I started toward the kitchen door, my father followed me. “I really wish you’d picked another Saturday.”
Turning to face him, I said, “I think I came here because I was afraid to go to my mother.”
Britney stepped behind my father, pressing her nearly naked body against him. She put her arms around him, hands flat on his chest. He made no attempt to pull away from her.
“There’s something I’m blocking on,” I said, more to myself than to either of them. “Something I desperately need to know ... or need to do. And somehow, some way, it’s related to Mother. Somehow she has the answer.”
“Answers?” he said incredulously. “You know perfectly well that your mother’s about the last place to find answers.”
Smiling wickedly at me over my father’s left shoulder, Britney slid her hands slowly up and down his muscled chest and drum-flat belly.
“Sit down,” my father said. “I’ll pour you another coffee. If you have a problem you need to talk about, then let’s talk.”
Britney’s right hand moved low on his belly, fingertips teasing under the waistband of his hip-slung shorts.
He wanted me to see the desire that he inspired in this lush young woman. He had a weak man’s pride in his status as a stud, and this pride was so fierce that it filled his mind, leaving him quite incapable of recognizing his son’s humiliation.
“Yesterday was the anniversary of Gladys Presley’s death,” I said. “Her son wept uncontrollably for days after losing her, and he grieved openly for a year.”
A faint frown made the shallowest of furrows in my father’s Botoxed forehead, but Britney was too engrossed in her game to be listening to me with full attention. Her eyes glittered with what might have been mockery or triumph as her right hand slowly slipped deeper in his khaki shorts.
“He loved his dad, too. Tomorrow is the anniversary of Elvis’s own death. I think I’ll try to look him up and tell him how lucky he was from the very day he was born.”
I walked out of the kitchen, out of the house.
He didn’t come after me. I hadn’t expected that he would.
MY MOTHER LIVES IN A LOVELY VICTORIAN house in the historical district of Pico Mundo. My father had inherited it from his parents.
In the divorce, she received this gracious residence, its contents, and substantial alimony with a cost-of-living adjustment. Because she has never remarried and most likely never will, her alimony will be a lifetime benefit.
Generosity is not my father’s first or second—or last—impulse. He settled a comfortable lifestyle on her solely because he feared her. Although he resented having to share his monthly income from the trust, he didn’t have the courage even to negotiate with her through attorneys. She received pretty much everything that she demanded.
He paid for his safety and for a new chance at happiness (as he defines it). And he left me behind when I was one year old.
Before I rang the doorbell, I brushed my hand across the porch swing to confirm that it was clean. She could sit on the swing, and I would sit on the porch railing while we talked.
We meet always in the open air. I had promised myself that I would never enter that house again, even if I should outlive her.
After I’d rung the bell twice without a response, I went around the house to the backyard.
The property is deep. A pair of immense California live oaks stand immediately behind the house, together casting shade that is all but complete. Farther toward the back of the lot, sun falls unfiltered, allowing a rose garden.
My mother was at work among the roses. Like a lady of another era, she wore a yellow sundress and a matching sunbonnet.
Although the wide brim of the hat shaded her face, I could see that her exceptional beauty had not been tarnished during the four months since I last visited her.
She had married my father when she was nineteen and he was twenty-four. She is forty now, but she might pass for thirty.
Photographs taken on her wedding day reveal a nineteen-year-old who looked sixteen, breathtakingly lovely, shockingly tender to be a bride. None of my father’s subsequent conquests have matched her beauty.
Even now, when she is forty, if she were in a room with Britney, she in her sundress and Britney in that thong bikini, most men would be drawn to her first. And if she were in a mood to rule the moment, she would enchant them such that they would think she was the only woman among them.
I drew near to her before she realized that she was no longer alone. She raised her attention from the flowers, stood taller, and for a moment blinked at me as though I were a heat mirage.
Then: “Odd, you sweet boy, you must have been a cat in another life, to sneak across all that yard.”
I could summon only the ghost of a smile. “Hello, Mom. You look wonderful.”
She requires compliments; but in fact she never looks less than wonderful.
If she had been a stranger, I might have found her to be even lovelier. For me, our shared history diminishes her radiance.
“Come here, sweetie, look at these fabulous blooms.”
I entered the gallery of roses, where a carpet of decomposed granite held down the dust and crunched underfoot.
Some flowers offered sun-pricked petals of blood in bursting sprays. Others were bowls of orange fire, bright cups of yellow onyx brimming with summer sunshine. Pink, purple, peach—the garden was perpetually decorated for a party.
My mother kissed me on the cheek. Her lips were not cold, as I always expect them to be.
Naming the variety, she said, “This is the John F. Kennedy rose. Isn’t it exquisite?”
With one hand, she gently lifted a mature bloom so heavy that its head was bowed on its bent stem.
As Mojave-white as sun-bleached bone, with a faint undertone of green, these large petals weren’t delicate but remarkably thick and smooth.
“They look as if they’re molded from wax,” I said.
“Exactly. They’re perfection, aren’t they, dear? I love all my roses, but these more than any other.”
Not merely because this rose was her favorite, I liked it less than the others. Its perfection struck me as artificial. The sensuous folds of its labial petals promised mystery and satisfaction in its hidden center, but this seemed to be a false promise, for its wintry whiteness and waxy rigidity—and lack of fragrance—suggested neither purity nor passion, but death.
“This one’s for you,” she said, withdrawing a small pair of rose snips from a pocket of her sundress.
“No,
