“Hey, Mom? What do you think of me going out tonight? There’s a pop-up show at Twelfth and Porter,” he said. “Luke Bryan’s playing. I know I’m grounded—but after that conversation with Lyla and all the drama with Polly, I could really use a night out. Please, Mom?”
I hesitated. My gut told me to say no, but my heart wanted to say yes. We really had made so much progress today. “I don’t know, Finch,” I said, still thinking.
“Can I at least email Bob Tate?” he pressed, referring to Kirk’s ticket broker, who could not only produce last-minute tickets to any show or sporting event, but also swing VIP passes or any other perk Kirk wanted. “See if he can get tickets?”
“How much do you think they’ll cost?” I asked, feeling determined to make him more aware of money.
“I don’t know,” Finch said, glancing down at his phone, typing something. “Maybe a couple hundred apiece since the venue’s small….”
“A couple hundred apiece?” I said, shocked—not so much by the price itself but by Finch’s nonchalance.
I made myself say no, then compromised. “You can go out, but find a way to have some cheaper fun.”
“Fine, Mom,” he said, looking disappointed.
For one second, I felt bad. It was so much more fun to make Finch happy, and my general overall philosophy was: if you can say yes, why not say yes? Of course that was Kirk’s philosophy, too, which had led us down the path of virtually always saying yes to our son, no matter the cost. After all, Kirk would point out, wasn’t it arbitrary to pick a random amount of money as a cutoff? If we could easily afford an eighty-thousand-dollar car for Finch, why get him a forty-thousand-dollar car he’d love so much less?
Now I wanted to go back to that conversation about Finch’s car—and so many other things. I wanted to list all the reasons why not for Kirk. He shouldn’t take these things for granted….He needs to earn it….If the bar is already that high, where will he go from here?…And most of all: There is a difference between privilege and entitlement. It was a concept that seemed as lost on Finch as it did on his father. What made Finch, as an eighteen-year-old kid, think he could reach out to his dad’s ticket broker? That money was no object, although he’d never earned a dime on his own?
I watched Finch type something else on his phone, then look back up at me. “I need to go get a haircut….If that’s okay with you,” he said with a trace of an attitude.
“Watch your tone,” I said, although I knew my admonition probably fell under the category of “too little too late.”
“Sure thing, Mom,” he said, sliding his phone into his back pocket as he walked out the door.
* * *
—
MORE THAN THREE hours later, Finch returned to the house with the same shaggy hair he’d left with.
“I thought you said you were getting a haircut,” I said, annoyed—with both the state of his hair and the fact that he hadn’t done what he’d said he was going to do.
“The place was packed,” Finch said, referring to the Belle Meade Barber Shop—where he always went to get his hair cut. “I waited forever…and then finally left.”
“You waited for three hours?” I said, thinking that while the place could be busy, it was never that busy.
“I had other errands to run….And then I hit some balls at the club. With Beau.”
“Okay,” I said.
“And guess what?…He actually has tickets to Luke Bryan tonight. And he offered me one of them.”
“Oh, really?” I said, wondering if Melanie had anything to do with this, or if Beau and Finch had just finagled it on their own. It crossed my mind, not for the first time, that Beau hadn’t been grounded for the party he threw. He was never punished.
“Yeah. So? Can I go?”
Something inside me told me to still say no—that the whole thing seemed a little fishy. But I’d explicitly told him that the price of the tickets was my issue, and now that was resolved.
“Please, Mom?” Finch said, putting one arm around me. “Just this one night?”
I sighed, then relented. “Okay,” I said. “But your punishment resumes tomorrow.”
“Got it,” Finch said, grinning and already texting.
I cleared my throat as loudly as I could, cueing him to look up at me. “Anything else you might want to say to me?” I asked, attempting light-heartedness, but also making a final point about the importance of basic gratitude.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Thanks, Mom. Seriously, I really, really appreciate it.”
I nodded, then stepped forward to initiate a hug. It felt a little awkward, as it had been a while since we shared any real physical affection. “You’re welcome, honey,” I said. “I love you so much.”
“I love you, too, Mom.”
As he began to pull away, I held on to him for an extra few seconds, whispering, “Please be good tonight. No more trouble.”
“No more trouble, Mom,” he said. “I promise.”
I’ve never been to therapy—not because I don’t believe in it but because I can’t afford it (although I guess it would be more accurate to say that I would rather do other things with my limited disposable income).
A few years back, however, I did start spending time with a retired shrink. Her name is Bonnie, and she’s an older widowed lady with just the right amount of eccentricity, who had hired me to build a tree house for her grandkids. A couple weeks into the project, when I discovered that her fanciful Swiss Family Robinson design exceeded her budget, she suggested we trade services. At first I agreed to the deal only to be nice—so that I didn’t leave a half-finished tree house in her yard—but I quickly grew to really enjoy our time together.
I liked her open-ended questions, especially because I could work while I talked (which seemed a lot less intense than sitting on a couch saying all the same things). Anyway, we started with Beatriz and Lyla, quickly touching on all my single-father woes. That eventually led her to the subject of women and why I wasn’t dating and then my entire romantic past. She asked about my first time—how, where, and to whom I’d lost my virginity.
I gave her the full scoop, telling her all about the summer I turned fifteen, when my buddy John landed us jobs at Belle Meade Country Club. John lived on my street and grew up basically like I did (i.e., not exposed to golf). But somehow he developed a love for the game. I was pretty indifferent myself, but it was an easy, decent-paying gig. All John and I had to do was pick up balls from the range, clean the carts and clubs after use, and work with the caddies to get the members’ bags ready to play. Incidentally, all the caddies at Belle Meade were black. We heard the reason was because members didn’t want their daughters falling in love with them. Rather than worrying about the obvious racist implications of this, John and I took it as an insult to us, i.e., why weren’t members worried about their daughters falling in love with us white bag room boys?
Cue Delaney.