“My mom, man…,” Pete says as we drink the remarkable sludge that can only be made by carefully following the directions on a package of store brand coffee. “My mom’s upset with me.”
“Where’s your mother?” I ask Pete instead of, “You have a mother?” which is what I’m actually thinking.
“In Wendell, a few miles away. I used to live there, too, but it made my mom sad to have me around so I split.” He pauses to pour coffee into the brown-ringed hole in his beard and the warmth of it steams up his glasses, making the cracks more evident and his wet eyes glisten. “She’s old. I’m not good for her heart. So I came down here to camp.”
“Where do you camp, anyway?”
He squints, suspicious and moving away. “I don’t tell anyone where I camp. They might steal my things.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean anything.”
“No, that’s cool, I can tell you, you’re okay. I have a spot behind Mill River Park down the road there, past the picnic tables and down the path.”
“I didn’t know there was camping back there.”
“There isn’t. There’s me. Hey, you should come by when you finish some morning. We can party!”
“Oh.”
“I got a great bag of weed from my mother’s neighbor—you know, Wendell grows the best weed in New England!”
“I’ve actually heard that before.” And I really have, more than once, across this very same counter.