But he, Patrick O'Shay, knew a special case when he saw one.
He shrugged, turned the ball game on the sportsradio channel, and thought about lunch.
House Afire
She cherished a picture of him at sixteen in summertime, grimy, wet with sweat, leaning insolently on the door of a Chevy. Every Sunday when she called him to talk, she would hold the picture in her hands, remembering the sun of that day, the baked smell of his skin, but she never mentioned it to him. Such intimacy would embarrass him. Their relationship, once so close that he was physically part of her, was now delicate, limited. When she got too sentimental, he rebuffed her. Every week, she vowed to herself that she would not pester him again with her chatter, and every week, craving his warm voice and recalling the concord of their heartbeats, she broke down and called him.
He was the kind of boy who had a list of safe topics ready for Mother.
She had raised him alone. For almost a year after separating from her husband, she suffered from a painful amazement that he could just walk away from their relationship the way he had. How could you give up on other people? How could he abandon his home like that? Then for a long time she contemplated his rejection, wondering if there was some important conclusion to draw, but, in time, a very green spring came along. She revived her morning walks, only now she walked with the boy in a carriage in front of her. As the boy grew older, she clenched his cold, tiny hand in her own and they walked together.
Over the years, determined his father wouldn't miss out on his son's life, she had written letters. Her ex-husband answered a few times, at long intervals. One night when her son was three years old, after a movie that had left her crying, she wrote. “We are doing very well. They put balloons up all over the city to celebrate the Fourth this year. We got up early, before the children carried all the balloons off.” He wrote back, “I miss you and the little one.” Emboldened by this show of interest, she invited him to visit them. He wrote back quickly for once. He needed more time to sort things out.
One afternoon when the boy was seven and balky, she went browsing in a bookstore downtown and he disappeared. At first she hunted the aisles almost casually, certain he had merely wandered off. Then, deciding he was being deliberately rebellious she commanded him to return in her nastiest voice, plotting his punishments out loud. The other patrons scowled at her, but she hardly noticed. When her son did not come out of hiding, she left her coat behind and ran down the street screaming his name until her voice left her.
Back at home she caught her breath in her chair, watching out the window for his return. The late afternoon heat poured over her. She tried to think of the next sensible thing to do.
When the boy returned after dinnertime, he woke her up. She had been frowning, he told her. Snoring, too. She tried to grab him, hold him close, but he stood woodenly in her grasp, angry about something. When she let him go, he closed the window quietly, shutting out the evening wind.
She knew he would have special needs, growing up with a single parent. Trying to forestall future problems, she arranged his room in a bedroom at the far end of the house so that he would have privacy when he needed it. Once he got over his fear of the dark, he shut the door to his room and kept it shut.
When he finally asked, she tried to explain why his father had left them. “We were very young,” she said, and for the life of her couldn't think how to explain the inevitability of that cataclysm. “He wanted to see more of the world. And he was homesick for where he used to live.”
“What did you do to make him leave?” the boy asked, turning his gaze full on her for once.
“Nothing.”
That was not entirely true.
She and the boy's father had never fought. They had lived a quiet life in a quiet town together until one summer day, sick to death of the hot, dry weather of the West, he pulled up stakes, taking her and their infant with him. They moved to a town on the shores of Massachusetts, where he had grown up.
The Northeast did not agree with her. She wilted in the humidity and missed the usual smells, the yellow grasses. And her husband, never much of a talker, sank into a rocking chair stupor out on the porch, emerging only for meals and work. Three months later, she flew herself and the baby home and refused to return. Her husband stayed in Fairhaven. In his first letter to her he described the flowers in bloom, the million shapes and colors; in his second, he raved about the white buds of summer jasmine, about how short, intense, summers were tolerable, even delightful in their transience; in the third he enclosed a brightly colored maple leaf. Then, except for those rare replies to her letters, he stopped writing.
The truth was, she could not make herself stay with a man who inhabited such an inhospitable nest. And she knew it was not the weather or the pretty colors or scents of the seasons that kept him holed up somewhere in New England. He had simply extended his hibernation into the realm of the physical.
As a toddler, her son never talked much. She liked to talk, and he made a good listener, so she told him what she felt about the day, or the people nearby, or the news. He seemed content as her audience. When he did feel moved to share something, an observation, a revelation, about what had happened that day with the teacher, something that scared him, his perceptions filled her with pride. She felt very lucky to have such a sensitive and intelligent child.
As he got older, if she questioned him too much, his face would fill with reproach, so much so she wanted to laugh, although of course she didn't. He had given her that same look years ago when he was three, when she put too much weight on one side of the teeter-totter, sending him sailing too high, making him cry. She guessed that he had inherited the need for a private safety zone from his father, but by then, she had grown accustomed to speaking her mind to him, to having him as a silent but, in her imagination at least, sympathetic, witness. She had to make a conscious effort to gear her stories to his disposition, to stop when he looked bored or the least bit angry.
He never seemed entirely happy, but if she asked, and he replied, he would say but of course he was a happy boy. When he did appear cheerful, he would laugh to himself and refuse to explain why. If she insisted, he would launch into a long story, intentionally boring, she decided, devised to discourage her questions. So, over a period of years, in a process unfortunately parallel to the one that had derailed her from her marriage, her questions dried up, and so did her stories. She curbed her tongue, keeping her topics to the practical and trivial.
The day he left for college, for just a moment as he stepped toward a waiting car, she forgot all about the distance between them. The rangy six-footer disappeared and in his place stood a small boy in a doorway, angry and sad about something she could not fix and did not understand. She cried, clinging to him. “Don't make a scene, Mom,” he said, gently lifting her arms off him and taking his leave with a casual wave. She finished off that afternoon with whiskey and a mystery story. She cooked no supper. She drank lukewarm coffee from the breakfast thermos and watched the sun go down.
During his college years, they spoke once a week. She confined herself to the kind of anecdotes he tolerated best, short, funny ones. He didn't share much. He had homework, a test. A pile of books to read. “Which ones?” she might ask, and he would answer vaguely, “Oh, some philosophy. Some physics.” Something she could not sink her teeth into. “I saw a movie,” he might offer, and she would jump. “Which one?”