Some nights it seemed Mary knew what we all needed: a sit-down family meal, one that required hours of chopping and prepping, getting the boys to set the table, washing lettuce, making salad dressing, pouring drinks—a meal that’d fill the house with warmth and aromas. She’d start early, slow-roasting a pork or simmering a meat sauce for hours.
One Saturday afternoon, as the boys slept well past noon, Mary and I started constructing such a feast—homemade pizzas, pasta with oxtail sauce, chicken and sausage for the grill, green beans and a salad. As dinnertime neared, Mary and I sipped our wine and she looked at all the platters of food and asked, “How many people are coming over again?”
The boys loitered in the kitchen and dining room, mocking my choice of music (Chet Baker, Let’s Get Lost) and asking every five minutes, “When’s dinner? I’m hungry.”
We tried to get them to tell us about the previous night, and why they’d slept so late.
“Why are you so suspicious?” Sean asked Mary.
“Because I’m one-eighth Sicilian, that’s why,” Mary said.
Leo said he was sleeping at a girl’s house that night—just messing with us, really—and Mary insisted on calling the girl’s parents. “Here’s what I need: address, home phone number, last name . . .” When Leo started waffling, Mary added: “I’m not going to call. But at least I’ll know where to find you if aliens invade.”
Getting bored, the boys began their ritual . . .
“Dude, I’m so gonna beat your ass,” said Sean.
“I really wish you would try, dawg,” said Leo, strapping on a Björn Borg–like headband: “I’ll push you down the freakin’ stairs.”
“Do not come near me,” Sean said, pulling on his boxing gloves and adopting a Russian-ish accent. “You do not want to fight me, my friend.”
So it began . . .
“Ow, bro, stop. STOP! I didn’t even hit you.”
“Get off me, bro, your breath smells like poop.”
“Calm down, dude. I barely touched you.”
“Stop, stop, stop, stop, STOP! Ahhhh!”
“Oh, it’s like that, huh? How’s this smell? And this?”
“Ow, ow, ow—oh my god, bro, stop. Get off me. You’re gonna break my fuckin’ arm.”
“No, I’m not—you’re gonna break your arm. Stop resisting. You’re like a wild animal.”
“Your breath smells like poop!”
. . . a version of the same dialogue I’d been hearing for a dozen years.
During a previous battle, Mary had asked one of their friends, “Nathan, do you feel sorry for them? Is that why you hang out with them?”
Sean looked up from the floor, where he was entangled with Leo, and said, “He gets community service hours for hanging with us.”
As always, the punching and shouting all came to a sudden halt when dinner was served.
The boys knew how much Mary valued our family meals. They were a staple of our family life, an enforced togetherness session, even if we sometimes had to pretend two of us at the table weren’t a little stoned, and the other two weren’t a little buzzed. Still, Mary had her table rules . . . If I tried to turn the stereo up, she’d turn it back down. If I tried to talk about things that didn’t belong at the dinner table—homework, school, jobs—Mary would give me her “cool it” look. Not now.
And if the boys ever tried to skip a preplanned Saturday or Sunday night dinner, Mary would scold them, “You need to be part of the household community.” Once, when both boys blew us off for a big meal, Mary was despondent: “I’m not even a mother anymore. Who am I?”
Tonight, dinner complete, the table jammed with plates and bowls and bones, the four of us sat and talked for an hour, mostly about last night’s teen adventures. We heard about them running into a skate friend who was back from rehab, had a job, an apartment, a girlfriend, a secondhand Cadillac. We heard about Sean’s epic night celebrating a friend’s birthday, moving the party and the mini keg from spot to spot as they got flushed out by police. They ended the night at a twenty-four-hour diner on Aurora Avenue, eating twelve-egg omelets as a parade of short-skirted prostitutes came through for coffees. “Some of them had Adam’s apples,” Sean reported.
Leo left the table to take a call on the front porch, then came back and whispered something to Sean. The two of them laughed, then launched into a refrain from a rap song, the meaning of which I didn’t understand. They clearly had another big night planned. “Just call me Swayze,” Leo announced. “Cuz I’m about to be ghost.”
Mary and I exchanged looks, and I thought: this is so weird and wonderful. We’re together. A funky union of four. I loved them so much. I loved us so much.
Nights like tonight, after a drawn-out dinner, the four of us for an hour or so, I’d be reminded that they still belonged to us. I’d reach out to touch them, hug them, muss their hair, punch an arm, grab them in a headlock. They’d resist a little—“get off me, Dad”—but without much bite, as if they needed it, too, some physical reminder that they were loved.
So many nights I’d torture myself with visions of harm, of annihilation. But tonight? With my boys at home, at least for now, all felt safer, whole. I could protect them because I could see them, hear them, touch them. I could be sure they were okay because they were enclosed by these walls, inside this home we’d built around us, our cocoon.
It won’t last. It can’t. It won’t even last the night.
But at least for now, for this one true moment, our boys aren’t on skateboards or in cars, they’re here, home, ours.
Hours later, I stood brushing my teeth, thinking back on the day, lost in a dopey daze.
Mary and I had gone stand-up paddleboarding that morning. Out on Puget Sound, curious sea lions popped up their heads as we weaved among sailboats and trawlers and almost toppled in the wake of a container ship. We came home sun-tinged and sore, had a cocktail, started prepping our big dinner. And now it was bedtime. As toothpaste dribbled down my chin I heard clapping outside. I looked out the window down onto the driveway and saw Sean, applauding slow and sarcastic.
“Want me to do my bathroom dance for you?” I yelled.
He laughed. He was bathed in the floodlight, standing in the same spot where I’d watched him and Leo smoke a bowl a year earlier, then furiously kicked a hole in Sean’s bedroom door. That pissed-off night, and others like it, seemed to be bobbing in our wake, at least for now. Sean had been doing construction work, saving money for a summer trip abroad. He was sunburned, wiry, and smiley—and sober? He looked like a young man.
“Get up here, punk,” I called down.
Standing beside me, reflected in the bathroom mirror, my son was almost as tall as me. With his sticking-up hair, he seemed an inch taller. Skinny, pimply, handsome.
As I settled into bed with a book beside Mary, Sean joined us in our room, playing with Mickey and telling us about an after-dinner skate session with his boys.
Then we heard Leo come in . . . “Up here, Leo!”
Leo had been skating, too—the first time in months that his feet and ankles felt good enough. He described how strange it was to flub tricks that once came naturally, to go through the motions but wipe out. He wasn’t sad about it, though—at least he was able to skate again.
I realized that we’d all been on boards that day. That’d probably never happened before. My body still sensed the rock and roll of the swells. My legs ached a little from trying to stay balanced and my arms hummed from paddling. I felt so good and didn’t want the moment to end. “You can’t go until you tell Mom and me a bedtime story,” I said.
They rolled their eyes—“c’mon, Dad”—but I got the sense they didn’t want to leave, either. Sean went first.
“Okay, you want a story? There was this kid named Crandall. And he dug a ditch for seven hours straight and then he died. Now that’s a story.”
“No, no, no,” I said. “The story’s gotta be at least a minute long and it can’t end in death.”
“Fine,” Sean said. “There’s this kid named Crandall, and he had to dig a ditch . . .”
I can’t recall the rest, but he had me and Mary laughing as Leo heckled, poking holes in the story.
“And what’s the moral of the story?” I asked when he finished.
“The moral? Does every story have to have a moral?” he said, making air quotes, but he knew what I wanted. “All right, all right . . . the moral is that persistence pays off. Okay?”
Then it was Leo’s turn, and he was ready for it. He launched into an elaborate tale of a kid who lived in a field full of dandelions, and every day he’d pluck one of the spent flowers and make a wish and blow away the wispy seeds. Day after day, he wished for tokens of wealth, a purple Mercedes, a helicopter, a yacht . . . I think he became a wealthy rapper in the end.
After Leo wrapped up his story, the boys decided to head downstairs to make ramen noodles and watch TV, but not before hugs and smart-ass devotions . . .
“I freakin’ love you so much it hurts,” said Leo.
“I love you as much as you need me to love you,” said Sean.
I heard them clanging and arguing in the kitchen. I knew they’d probably stay up late watching their favorite shows for and about dumb-ass boys, Workaholics, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Trailer Park Boys, or their go-to movie, Step Brothers.
My sons. They’ve remained so close, best friends, a team. They protect and respect each other. Even at seventeen and eighteen, they unselfconsciously embrace one another, tell each other “I love you.” And that, I realized, has saved us. We love each other, we say it, we mean it. No matter what we’ve endured that day, as teens or adults, we rarely end a night in anger, without a hug. We’d become experts in reconciliation, in the art of hugs and I’m sorrys and I love yous.
I looked at the clock.
“Mary, it’s only ten forty-five.”
“I know. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know, but this is what I wished for . . . tonight . . . This is my dandelion wish.”
My boys were home.
I could still feel those waves beneath my board, up and down, up and down, and it lulled me off to sleep.