This Is How We Love by Lisa Moore

Author:Lisa Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2022-04-12T15:15:00+00:00

xavier

ferris wheel

Xavier had met Violet at Thomas Amusements the summer they were both seventeen. He’d seen her around at parties, but he’d never spoken to her. She was working the cotton candy booth. He was with Lily Green, the girl he’d asked to the prom.

His parents had shown up at the meet-and-greet before the prom and he was already well into the gin with his tie loosened, the neck of the white shirt undone. When he introduced Lily and his mother, they seemed unable to speak and unwilling to look away from each other or to speak to anyone else.

He’d made it a habit to not tell his mother anything about his private life. Even when he was little he could see the way she was with Stella’s ex-girlfriends. His mother just went on loving these ex-girlfriends, as if she were their mother too, even after the relationships were over, inviting them around, once there’d been two exes of Stella’s and a current girlfriend all at the dinner table at the same time. He was determined to avoid that sort of situation.

There were his mother and Lily Green, proving his point. They both stood, very stiff, Lily swinging her sequined evening bag at her side; his mother cupping her elbows and rocking from her toes to her heels.

He saw that his mother was shy. He’d never seen her this way before. She looked dowdy and short next to Lily, who wore an ice-blue satin dress with diamonds cut away at the waist so that her bare skin winked through and the back was gone too, with a few criss-crossing ribbons to hold it onto her shoulders.

They’d said hello and shook hands, but they did not say anything else. His mother glanced around, as if looking for some help. She had a pink cardigan on her shoulders, buttoned at the throat, and a dress with giant blue roses, made of layers of a nylon material that she kept having to smooth down.

Xavier waited for his mother to pull through. His mother who might say anything, who had the capacity to startle with drilling questions, or flummox with shards of raw honesty that made people see themselves in new ways, his mother could only think to ask where Lily got her dress.

Lily had said, Online. A one-word answer that did nothing to crack the bizarre electricity between his date and his mother, both inert, unable to move. Lily was into girls, but she and Xavier had been partners on a science project, and they fell into going to the prom together without really talking about it much, because she was such a laugh.

I expect you to take care of him tonight, his mother blurted. I expect you to make sure, she was telling Lily, that nothing bad happens to him or to you. I trust you in this. Do you think you’re able to do that? It was a bizarrely sexist thing for his mother to say. Stella had gone to her prom in a dress that had been strategically ripped and torn, a pair of army boots.

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