Reclined against the maple headboard of his bed, Dave shrugged. His mother was small, compact, yet there was no room for her in there. He was too old for her to curl beside him on the bed—if she’d even perched on the edge, it would have embarrassed him. They were used to seeing each other over tables spread with food, or sitting in her Lexus in their separate leather seats, listening to the radio, looking at the road.
It still felt strange to him, this distance between them. When he was a kid, they’d spent hours, days, years alone together. When his father would leave for work, the air in the house would seem to lighten and expand, and she’d sit with him on the vine-laced living room rug playing Thomas the Tank Engine and then cook him butter noodles, warm and plain just like he liked, and fold him into bed at night with stories about heroes who were always brave and always saved the world. And just loved him. And there was nothing that he’d had to do to earn it.
Dave’s mother arranged herself in the desk chair, pointed her knees toward the bed. “We are not understanding each other,” she said.
Dave shrugged.
“You think we don’t love you? We don’t care? You’re the most important thing in our life, David. Number one.”
“I know,” he said. What she’d said was supposed to be a compliment, but it made the acid lurch in his stomach.
Dave’s mother wrinkled her forehead. Her eyes were liquid brown. The skin around them had feather grooves in which the black gunk of her makeup had smudged. She said, “All we ask is that you realize what you are.”
“What I am,” he echoed.
“You know you could do so much better, you could do anything. If you’d only try.” His mother’s voice was firm, emphatic. He was going to throw up. Did she really believe these things? Did she believe he hadn’t tried?
He had nothing to say to her. He pulled his legs to his chest. His socks were bleached and his toes banded by a thin gold thread.
In his silence his mother said carefully, “You know, I have always wondered what it would feel like to have really done something.”
This confession had come out of nowhere. Was he supposed to respond? He couldn’t. He felt he had intruded on a private moment she was having with herself. Yet she seemed to be waiting for him. Her gaze fell to her hands; her hair swept into her eyes and she tucked it self-consciously behind her ear. It was not her usual harried brushing away. It was something a girl would do.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Nothing.” She smiled, waved him away. The moment was over. “It’s just, I don’t want you to regret. You have so much potential. You can be anything you choose to be.” She placed her hand on his shoulder and squeezed.
Dave looked into her eyes. What he saw was not anger or disappointment or righteousness but simple human need. She had given up her life to be his mother. Because he was special. Every report card had told her otherwise, that he was little more than “a hard worker” and “a pleasure to have in class,” yet she had kept her faith. He had the potential, he could, and one day—at the right time, with the right class, the right teacher—he would. This was the story she’d told herself; it was his job to make it true.
It was hard, he thought, to be responsible for all this happiness. He was angry but he was also sorry.
“I’ll try harder,” he told her. “I will try to be better.”
—
Drifting to sleep that night, Dave imagined another life in which he was allowed to wear happiness in the simple way that felt native to him. He thought of his future secretly, as if his parents would peer through the crack of his open bedroom door and deep into his brain (he usually left the door open because closing it triggered a string of questions he couldn’t stand: “Why do you need to close this door? What are you doing in there?”). He saw not a high-powered job, not a doctor’s white coat or a lawyer’s striped suit, but himself, Dave Chu, in chinos and polo shirt, in the middle of an ordinary life. Some job. A home. Enough money to see the newest superhero blockbuster every Friday night, not at the art-house theater in Mill Valley but at a strip-mall megaplex with stadium seating and IMAX screens. He wanted the hero to get the girl. He wanted to eat Milk Duds and popcorn and sip Sprite from a straw that he shared with his girlfriend or wife.