth, two years ago. I appreciated him long before that ... liked him, in your language, but it was on that date that I had my first ... um ... adult reaction to him."

Imagine being an eighteen-year-old boy and hearing your mother say that about your best friend. With that kind of certainty and detail. I have to hand it to him. Scott handled it better than I would have. Maybe that was one of the things I loved him for. He had this incredible strength when it came to facing adversity.

"You actually remember the date?" he asked, incredulous. "What happened."

"He took a picture of me," she said. "Actually, he took some pictures of the sunrise, and while he was doing that, I noticed he seemed awfully grown up all of a sudden. Then he took a picture of me that, as it turned out, also suggested how grown up he was."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Are you sure you want to know ... details?"

He was honest. "Maybe," he said. "I'm not sure. I just want to understand how this happened."

"He took a picture of me with the sun rise behind me. He didn't know that the intense light would render my nightgown, shall we say, unable to inhibit outlining my form? It was actually a beautiful, artsy shot. And all he was wearing that morning was a pair of running shorts." Her eyes took on a wistful look. "He has the cutest, tightest little ass."