Chapter 12 - Thanksgiving

"So, Jeremy, are you seeing anyone?"

Jeremy had known his mother would ask that question. He'd been dreading it all day, because he didn't want to lie to her but also couldn't imagine how he could possibly begin to explain about Liliana.

"Well, I -- "

"Leave the boy alone, momma. He's a grown man, now, it's his own business who he sleeps with. Or doesn't."

Jeremy blushed. His father laughed. "You don't have to be embarrassed, son. Either tell your mother what she wants to know or tell her it's none of her damned business."

It had been an eventful week. Jeremy had sent two more stories off to magazines, polished three more sonnets, wrote drafts of six more poems, including two more Liliana sonnets, as he had come to think of them.

He had also been late to work again on Tuesday, and Cecilia had warned him that he was skating dangerously close to having an official reprimand placed in his folder, which would trigger a suspension if he committed the same offense again within six months. He told her he was still sick, and that the upcoming four day weekend should help him get back on his feet.

He had a four-day weekend because he'd managed to get off Friday. It was the first year he'd been able to do it. Vacation days and personal holidays were by seniority, and Jeremy had finally managed to outlast enough of his co-workers on the job to actually accumulate some clout when it came to choosing time off.

Wednesday night Liliana had come to him, waiting for him in his bed when he came home from his nightly walk in the park.

Thinking about making love to Liliana while sitting at his parents' table over Thanksgiving dinner made him blush again.

"There is someone, but I . . . I don't know much about her yet."

"Where did you meet her?" asked his mother.

"In Tower Grove park. By the fountain pond."

"Oh, that's a lovely spot. What a place to meet! It sounds like a movie."

You have no idea, thought Jeremy. Nor any idea what kind of movie. But he didn't say anything.

"Well?" said his mother finally.

"Well what?"

"Is that all? What's her name? How old is she? What does she do?"

"Her name is Liliana," Jeremy answered. "I . . . I said I really don't know much about her. We just met last week," he lied. "I'm not even sure she likes me."

His mother's face, which had the shine of anticipated grandchildren, lost its beam as if someone had flicked a switch. "Oh," she said. "I thought . . . " she didn't finish, and didn't have to. Jeremy knew very well what she thought. The same thing she thought every time he mentioned any interest in a girl. That pretty soon her son would finally settle down with some nice young girl and begin producing the grandchildren she was itching to spoil.

"Sorry, mom. Maybe next Thanksgiving I'll be able to bring a girl down for your approval." He said the same thing every year, but so far he'd never had a relationship get serious enough he'd wanted to subject the poor thing to the inquisition he imagined his mother would have prepared against the eventuality that sooner or later he'd find someone to marry. He was pretty sure that, as much as she wanted him married off, his mother would find a hundred reasons why he shouldn't marry any girl he brought down to meet her. Back in high school, she had disapproved of every single girl he'd dated.

"Pass the green beans, please," Jeremy's father interrupted. Ever the peacemaker, he tried to move the conversation away from these troubled waters. "Looks like a pretty mile winter this year. I supposed it's more of that global warming they talk about."

"Actually," Jeremy said, "global warming is no guarantee of a mild winter. The overall average temperature is up, but one effect seems to be that the climate is becoming more extreme, so we could have pretty severe winter storms and some days even have record cold and it could still be associated with global warming."

"Wait a minute. You're saying global warming could cause us to get record cold? That doesn't make any sense."

Jeremy's mother was having none of it. "I asked if you were seeing someone, not if there was anyone you liked that you wished you were seeing. Have you asked this girl for a date, at least?"

Jeremy looked at his father, who shrugged, retiring from the battlefield. He'd done his best at deploying diversionary tactics, but now Jeremy was on his own.

"Mom, look. I just don't want to talk about my love life with you, OK? Whether Liliana and I have gone out or will be going out or will never go out just isn't . . . Well, it isn't any of your business."

"None of my business? Whether or not my only son remains single for the rest of his life and never gives me any grandchildren is none of my business? Whether or not your father's name carries on in the next generation is none of our business?"

"Frankly, no. And I'm not talking about that anyway. I promise that if I'm thinking of getting married, I'll let you know. Otherwise, it's none of your business."

"Well, I never!" Jeremy's mother sputtered. She was so angry her face was turning red.

"Mom, look. I'm sorry. I just . . . " he shook his head. "I'm 27, Mom. I'm not your little boy. I have my own life now, and I need space to live it on my own terms."

"You're twenty-seven years old and you haven't had a steady girlfriend for more than a month at a time since you were seventeen. It just seems like . . . You know, Jeremy, if you're gay I just wish you'd tell me so I can start getting used to the idea that I'm not going to have any grandchildren."

Jeremy started laughing, unable to stop. "No, Mom," he managed to squeeze out between whoops, "I'm not gay."

His mother was not mollified. "Well, all right then. Don't you think it's about time you settled down?"

He shook his head. He would never be able to explain to her the difference between his generation and hers, between his view of what was important in life and hers.
It wasn't that he didn't want children. Or rather, it was true that he didn't want children, but to his mother that must mean that he wanted not to have children, and that wasn't true either. Children weren't important to him, one way or the other. If it worked out that he married and had children some day, that would be fine. If he married a woman who didn't want children, that would also be fine. If he never married, he would miss not having found a woman to be his wife, but not because it would mean that he would be childless.

His mother -- and his father too, he suspected, though he didn't say much on the subject -- couldn't understand that. Children were so central to his mother's existence that he still marveled that he was an only child. He supposed there must be some medical reason why his parents didn't have more children, but he never inquired about it. His mother made up for it by volunteering to work with children in a variety of ways. She taught Sunday school, and in the summer Vacation Bible School, and volunteered at the local elementary school. "Children are our hope for the future," she would often say.

To Jeremy, children were not the hope of the future. They were just children. Noisy and annoying and cute and amusing and exasperating and endearing. He enjoyed being around kids in small doses, and he supposed he could get used to the idea of fatherhood if it ever came up. But for right now he was perfectly happy to deal with kids on the basis of termporary relationships he could end at any time. Children were best tolerated when one could quite easily hand them back to their parents, as far as Jeremy was concerned.

Driving back from the country, Jeremy wondered why he'd even gone. He could have spent more time with Liliana. Well, OK, he probably wouldn't have seen Liliana anyway, since he just saw her last night and she had so far never come to him to nights in a row. But he could have written. He could have done a lot of things instead of get into an argument with his mother. She always had criticism for him.

"My goodness, you're awfully thin!" was the first thing she'd said to him. "What have you been eating?"

He mumbled something, because the fact was he really hadn't been paying much attention to food lately and he probably had lost a bit of weight, but he didn't think it was as serious as she made out.

"You need to eat! Put some meat on those bones! Good thing you're here, we've got lots of food!"

She had insisted on loading him with leftovers, most of which he knew he wouldn't eat. It would sit in his refrigerator for a week, then he'd throw it out. Not that he didn't like his mother's cooking, but she had loaded him up with a week's worth of leftovers, and he'd get tired of eating turkey and mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes by tomorrow.

It was a long drive up in the dark, and the first part, from his parents' place -- which actually wasn't even in Caledonia, wasn't in any town, just closer to Caledonia than to any other place marked on a map -- to the major highway that connected bigger towns to St. Louis was a winding, twisty two-lane blacktop road that could be scary and dangerous at night. He felt comfortable on it, felt like he knew it, despite the fact that he traveled it only a few times a year these days. He'd grown up riding and then driving on these roads. Nearly lost his life once on this very road once, going too fast around a curve, finding himself in the wrong lane facing an oncoming car, and flying out of control when he jerked the wheel to avoid it, spinning around and landing in a ditch, wedged against a culvert. He had told his parents that the wind must have taken his car, and it was a windy day, but he never told them about the other car that he almost hit.

He had lost friends here, too. Not close friends, but in a town the size of Caledonia everyone knows everyone else. And one of his best friends was paralyzed from the waist down after crashing his sports car into a tree. Now he drove a van with a wheelchair lift.

So he drove carefully and not as fast as he once did, though not as slowly as a stranger to those roads would have been advised to do. Every curve had a sign posted before it saying what speed the highway department thought it was safe to use on that curve, but Jeremy knew from long experience that those signs were unreliable. Several signs said "50" for curves that Jeremy wouldn't even bother slowing down from his regular 60 m.p.h. for, while one posted "45" he took at 40 in the daytime and 35 at night.

Despite the fact that it took some brainpower to negotiate this tricky road, Jeremy knew it so well that he could almost do it in his sleep, so by the time he made it to the highway he'd already worked out the idea for another short story. He hoped he didn't lose it before he got home. He'd just have to keep thinking about it all the way home.

Or maybe not. There was a flourish of stores and gas stations at the intersection where the highway met the smaller road -- which was also officially a highway, of course. He stopped in one, got a cheap pen and notebook, and scribbled down his idea before getting back on the road.

He pulled off the road and scribbled ideas three more times before he made it home.