There was something about fresh-cut grass that turned Jaylin’s stomach.
He powered off the lawn mower and shed his shirt from his sweaty chest. He wasn’t quite sure if it was the smell or the summer sun, but he couldn’t go a second longer without a break.
He lunged inside, where his mother sat on the couch, playing a farm game on her phone and watching trashy daytime television.
“So what is it today?” he asked, fetching a glass of water and dumping far too much lemonade mix inside.
“He,”—she pointed with her phone—”is cheating on that woman right there with her own mother. A woman older than me. Can you believe that?” She giggled the way she always does on a good day—the whimsical titter that Jaylin so loved the sound of. He wished he could capture it from the air and bottle it. Then he wished he didn’t have to wish for things like that.
“Well, would you?” She was flashing her powder blue eyes over her shoulder at him, and it took Jaylin a moment to realize he’d missed her question entirely.
“Sorry, what?”
“Would you sleep with an older woman, Jaylin?”
He choked on his lemonade, wiping the cold river from his chin.
She’s caught his expression and giggled again, that effervescence bubbling out of her like a good champagne. “I just want to make sure I’m not leaving you here with some strange Oedipus complex. Or was it Electra? I never paid much attention in psychology.”
“Mom. There are no… ‘complexes’. Nothing’s complex.“
“Oh, don’t be so embarrassed. Age is nothing but numbers. And gender too, you know. All just a bunch of hooey.”
“What is up with you today?” He grinned at her from behind his glass of lemonade. “Hoping I’ll get laid this summer? Want to set me up on a blind date with one of your friends from your quilting club?”
“Oh heavens no,” Julia said. “Not those sluts.”
Jaylin laughed, then choked, the lemonade burning at his his nose.
“I’m just saying, it would be nice to see my only child find the love of his life,” his mother said. “Whether that love is a girl your own age, or a man in his forties. So long as you’re happy, dear.”
Jaylin stopped pinching his searing sinuses and turned to her, those words a brazen breeze on his face. “You think the love of my life could be a man?”
“Oh, honey.” She pushed herself up off of the couch the way a decrepit old woman rises from a bus bench. She was only forty—too young to be moving like this. At first, she wobbled a bit and Jaylin felt himself flinch, ready to hurdle his body over the couch and catch her at a moment’s notice. But she balanced herself with a smile and shuffled slowly on her little pink slippers to meet him.
“There ain’t no such thing as straight.” Her hips knocked into him as she took the counter at his side. “Especially with you. Now hand me a mug, will you?”
Jaylin stood on his toes to reach the cupboard. “The hell does that mean?” he asked, fetching the creamer from the fridge while his mother filled the cup with stale, reheated coffee. “With me?”
“You’ve always been a bit different when it came to boys, that’s all I’m saying.” He watched her pour a disgusting amount of creamer into her cup. She always liked things sickeningly sweet. “Anyway, I remember the way you used to watch them during soccer. That one boy, Brian—”
“Brian Delgato.” Jaylin scratched his had as he recalled the foreign exchange student from Sophomore year with the straight teeth and knee-quivering accent. “Yeah, I remember him.”
“You had the biggest crush on him!”
All her teasing flushed him down to the fingers, but Jaylin didn’t deny it. In fact, he fell quiet altogether. Because she was right; Brian Delgato had abs you could melt butter on—abs so swollen and defined, you could roll a quarter down his sternum, and it would keep propped up like a wagon wheel. At sixteen, he thought, maybe if I just stare long enough, I can build up some kind of sexual tolerance. Stop getting a woody every time Delgato was on the skins team. It never happened.
“So do you?” his mother finally piped up. “Do you like boys?”
Jaylin traced the tiles in the counter. “Can’t I like both?”
“You can like both,” his mother said, gently turning him by the biceps to face her. Her smile was warm, her brows much thinner than they used to be. “You can like boys or girls, or anyone in-between or out. Or you can like no one—no one at all; I hear some people are like that, but you know—it doesn’t matter to me. Not one bit.” Her eyes crinkled and glistened, and her fingers were thinner than he remembered when she reached for his face. “It doesn’t matter because I love you more than anyone else ever could.”
He shut his eyes as she brushed a lock of blond from his brow, and held his cheeks in her bony hands. It hurt, those words. It hurt because Jaylin knew the truth in them—he knew she truly did love him more than anything else on Earth. No one would ever love him like this again.
“You need to eat more,” she said, clearing the emotion from her throat. “You’re too damn handsome to be skin and bones. I’ll get us some Pizza. You finish mowing the lawn.”
Jaylin nodded and her warm hands slipped away. He ached at moments like these. Every time, it felt like a predetermined goodbye. Like she wanted their farewell to be a sweet one because no one knew just what time death would come knocking. Just that he would. Very, very soon, he would.
Jaylin blinked to dry his misty eyes and flee the place before his mother noticed the sheen of tears. But as he tried to escape the kitchen, she struck up a sudden “Oh!” and Jaylin turned to face her.
“I just thought of another boy you had a crush on! That Tyler boy—Tyler Black. The one that lived next door. Used to do the mowing before you had the muscles for it.”
A cold feeling settled in between his ribs.
“I wonder how he’s doing,” she pondered, and Jaylin’s eyes swept to the floor, where they lingered on the dust and the dirt and the tiny house spider that skittered towards him. He felt as if he should be down there with them. On the ground, with the pine needles and the cobwebs. A tiny pest under the weight of that name.
His shoulders jumped and his feet carried him past the linoleum, his shoe pressing down on the little spider. “Who knows.”
_
It took little more than a text with the word “pizza” to summon Tisper to his front door. His mother went to bed after a few slices, and the two of them holed away in Jaylin’s room with the last of hot-and-ready pepperoni.
“I will never get used to this TV,” Tisper was complaining, pushing a VHS tape into the player.
The outdated flatscreen flickered and blinked alive with the grainy rewind screen of the horror movie Tisper had settled on.
“Seriously?” Jaylin groaned.
“Seriously,” Tisper said.
“Why do you even like movies like this?”
“I don’t know, they’re charming,” Tisper said. “They take me back.”
“To the nineties?” Jaylin laughed.
Tisper laughed too, just a little. “Yeah, to the nineties. Before Mom and Dad and Phillip.”
“And Tyler,” Jaylin noted to himself.
Tisper crawled down beside him and curled her head against his shoulder. “And Bobby.”
“Has he been around?” Jaylin asked.
“Not yet, thank God. How’d it go with Olivia?”
Jaylin could tell she wanted a change of subject, but to go from Bobby to Olivia was like choosing rotten eggs over spoiled milk. “Well, I’m not dead.” Jaylin shrugged and batted blindly for the remote. The introduction music grew climactic, too loud for his liking. He could tell by the deep breath she took next that Tisper had something on her mind, so he muted it all together.
“Are we ever gonna meet anyone, Jay?” She turned her head to look at him and he noticed for the first time the tired lines under her eyes. “Anyone better than each other? Anyone who doesn’t hate us in the end?”
“You will. I know you will.”
“What if I don’t? What if—” Tisper stopped her words to chew on her lower lip, eyes sliding over the pattern of his blankets.
Jaylin snatched her hand from the sheets. “You are the most beautiful person I know,” he said. “And you can do a hell of a lot better than Bobby, so don’t even consider it. The first thing he’d do is fuck you over, and the guy just doesn’t have that many Camaros for me to smash, Tis.”
Tisper laughed and lassoed her arms around his neck. “We’ll both meet someone good. And then we’ll go on double dates.”
“Sure.”
“We’ll live in houses next to each other. The kind with balconies.”
“What else?”
“Well, my husband and I will adopt, of course. You’ll buy a boat—or whatever married guys do. And I’ll borrow your things and never give them back, and you’ll complain about my raucous love-making.”
Jaylin wrinkled his nose. “I don’t want to think about your raucous love-making.”
“Oh, don’t play naïve. Exactly how much did you make by jumping Olivia’s bones today?”
Jaylin turned his head to look at her, a grin aching his cheeks. “Two-fifty.”
“You said two-hundred yesterday!”
“Well, I happened to earn an extra fifty.”
Tisper scrunched her face. “I don’t want to know how.”
“It’s a lucrative business, Tis.”
“And I respect that, but keep your lucratives far, far away from me.”
“That’s not a word, but I appreciate the way you still somehow made it disgusting.”
Finally, he got a laugh out of her. A real laugh. A beautiful, happy, blissful laugh. Then Tisper knocked her head gently against his own. “Do you really think someone will fall in love with me, Jay?”
“It would be impossible not to.” Jaylin brought a tress of her hair in front of them both and twisted the black silk between his fingers. “You’re the loveliest person I know.”
That was the difference between Tisper and himself. She was a romantic. She saw the good in the world, even when it had shown her nothing but ugly. She made him optimistic. She dreamed of things others only read in romance novels. She expected them.
Tisper believed in falling in love. Jaylin believed in wanting to.
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