“Why?”
“Because they are your family. You will be eighteen in less than a year, and then you can go away and be on your own and find your own family, in whatever way you care to do. But you still only have one family of origin. One mother. So I advise you to make your peace with them, and with her. If she drives you crazy, you can spend less time with her when you’re grown. But if you don’t work out these basic differences, if you don’t talk out what is going wrong, you will regret it when all is said and done. I have some experience with this in my own past. So when we get home, and I get safely inside, you should go upstairs and talk with her—in a better way than perhaps you have done in the past.”
“Okay,” Raymond said. “Okay. I will.”
It’s not like he had any other options now.
“I’m going to be there for you at the trial,” he said as they walked slowly up the steps to their building.
“Don’t say that yet. You don’t know. It might not be possible.”
“You need me to be, right?”
“It would be a great help to me, yes. I think Isabel would take me, but she will have so much on her mind. Plus she could go into labor at any moment. It’s a terrible time to ask her to attend to the needs of someone else.”
“So you need me at the trial.”
“I suppose it’s fair to say so.”
“Then I’ll be there. And nobody’s going to stop me.”
In a relatively unprecedented move, Raymond sat on the couch in their apartment and simply waited for her. Waited for his mother to arrive home.
It didn’t take long. Less than five minutes.
When she came through the door, she seemed surprised to see him there. She pasted on that same wry expression, as if the whole thing were a big, sarcastic joke to her. Raymond had begun to find it deeply irritating.
“This will be very interesting,” she said, locking the door behind her. Then she turned to him and assumed the position—hands on her waist, elbows angled out. “I can’t tell you how interesting I think this all is. I can’t wait until next time I go out for a drink after work with the other ladies. Imogene will tell me all about her son who’s back using crack cocaine, but of course he tries to hide it from her. And Paulette has a daughter who got eleven parking tickets, and she never paid a one of them, and they went to warrant, but Paulette wouldn’t even know about it if the notice hadn’t come in the mail on a Saturday. Because, you know . . . kids. They don’t want you to know about all the bad stuff they get up to. So then I get to say, ‘Oh yeah, girls. I know exactly what you mean. My son Raymond helps little old blind ladies cross the street, but of course he keeps it from me, because what kid would want his mother to know that?’ What the hell, Raymond? What the actual hell?”
Raymond only looked up at her and blinked too much. He could feel himself doing it, but he couldn’t stop.
Inside, two very distinct parts of him had declared war on each other. One part wanted to stay quiet and calm, and keep her calm, because he needed her permission to miss school. The madder she got, the less likely she was to help him. The other part of him just wanted to fire back at her in rage.
He waited to see which one would win.
“Why would you not tell me a thing like that, Raymond? I asked you over and over to tell me about your new friends.”
“I didn’t think you would understand.”
“What wouldn’t I understand? You thought I’d tell you it’s bad to help the elderly and the blind?”
“I thought you’d tell me I need to make friends my own age.”
“Well, you do need to make friends your own age. That goes without saying.”
Raymond spread his arms wide, as if to show her what had just occurred. He thought the situation would speak for itself if he could only jog her into noticing. She did not notice. She seemed to have disappeared into her own head, her own world.
“In fact, when you think about it . . . it’s weird. It’s just weird, Raymond. A seventeen-year-old boy being friends with a woman who’s like . . . a hundred. There’s something kind of icky and weird about it. Oh, I’m sorry—that’s too harsh. But it’s sure not what I expected.”
And then you have the nerve to ask me why I didn’t tell you.
“And then you have the nerve to ask me why I didn’t tell you,” Raymond said. Out loud.
He sat frozen and listened to the words, which seemed to vibrate in the air between them. For years he had said things like that in his head while interacting with his parents. This was the first time one had come out of his mouth.
“I’m just expressing my opinion,” she said.
“And I didn’t want to hear your opinion, but you never, ever keep your opinion to yourself. So that’s why I didn’t tell you.”
He stood and walked off toward his bedroom.
“You’re being too sensitive,” she called after him.
No, you’re not being sensitive enough.
“No, you’re not being sensitive enough,” he called back over his shoulder.
He wondered if this was just the way of things now. If he would never be able to hold his comments inside again.
He closed himself into his room and decided he would not find that magic moment to ask her. She would always be just like this: defensive, quick to anger, slow to understand. So maybe he wouldn’t ask her. Maybe he would just skip school and go to the trial.
She could punish him any way she chose to afterward. It would be worth it.
He sat at the dinner table, pushing something around on his plate with a fork. He wasn’t even entirely clear on what it was. Could have been chicken, or it could have been some cut of pork.
He looked up at his two middle sisters, who looked back. Then they looked at each other and burst into giggles. He looked away from them. At Clarissa, who was shoveling rice into her mouth and paying no attention to anyone. He looked back at the two middle girls, and the scene repeated itself.