Boy by Blake Nelson

Author:Blake Nelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse

34

The next day I drove to the airport and picked up my mom. She was quiet on the ride home. I helped her carry her bags in and went up to my room.

A moment later she yelled up the stairs, “Gavin! Can you come back down here please!”

I came back down the stairs.

“What is this?” she said. She was standing in the middle of the living room with her arms crossed.

“What is what?”

“This,” she said, waving one hand in the air. “It reeks like cigarette smoke in here,” she said.

“Oh . . .”

She beckoned me further into the room and pointed out a tiny Mexican salsa bowl that had been pushed under the sofa. It had several of Kai’s cigarette butts in it.

“Oh, sorry about that,” I said.

“I can’t have you smoking, Gavin,” my mother said, suddenly on the verge of tears. “Do you understand that? Not now. Not with everything else that is happening.”

“I don’t smoke, Mom. Some friends came over. Kai and Antoinette.”

She shook her head. I couldn’t tell if she believed me or not. It didn’t seem to matter. She snatched up the salsa dish, marched into the kitchen, and threw it into the garbage.

I went back upstairs.

• • •

My mother worked for a small advertising agency before she met my dad. This was in San Francisco, during her first years out of college. One of our photo albums was dedicated to this period, my mother’s life in the early nineties. As a little kid I loved these pictures. Mom sitting on the fire escape of her apartment. Mom in black dresses and Doc Martens. Mom on a scooter or drinking cocktails after work at the trendy offices of the Echo Advertising Agency.

At one time she was engaged to one of the founders of Echo, Peter Frohnmeyer. He was very good-looking and fashionable. Apparently he was from a wealthy San Francisco family. There were lots of pictures of the two of them: at the beach, at a big New Year’s party, on a boat. It was quite a life, judging from the pictures. It always looked like my mother was having a great time.

But then my dad had appeared on the scene. My tough-guy, no-bullshit dad. I never learned the exact story of how he stole her away from Peter Frohnmeyer. The most Russell and I were ever told was what a great victory it was for our dad. One of his many successes.

In another photo album there were three or four pictures of my dad at around the same time. He had moved to San Francisco too. He was supposedly very poor when he was in law school and yet a year later he was somehow driving a convertible. He looked pretty good in these pictures, with all his hair and less flab in his face. But it’s obvious from the most casual photos that he was the more serious person. A certain grim determination was visible in his face, even in the old Kodak pictures. Whatever he did to get my mother away from Frohnmeyer, I’m sure that was part of it.

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