Please Don't Come Back from the Moon by Dean Bakopoulos

Author:Dean Bakopoulos
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 0151011354
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2011-12-12T11:00:06+00:00

7. Capable of Love

MOST OF OUR MOTHERS, your wives, they've moved away. They now live in condos in Canton and Livonia and Westland, and some of them live with men, men who are cleaner, better dressed, and more polite than you ever were. They have steady jobs, retirement plans, crisp clean foreign cars, hairless knuckles.

These are the kind of men we, or anybody for that matter, should like. Still, we can't help it: we regard these men with suspicion, and when we are invited over for Sunday dinner, we feel as if we are dressed poorly or as if we look pathetic, waiting for roast beef or lemon chicken to be heaped on our plates.

When these men get up to clear the table, our mothers seize the moment we have alone and lean in, touch our arms, and ask, "So you're all right, honey? You're okay?"

Of course we are!

We still live in those houses, the ones you left. We've stayed behind, long past the time we should have moved out, and our mothers simply turned the houses over to us, moved in with their new husbands, worked their new jobs, lived their new lives.

On the walls of our houses, there are posters of retired Detroit athletes, such as my poster of Lou Whitaker and Alan Trammell, the Tigers' great second base—shortstop combo from the eighties. On the bookshelf, next to my high-school Spanish book, is a cigar box full of ribbons from a summer league swim team. On my dressers are buttons boasting photos of me and my old homecoming dates. Sweet girls. One of them now lives in Korea or Taiwan or somewhere with missionaries; one of them dates a golf pro with perfectly muscled, tanned forearms; one is earning a Ph.D. in women's studies.

It's hard to get rid of all this clutter when you've never left your mother's house.

Our houses—your houses—need new roofs and new paint and our driveways need resurfacing. These houses are rich with smells I can't explain, like clean, damp towels, like memories. On weekends, we mow the lawns and trim the hedges, we do all the maintenance we can that doesn't cost any money, and we look around at our yards, our trim lawns and sidewalks swept clean, and we say, here it is, here is the order in our lives, here we are in Maple Rock.

Sometimes we have girlfriends who move in with us, and they are impressed that we are homeowners. They look at our master bedrooms and white kitchens and think, this, this is a man I could marry. But sooner or later, something disintegrates: maybe it's our fault, maybe it's not. Sometimes, someone will break into the house, or there will be a rock thrown through the window, or there will even be gunshots in the night. Maple Rock is not quite what it used to be. Sometimes these incidents signal the end of our relationships. Other times, the women we are trying to love accuse us of moodiness, drunkenness, and indifference.

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