Her face relaxed.
“Yes, I’ve been dating a lot. I’m sorry, Josh. I sometimes don’t tell you enough about what is going on with me. I get selfish.”
“It’s fine,” he said, head tilting down, idly flipping his book open and closed.
He was embarrassed by how much he needed her. At his age, he felt he should be basically independent, but as she had spent less and less time at home in the previous weeks, he had become aware of how complete his assumption of her presence had been. It panicked him a little, and that panic had come out as a demand to know where she had been, and he hated himself for demanding to know but also couldn’t stop himself from asking.
“Listen. This goes two ways, honey. It’s just you and me and we have to trust each other. You’re my baby—”
“Mom—”
“You’re my baby. You’re my pal. You’re everything, okay? And that means when you close me out, I have nothing. I have a job and a house and some friends and a car and your grandparents. But also I have nothing.”
Josh swung open his mandibles to speak.
“Hang on,” she said. “I’m not saying you need to tell me everything. But, just: How is it going? How are you feeling? This can’t be an easy time for you. Or maybe it is. I really don’t know.”
She sat across from him. There was a silence, and she let the silence happen.
“You could just ask,” he mumbled.
“Josh, I ask all of the time. I asked just now. And I get one-word answers.” She could hear her voice getting louder and tried to pull it back in. “Sorry. I just want us to talk about our lives. Not all the time. Sometimes. I promise not to get bored when you tell me about your”—she glanced down to his T-shirt—“Mountain Goats concerts, if you promise not to get bored when I tell you about the office copier breaking down halfway into my job.”
“That sounds boring.”
“It wasn’t. It was R-rated for strong language and machine violence.”
Josh didn’t laugh, but he softened, which was all she needed a bad joke to do.
“So I’m dating Dawn,” Diane said, thinking she was not at all the type of person to tell lies to her son but once again finding that she was a different person than she thought. “Mom going on dates. Gross, right?”
“It’s not gross,” Josh mumbled.
“We’re seeing a lot of each other, but who knows how long it will last? Tell me about you.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re not dating?”
“No.” Josh forced a laugh.
“Interested in a boy?”
“No.”
Diane didn’t want to press Josh further, hoping he would enter the conversation on his own.
The silence thickened the air with the hums and thumps of bodies and appliances, the coffeepot, and a distant car honk, and a nearby bird exclaiming, and her blood moving in jerking, lurching steps under the skin of her neck, where she felt a slight tickle, and the faceless old woman that secretly lives in their home taking slow, careful steps on the second-floor hallway above them, and all the other sounds that silence is made of.
“Why do you think I’m interested in a boy?” Josh said.
“Well, you’re fifteen. I assumed all teenagers do is think about other teenagers, don’t they?”
“No, I am, I guess. I mean, not a boy. There was one but he was weird. I think I scared him.”
Diane kept from saying anything, worried that it might stop this unexpected moment of communication. She let Josh tell his own story.
“There’s a girl named Lisa who my friend Matt says likes me, but I think she’s just really nice to everyone. I don’t think being nice to someone means you like them, especially when you’re nice to everybody. I mean Matt just only thinks about getting with girls and hooking his friends up with girls. All these girls are in love with Matt, and he sometimes sets them up on dates with his other friends, like he’s a matchmaker. And they all go out with his friends, just so they can stay close to Matt, but they all eventually find their way back to him. I think that’s his game, setting his friends up to stash future girlfriends. That’s totally it. That’s probably why he’s trying to set me up with Lisa, because he’s still dating Rosita, and if I can hang out with Lisa—”
“Josh.”
“What?” He looked startled, like he thought he was alone.
“Do you like Lisa?”
“I guess. Yeah? I don’t know her.”
“Are you attracted to her at all?”
“I don’t think so? A little bit? Not really?”
“Then don’t feel pressure to go out with her. If you like her, then there’s nothing wrong with it. But don’t do it for Matt. That’s his problem to work out. Not yours.”
“Okay.”
Silence again. Diane used the silence to scold herself for interrupting with didactic parenting. But also, wasn’t it her job to interrupt Josh’s life with parenting?
“I hate to ask you this,” Diane hated to ask, “because I don’t want it to seem like I was snooping.”
Josh lifted his eyestalks until they were definitely, opaque blackness and all, looking directly into her eyes.
“I found a note in my car the other day.”
Josh’s shoulders tightened and his antennae pulled back.
“I think it fell out of your notebook. And it was short. Normally I wouldn’t read something that looked this personal, but I saw it and took it all in before I could even tell what it was.”
This lie also accomplished one of the two things that make a good lie.
“What note?”
Josh knew what note. He had been looking for that note. Dreading his mother would find that note. Hoping he would not have to talk about that note.
Diane would occasionally find notes he had written. This had happened before. Sometimes it was actually happenstance, and sometimes the faceless old woman who secretly lives in their home would move his notes to where Diane would see them because the faceless old woman was bored and found the troubles of others interesting. Always Diane said she believed in his privacy and always she meant it, but also it always happened that she had read the entire note before she realized what it was. This was not a pattern that she was aware of, but it was one that Josh was very familiar with.
“It was a note where you were asking your classmate about a boy. A boy you were interested in.”
Josh started to sigh in relief and stopped himself just as the air was coming out, so that it came out sounding like an exasperated huff. The note was not about a boy, but a man. Here is what it was about the note.
When he was six, Josh had asked his mother who his father was. Diane told him he didn’t have a father. Some kids have fathers and others do not. Josh was one of those other kids.
When he was ten, Josh had asked his mother where his father was, knowing at that age that it was improbable for babies to be born without a biological mother and biological father. Diane told him she didn’t know.
When he was thirteen, Josh had asked his mother who his father was so he could track him down. Diane told him that would not happen. That he was not old enough to go looking for his father yet. When he turned eighteen and was living on his own, not under her roof, he was welcome to do whatever he wanted, but that he’d be much happier not trying to track down a man who didn’t care enough to raise him in the first place.
Diane did not talk much to Josh for a couple weeks after that, except to ask him what time he was coming home and whether he had homework or choir practice or a Boy Scout function. (Josh was only a few tasks away from getting his Blood Pact Scout badge.)