The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell(79)

“Let me,” my mother said, walking in and slapping at my hands.

I tilted my chin so my mother could undo my abomination and deftly craft the knot. At six feet, I had surpassed her in height, but standing there on the day of my high school graduation, it seemed that mirror revealed much more than our discrepancy in height. My mother had aged. We had celebrated her forty-third birthday that year, and now, standing so close to her, I could see the depth of the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes, what she called her “worry lines,” and how her once-unblemished skin now displayed the inevitable markings that only time delivers.

I had never wanted to turn back the clock. Despite my friendships with Ernie and Mickie, my grade school years had not brought fond memories. I had been happy to leave David Bateman and Sister Beatrice behind. High school had been better, but for all my achievements, I could not ignore the fact that, but for Ernie, I was rarely invited to parties, no girl had invited me to her school prom, and, but for Mickie, I would have missed mine. Yes, I’d achieved straight As, but that was a little easier when you spent most nights, including weekends, studying. Still, I had not considered that my mother would someday grow old. Grandma O’Malley, who had come down for my graduation and waited downstairs in the living room, had once proclaimed, “Time is wicked. It comes and goes like a thief in the night, stealing our youth, our beauty, and our bodies.” I had watched Grandma O’Malley, a proud and simple woman, shrink and wrinkle and turn white over the years. But we expect that of our grandparents. Not our parents. For some reason, we think our parents will never grow old, perhaps because when they do, we are forced to acknowledge that we will one day grow old, and we face our own mortality.

The barber who cut my father’s hair and now cuts mine said it more simply than Grandma O’Malley. “None of us is getting out of here alive.”

My mother pinched the knot and slid it up to my neck. As she raised her eyes, I saw that she had accomplished the task through tears.

“There,” she said, turning her head.

I reached out and hugged her. The tears we shed that morning were our silent acknowledgment that while the years might not have been extraordinary, as she had so diligently prayed, they had been ours. Come the fall, I would be leaving for college and my mother would lose her little boy, and I would lose the person who had always been there for me, my fiercest advocate since the day I’d been born.

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you, too,” she said. Then she stepped back, gathering herself. “Enough. I’m going to get makeup all over your white shirt.”

“You don’t need makeup, Mom.”

“I agree.” My father stepped in from the hallway. He’d been feeling better but still looked thin and tired. However, I knew nothing short of wild horses could keep him from attending my graduation. I don’t know how long he’d been standing in the hall, or how much he’d observed and heard. My father knew the depth of my relationship to my mother, and he didn’t begrudge us a moment of it. My relationship with him was different. He’d raised me to be a man, and he was proud of me. But to my mother—I suspect to all mothers—their little boys will always be their little boys, no matter how old those boys become.

I retrieved my royal-blue cap with the gold tassel and grabbed the hanger with my matching graduation gown. My mother had ironed the fabric until the pleats could cut paper. When I turned back, I watched my parents depart my room, my mother wiping at tears, my father’s arm around her shoulders, consoling her. I remember being glad they would have each other for support when I left the following fall, and I realized how much I would miss them.





16

After the ceremony, we celebrated at a restaurant with the Cantwells. Mickie joined us. Her graduation from the public school would not be for another two weeks. After the restaurant and all the toasts to our futures, Ernie and I dropped off our parents and grandparents to head to one of several graduation parties.

“Are you going with them, Mickie?” my mother asked as she stepped from the car.

Mickie begged out. “Not me, Mrs. H. I don’t want to be the only girl in a testosterone-fueled room full of glory-days jocks reminiscing about their high school sports careers. I’ll stay here and watch TV with you, if that’s okay.”

When Mickie put it that way, I couldn’t blame her. But I also knew that was not her motivation for staying with my mom. My mom had done her very best to put on a happy face. That’s not to say she wasn’t sincerely happy for me, but with every new beginning, there is an inevitable end we must first accept, and my mother was struggling to accept that her boy had finished high school and would be leaving home in just a few short months. Mickie had begged out of the parties to be with my mom and to cheer her up. In many ways, Mickie had become the daughter my mother never had, and, I suspected, my mother had become the mother Mickie wished she’d had.

That night Ernie and I hit four parties. There was a bit of the glory-days reminiscing, as Mickie had predicted, but not by Ernie or me. We weren’t viewing graduation as an end, as were some of our classmates who had chosen not to go on to college or who had enlisted in the military. Despite my reticence when it came to new adventures and meeting new people, I was looking forward to attending Stanford and living with Ernie. I’d already looked up the school paper, the Stanford Daily, and was hoping I could write for it.