He chuckled. “Thanks. I think.”
“Did you find the memory you were looking for?”
“I think so. Can I tell you?”
I smiled as I squeezed his hand. “You can tell me whatever you want.”
He turned his head to look at me. “I can, can’t I?”
I nodded. “It’s kind of what boyfriends are for, I guess. Though I haven’t had much experience to say so.”
“You’ve done pretty good so far.”
“Pretty good?” I said as I rolled my eyes. “Gee, thanks for that ringing endorsement. Nothing strokes the ego like pretty good.”
“How about amazing?”
“A little better.”
“Extraordinary.”
“So it’s been said.”
“Unexpected.”
I grinned. “Likewise. What did you find to think about your mom?”
He let out a low breath and turned to look back at the sky. I followed his gaze to the azure blue. “I think I was ten or eleven,” he said finally. “We lived up in the foothills in this old house on Windriver. I came home from school one day and found my mom and dad fighting. I wasn’t supposed to be home that early because I had soccer practice, but it got canceled, so I just rode the bus home.”
He rubbed his thumb over my fingers. “It wasn’t a normal fight, like I’d heard them get into before. It was very loud. They were very angry. My mom was screaming at my dad, and he was screaming back at her. I couldn’t make out what they were talking about, I just knew it was bad. My friend Jake’s parents had just gotten divorced and his mom had moved away and he never got to see her and I remember thinking, This is it. They’re going to get divorced and she’ll move away and I’ll never see her anymore because she won’t want me. I thought that if they kept fighting, they would eventually see that they didn’t belong together and they would divorce and I wouldn’t know my place anymore.
“It didn’t last that much longer. The voices quieted down, but they were still angry, and finally my dad left the house, slamming the door behind him. I heard the car starting in the garage before he left, and I didn’t think I was going to see him again. I didn’t think he was going to come back, and the only thing I wanted to do right then, right at that moment, was to find my mom and remind her that I was still there with her. That I was still alive. That I wouldn’t leave her, no matter how hard it got.”
His voice broke, and I thought about asking him to stop, that he didn’t need to say any more, but he pushed on. I hurt for him.
“So I went to her. She was sitting on the stairs, her face in her hands, and she was crying. That scared me more than anything because for all that I could remember, I couldn’t remember a time when I’d ever seen her crying. It seemed worse than I’d first thought, and I didn’t know what I could do. I was just a kid. I was little. What did I know?”
“But you did something, didn’t you?” I asked him quietly. “You helped her.”
He nodded and looked over at me again. Our eyes met, and for the rest of his story, we stayed that way. “Maybe. I like to think so. I didn’t know the best thing to say to her, so I sat on the steps above her, and I pulled her back into me. I wrapped my arms around her and put my chin on her head and told her the only thing I could, that it was okay. That it was all right. That somehow, I’d figure out a way to make it better for her. I asked her to stop crying because I would always be there for her and I wouldn’t walk out the door. I told her I….” He stopped as his eyes grew brighter and his face trembled. “I told her that there was nothing she could do to make me leave her.”
I reached over with my free hand and thumbed the tears from his face. He kissed the palm of my hand, the tips of my fingers. “What did she say to you?” I asked hoarsely, knowing she must have said something.
“She said… she stopped crying and she looked up at me and smiled. She said that she didn’t know what she would have done without me. She said that she was glad that I was there for her and that she was sorry she was sad. She said that she loved me and that she always would. And then she kissed my forehead and pulled me up, and we went to the kitchen and we made peanut butter cookies and it was a good day. It was a good day, and that is what I want to walk away with. Paul, that’s all I want to remember.”
“Then that’s what you remember,” I told him. “That’s what you take with you, and fuck all the rest. The rest doesn’t matter. The rest isn’t important.”
“It’s like the stars, you know?”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
He pointed toward the sky. “You can’t see them now, because it’s daytime. But you know they’re still there because they haven’t left. Not really. It’ll just be a little bit of time before you can see them again.”
“Yeah, Vince. It’s like the stars.”
“Paul?”
“Yeah?”