Chapter 1

Hi, my name is Dave. I’d like to tell you about what happened after my father suffered a devastating stroke.

When I came home from college for the summer, my mother asked me to go through the belongings in my father’s office. She didn’t want to do it herself, and Dad had become visibly agitated whenever she mentioned it to him. Of course, I assured her that I would take care of everything.

By the time I arrived home, my mother was less distraught than she had been two months earlier, but she was still visibly relieved to see me. She had become exhausted by the constant stream of sympathy from friends, relatives, and, perhaps most frustratingly, acquaintances she barely knew.

She avoided every invitation to meet for coffee or get together, dreading the awkward conversations that inevitably followed—conversations filled with concern about Dad and questions about how she was coping on her own.

She eventually asked me to protect her from all of it. She wanted me to act as a kind of gatekeeper because she found it difficult to turn people down herself.

In her own words, “I need you to look after me.”I didn’t read anything into it at the time. My mother was twenty years younger than my father, yet still twenty years older than me. Five years earlier I’d carried a raw, adolescent obsession with her—stroking myself every night while picturing the soft curves of her late-thirties body until I finally drifted off. Now, though, I only saw a worn, exhausted woman.

Those old, half-buried flashes of desire didn’t return until later, when I was clearing out my father’s office. At the back of the closet I found a cardboard box packed with letters. What began as idle curiosity turned to cold shock as I realized the letters belonged to a private circle—an incest group in which men exchanged detailed, true accounts of their experiences with their own mothers.

Taped inside the lid was a short list of rules: All stories must be true.

All names must be changed to protect the innocent.

The story must be about you and your Mother.

The first letter in the first bundle was my father’s own submission. He had signed it “Ron,” yet he broke the second rule by using my grandmother’s real name. Later I would learn that was not the only rule he had broken.

This was the first story in that set of files. My father’s story.

Hello all. Let me introduce myself. My name is Ron. Not my real name, but everything else I’m about to tell you is true. I grew up in the midwest on a farm, I suppose like a lot of you, even some of you city folk. Times were hard then, even before the depression. And there wasn’t a lot of fun to be had like there was in the cities. On the farm, there was always work to do and, without a car, too many miles for us young folk to get together anyway with the little time we did have to ourselves. So we mostly socialized within our own families or our closest neighbors.

We did have a car, a Ford, but it mostly got used for just for going to church and trips to town for supplies. When I came of age, I made all the trips to town in the Ford, with my mother, and usually to church too. My father needed to stay and work the farm. He said he didn’t have the time for socializing, and I may as well do the driving since I wasn’t any good at fixing things or doing real work. He figured I should learn how to be good at something, and the only chance for that was if it was something I liked doing. Well, he said a piece there, he did.

My father was almost sixty then. I think he didn’t come to town because he just plain didn’t have any patience for people anymore. He liked being on the farm, and he liked being on his own. Most of the time during the week he was out in the fields all day anyway, and at night he was in the shop or the barn after dinner until he went to bed, never later than nine o clock.

My mother, Ellen, wasn’t even forty by several years. When I look back at it, she was too young to be with an old crock like my father. She was a pretty woman when she fixed herself up for church or going to town. She had long red hair that she often got me to brush for her because my father was always too busy though she once said that he used to like doing it for her.

Even at that age, my mother had laugh lines around her eyes, and when she smiled, there were up and down crinkles in her cheeks on either side of her mouth. But, like I said, she was still pretty. She and I spent a lot of time together since my father was always tinkering and I was had a thousand excuses for avoiding work in the field in favor of doing chores closer to home. Father said it was just plain easier to do things himself. I think he preferred being by himself or he would have made me come anyway.

Mother was a lonely woman, I realize now, looking back. She looked forward to church Sundays and loved going to town. After several times driving to town on my own with Mom, the excitement of driving wore off enough that I began to pay more attention to Mom. She was one of the prettiest women in our little town but she kept a polite distance from people, despite her seeming need to be near them. I know now that she was treading a careful path, making sure she didn’t encourage the men or spark the jealousies of their wives who were all too aware that Father was much older than she.

Town was necessary for her sanity but it was also a social minefield. On the way to town, she was tense. In town, she was careful and controlled. On the way home, alone with me, she was at ease, sometimes even exuberant. She would chatter away, reliving her conversations with other women, and what she thought they were really thinking. I was her confidant. She would lean over closer to me to make a point, sometimes whispering when repeating some gossip or confiding her thoughts, touching my arm if it was a particularly juicy bit of news. I loved it.

I started driving more slowly on the way back to the farm, even though I loved to go fast, just to drag out our trip home. Mom never complained. I think she liked having more time away from home where there were no chores to do. That’s probably why she never complained when I took our first detour, or maybe it was because it wasn’t very far out of our way and it was a beautiful day.

Because I liked Mom being close, leaning in, touching me on my arm, I kept the window open and complained about not being able to hear her. At first, she just talked louder. Then, she leaned closer to me most of the time, which I enjoyed immensely. Finally, at no urging from me because it never crossed my mind, she simply moved her cloth shopping bags from between us to the door, or on the floor, and sidled up next to me. She would sit there, thigh pressed against mine, and yack almost into my ear as I drove, her arm on the seat behind my shoulders, sometimes curling around to cup my neck.

As soon as we crested the small hill coming out of town, she would shift her bags and slide over. And when we neared our property, she always moved back to her door. On the rare occasions when we passed another car, or one came up behind us, she would lean back over to her side. It was as if our closeness was a secret as well as her confidences in me. I wasn’t sure why then but this really excited me. It was as if my Mom and I shared a world all to ourselves that no one should know about. Always, just before she pulled away, Mom would lean in and give me a big kiss on my cheek, sighing, “Well, we’re home already.” I took this as a signal that it was OK to take longer detours.