OLIVER EXPECTED TO FIND his mother in the cafeteria pushing scrambled eggs and sausage around her plate between sips of coffee. But according to one of the orderlies, she’d skipped yet another breakfast. He eventually found her in the backyard of Shady Grove, sitting alone on a decorative park bench and staring off at nothing in particular, either reliving distant memories or imagining new ones. He approached quietly from behind and said, “Hey, Mom.”
Delores Miles turned slowly, her eyes registering only a flash of confusion before her mind could concoct a workable scenario. “You’re the new therapist, right?”
“Sure, Mom.” At least part of her memory was working.
Oliver had two choices when talking to his mother. Either he could turn every sentence into a pathetic segue in an attempt to get her to remember him. Or, he could just play along with whatever she said, using equally pathetic and leading questions to get his mother to remember him. Sometimes, when he was feeling especially desperate, he resorted to trying to trick her into saying his name. He wasn’t feeling especially desperate this morning. Mostly, he felt sleepy.
“So,” he said, just to have something to say, “how are you this morning?”
“Better than Thomas.”
Oliver followed his mother’s gaze to the back corner of the yard where a severely palsied man in a tattered bathrobe and black knee-high socks crouched by a chain-link gate that was overgrown with thick, weedy vines. He kept sneaking glances over his shoulder before attempting to pick the fat, rusted lock with limp dandelion stalks.
She shook her head and said, “Poor man. But if he ever does open the gate, it’ll be a mass exodus.”
Oliver bit back a grin as he imagined a slow-motion prison break, with tottering old folks ramming walkers into wheelchairs as they elbowed their way through the rusted back gate, across a busy intersection, and into the promised land of a shared parking lot between a Chinese restaurant and a State Farm agent.
His mother often compared the conditions at Shady Grove to prison. And she would obviously know better than he —her rap sheet included public intoxication, driving under the influence, and numerous accounts of domestic violence—most of which found her in the role of aggressor, exacting vengeance on one of her worthless boyfriends. She’d only been busted for child abuse once. But it was enough.
“Frankly,” she said, “I hope he makes it out someday. We all do.”
“Really? Why do you think everyone wants out of here?”
For one split second, she morphed into one of her old selves—the incredulous mother regarding her imbecilic offspring as he laid in the yard, wiping his tears with his homemade cape and cradling his newly splintered forearm after a not-so-super-heroic flight out of a second-story window. But her troubled expression disappeared as quickly as it came.
“I’m sure it’s the drugs.”
“Thomas is on drugs?”
“Sure,” she said. “We all are.”
“Does that include you, Mom?”
She blinked once, then again. Finally, she said, “So how much schooling does that take?”
“Does what take?”
“Physical therapy,” she said. “You know I’m thinking of going back to school myself. I’ve always been a strong proponent of continuing education.”
“Yeah, I know, Mom.”
“I’m still leaning toward becoming a pharmacist.”
“But I hear you make a fine nurse.”
“Thanks, anyway,” she said. “But I’m retiring.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“They don’t appreciate the work I do around here.” She stood then and brushed her backside with hands that looked like they belonged to a woman twice her age. “I think I need to go lie down.”
As she walked toward the building, Oliver grabbed her nursing kit and followed her inside. This was not a good sign. Ever since she’d gotten sick, she’d occupied the healthy parts of her mind with various hobbies. For a while, she assumed the role of resident hairdresser, until visiting family members complained about the crewcutted mothers and mohawked grandpas. She had spurts of interest in jigsaw puzzles and Sudoku and crosswords, but those never lasted more than a month or two. Her happiest times had been while leading Bible studies and preaching Sunday morning sermonettes. But that too ended when Dr. Strahan revoked her baptizing privileges. If she gave up nursing, she’d be hobbyless once again. And when she didn’t have a hobby, she sat and stared at the television and napped a lot. That’s when it felt like a race to see which would deteriorate faster—her body or her brain.
Oliver placed her colorful nurse’s kit prominently atop her bookshelf, exactly where her framed mother/son photographs were supposed to be. His hope was that she would wake tomorrow morning and see it there, causing her selective memory to forget about taking early retirement.
As if on cue, she climbed into her bed and thumbed the remote control until she found a talk show with a panel of teary women discussing the difficulties of child rearing. Oliver didn’t realize he’d slipped into a TV coma along with his mother until he heard the sound of hushed voices and scuffling feet in the hallway. He knew better than to suggest she turn off the TV. So he motioned to the weepy woman on screen and said, “So … do you have any children of your own?”
She shook her head, fondled the frayed edge of her quilt, and sighed longingly at her bookshelf. “No, I never married.”
That was true. She never did marry, though she did sleep around a lot. Oliver decided to honor his mother by keeping that particular thought to himself.
He sat opposite her, watching her eyelids sag and droop and eventually close altogether. That’s when he sat up straighter, listening for his three favorite syllables. The last time he’d heard his own name cross his mother’s lips was just moments after she’d nodded off, her voice tender and dreamy and reducing him to a blubbering idiot. His irrational obsession with hearing his name worried him. But what actually frightened Oliver beyond words was the thought of ending up like his mother.
She fidgeted for a moment, as if she could hear his thoughts, then nestled further down under a thick quilt.
That’s when the commotion started on the other side of his mother’s door. Oliver followed the sound into the hallway and was nearly decapitated by an orderly sprinting toward the stairwell.
Eventually, he followed the bustling sounds up to the third floor where he found Betsy at the nurse’s station in an intense conversation with a police officer. Her practiced lilting voice had given way to tremors. Oliver leaned against the counter, pretending to search for something in his wallet, and listened. Apparently the body of Mrs. Tompkins—Oliver’s mother’s most recent “patient”—had just been discovered in her bed, her soul having already departed.
The cop brushed past Oliver and into the dead woman’s room. He emerged moments later engaged in a serious dialog with the beefy security guard, treating him like an equal.
Betsy approached Oliver, clearly in shock.
“So,” he said, “she’s really … you know … like, no longer with us?”
Betsy nodded gravely, a single tear spilling down over the slope of her pink cheek.
“Wow,” was all he could manage as his head swiveled toward the open door.
“But listen, Oliver.” She put her hand on his arm and squeezed gently, letting it linger there as she glanced toward the uniformed men outside Mrs. Tompkins’s room. “Trust me on this. You have nothing to worry about, okay? Nothing at all.”
“Then why am I suddenly so worried?”
“Just because your mother was the last person to see Mrs. Tompkins alive … Well, I’m sure she had nothing to do with … you know … her untimely passing. Nothing at all.”
• • •
The police eventually made an appearance. They asked Delores Miles a battery of questions about her last few moments with Mrs. Tompkins. But either she didn’t remember, or she didn’t want to.
“What about you?” one of the cops asked Oliver. “You know anything about all this?”
Oliver shook his head, blissfully ignorant. Some things are better left unknown. The frustrated policemen dropped business cards on the nightstand and left. Oliver stayed with his mother until she started nodding off. He stretched out in the recliner and watched her until she fell asleep. He was tempted to close his eyes and take his own morning nap. But he’d made his mother a promise years ago and he intended to make good on it—even though it felt like an orphaned promise that, like so many falling trees in remote forests, would splinter and crack and eventually tumble to earth, impotent and unheeded.
He got up, kissed her on the forehead, and set off to finish his education.
• • •
Oliver checked his watch, not to see if he was going to be late for class, but rather to see which class he’d be attending this morning. And where.
He decided to let his stomach be his guide. American Lit. was closer, by about thirty miles. But the road to Intro. to the American Legal System was paved with donut shops. At the Krispy Kreme drive-thru Oliver swapped a faded green portrait of Abraham Lincoln for two blueberry cake donuts, a large coffee, and a handful of coins. Then he pointed his asthmatic Integra toward the big state school in Murfreesboro.
The only decent parking spot he found was in the Humanities lot. So he nosed in and kept his car idling while he thumbed through a stack of parking decals—all from various universities—that he kept rubber-banded together in his glove compartment. He reminded himself that this was not stealing. Oliver had actually purchased these preowned decals on eBay and had the receipts to prove it. (He realized most universities would take a more narrow view of this rationale, so he silently renewed his vow to someday repay this vehicular debt to society by endowing a few of his favorite colleges with a Parking Scholarship—anonymously of course, and only after the check cleared for his first HBO special.) Two strips of Scotch tape later, he abandoned his now-authorized vehicle and fell in step with a horde of overly serious students. After consulting a threadbare note card to make sure he had the room number right, Oliver checked his watch again and slowed his pace.
Timing his arrival was critical—too early led to unwanted attention and actual conversations, whereas arriving late might arouse suspicion. So his goal became to show up inconspicuously on time, careful to keep his head down and avoid sitting in either the front or last rows. It also helped to hide behind sunglasses or under headphones while pretending to cram for some upcoming, nonexistent test.
But the gods of academia conspired against him that morning.
First, he’d forgotten his earbuds, remembering too late that he’d left them in the security closet at the hotel. Plus, the professor was running late, which rendered Oliver’s timely arrival early by comparison. And the only empty seat in one of the middle rows was directly behind a conversationally needy redhead he remembered from a previous unauthorized visit. So Oliver was forced to sit in the back. To avoid any unwanted conversation, he leaned his head against the block wall behind him, closed his eyes, and pretended to nap.
The next sound he heard—or would remember hearing anyway—was the sound of shuffling feet and backpacks. He’d managed to sleep through yet another class.
Oliver kept his eyes on his shoes and fell in line amid a gaggle of students making lunch plans. He was three short steps from the open doorway when he heard his name.
“Mr. Miles? Could I have a word?”
Oliver ignored his first impulse, which was to bolt into the hallway and sprint toward his illegally parked Integra. But if the professor already knew his name, then how hard would it be to track him down and have Oliver arrested or kicked out or dragged off to the collegiate equivalent of detention hall?
In the end, it was simple curiosity that made Oliver pause in the doorway.
He turned, his steps plodding and rueful. But his teacher didn’t appear angry or offended or even perturbed. If anything, he looked kind of nervous, probably more so than Oliver. And why not? The man was a trained educator, not a bouncer. There was probably no handbook on how to confront students caught illegally auditing classes.
“I don’t think we’ve been formally introduced,” the teacher said. But Oliver was suddenly convinced that they had. And it was more than a nagging familiarity in the man’s kind eyes and prematurely graying beard. Something intimate, paternal. “I’m Professor Laramy. Daniel.”
“So,” Oliver said. “Am I in trouble?”
“Funny, I was about to ask you the same thing.”
Oliver studied the man’s face for any trace of irony, but he looked utterly sincere. “I realize this looks kind of bad, but I promised my mother I’d get a good college education. She never really specified the parts about enrollment and meal tickets and graduation and such.”
Laramy laughed through his nose, a nostalgic sound.
“That sounds like Dot.” Then the man who was not really his professor looked him in the eye and said, “Tell me, Oliver. How is your mother?”
Images from some distant past clicked through Oliver’s memory like frames in a View-Master. He saw Laramy again—beardless, paunchless, his skin flushed and pasty from postcoital exertion, eyes brimming with equal parts panic and shame. The younger version looked anything but professorial as he beat a hasty retreat from Delores Miles’s bedroom. He was obviously surprised to see the bed-headed youngster perched on the sofa, spooning Lucky Charms into his little mouth. The younger version of Laramy paused at the door, thinking. The lingering image was that of Laramy’s wedding ring glinting in the glow of the television set as he turned the knob and left.
All at once, the idea of getting busted by his teacher, and quite possibly getting kicked out of school (or at least this school) didn’t seem like such a big deal anymore. Oliver had had these conversations before. Ones where some middle-aged guy, all blushed and sweating and unsure what to do with his hands, would accost Oliver about the welfare of Delores Miles. They all had one thing in common—at some indiscriminate point in their past, they’d gotten drunk, then eventually gotten naked with his mother. She had been a conquest, a proverbial notch in their literal belts, a trophy they didn’t earn and couldn’t keep. Or didn’t want to.
Oliver never questioned their sincerity when these random men asked how she was doing, only their tact. A few had no doubt loved her, or at least thought they did. Some were convinced they could reform her, but she turned out to be unreformable. Most simply used her. But without exception, they all felt sorry for her. And there was nothing Delores Miles hated more than pity.
Oliver studied Professor Laramy’s beleaguered expression, trying to figure out which of these categories he belonged in. He decided it didn’t matter. He was simply too tired to care.
“My mother is sick.”
“Oh? I’m really sorry to hear that. Is there anything … I don’t know … something I can do?”
“I’m guessing you’ve done enough already.”
Laramy stopped fidgeting and eased past Oliver to close the classroom door. He returned, looking pensive, and said, “Look, that was a long time ago, Oliver. It was a different era; we were different people back then.”
“No, not different.” Oliver didn’t speak the words so much as mouth them, as if having to solve each one as it occurred to him. “Just younger.”
“Pardon?”
“Weren’t you about my age when you decided to fool around with my mother?”
“I suppose so, yes.” Laramy sighed his sentences now, obviously weary of this conversation and where it was headed.
“So I take it you were already married when you guys hooked up?” Laramy nodded, shame personified. Oliver resisted the urge to feel sorry for him. “Tell me this, Professor. Do you have any kids?”
“I’m not sure what that has to do—”
“Humor me.”
“Okay, yes, I have a daughter. She was married last year, in fact.”
“Perfect. So based on your logic, it would be totally cool for me to get your daughter drunk, have casual, meaningless sex with her this week, so long as I eventually grow up and acknowledge years later how different I’ve become.”
Laramy must have locked the door when he shut it. Someone jiggled the handle, then knocked. But Laramy ignored whoever it was.
“Look, I didn’t mean to upset you, Oliver. I just wanted to know how your mother was doing.”
“Okay then, why?”
“I don’t know. Why does anyone ask after someone else? I care about her.”
“Just like that? After all these years you magically start caring again?”
“Frankly …” Laramy’s voice quavered. “I’ve never really stopped.”
“Which is why you sent her all those birthday cards, right?” Oliver hated the way sarcasm made his voice go shrill. “And why you were always around to help us load up moving vans? Or why you called so often just to check in and see how she was doing? To tell her how much you care?”
“It’s not what you think, Oliver.”
“What I think is that you somehow recognized me in class this morning and it reminded you of some passionate tryst with Delores Miles. I’m sure it’s all very titillating for you. You get to relive it, picture it all over again in excruciating detail. But guess what, Professor Laramy … so do I.”
The second hand of the battery-operated wall clock ticked away the seconds. Voices filtered in under the closed door. Students would begin lining up outside the door soon.
“For the record,” Laramy said, lowering his voice, “it was not some one-night stand. We were together for months. We were in love.”
“I doubt that.”
“Pardon me for saying so, but how could you possibly know if your mother was in love with me or not?”
“Because,” Oliver said. “I don’t think she’s capable.”
“Why on earth not?”
“Mostly because of guys like you.”
Oliver could see that he’d gone too far, and he almost felt bad about it. At least Laramy seemed sincere. This wasn’t his fault, not entirely. In all likelihood, Delores Miles was already broken when this guy found her. Like so many others, he probably thought he could fix her. Besides, to acknowledge his mother’s culpability was to admit his own. A better son would have done a better job protecting her from herself. So it was more convenient to blame the nameless string of guys. It made him feel better, or at least a little less culpable.
“I’m sorry, Oliver. I really am. About everything.”
“It’s fine.” Oliver mimed his own weak surrender. He was afraid Laramy’s apologies might turn sloppy. Or worse, that he might ask for forgiveness. And if he didn’t ask, Oliver wouldn’t have to deny him.
“And for what it’s worth, I recognized you months ago. But your attendance is rather sporadic. You confirmed it today with all that snoring.”
“You recognized my snore?”
“No, but I did make my way to your desk and gave your shoulder a hearty shake. You didn’t wake, but you did quit snoring. Your notebook was open on your desk with the heading ‘Jokes.’”
“How did that help?”
“Your mom always bragged about your sense of humor.”
“She did?”
“But she worried all those comedy records were going to rot your brain. By the way, what did you think of the Steven Wright album?”
“That was you?” It was called I Have a Pony, and Oliver had found it leaning against the screen door the Friday before his twelfth birthday. There was a red bow in the corner and a note that said Happy Birthday, Oliver! He wasn’t about to admit it now, but that collection of cerebral one-liners had changed his life, or at least drastically altered its comedic course.
Laramy nodded, pleased with himself. “Anyway, after I recognized you in class, it still took me awhile to work up the nerve to ask you about your mother. Since I didn’t see your name on the roll, I checked with the registrar’s office. But it seems they’ve misplaced your enrollment records.”
Oliver recognized the metaphorical olive branch being offered, even without the customary wink. It felt more like a Get Out of Jail Free card. They both knew he was freeloading. All he could muster was a grateful nod.
Laramy said, “Actually, I’ve always been a fan of auditing classes. And I do hope you’ll keep studying with us.”
“We’ll see,” Oliver said.
“And I meant what I said. If there’s anything at all I can do for you or your mother, just let me know.”
“Thanks,” Oliver said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Anyway, would you at least tell your mother hello for me?”
“Here,” Oliver said, patting his pockets for something to write on. He pulled a scrap of paper from his notebook and snatched a pen off Laramy’s desk, then scribbled the address and handed it to his teacher.
“Why don’t you tell her yourself?”