All We Ever Wanted

  No. Why? I wrote back.

  Thinking about staying another night. Getting a migraine and just want to lie down. Will take an early flight tomorrow.

  Okay. Feel better, I wrote back, relieved that I could put off our conversation about Tom and the money a little longer. I gave Finch the update on his father’s return, and he just nodded.

  “Does Dad know you and Polly broke up?” I asked.

  “I dunno,” he said. “I don’t think I mentioned it.”

  “Have you talked to her?

  “Not much….She’s nuts, Mom.”

  I felt myself tense up, having long noticed that this was something men (and boys, obviously) did after any breakup. Dub their exes “crazy.” Discredit them, make it seem as if the men were lucky to have gotten out of the relationship. In fact, Julie had once told me it was the most common narrative in the aftermath of a divorce—the justification men used for their own misconduct. A form of misogyny.

  “Don’t say that, Finch,” I said.

  “Sorry, Mom. But there’s a lot of stuff you don’t know….She really can be a bitch—”

  “Finch!” I said. “Don’t ever call girls names like that. It’s so incredibly demeaning.” I wanted to add, Have you learned nothing from all of this?—but I stopped myself. It was the most we’d talked in such a long time, and I didn’t want it to end on a sour note.

  “Sorry, Mom,” he said again as he turned onto our street. “I just lost a lot of respect for her recently. Ya know?”

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding. “I know how that can be.”

  * * *

  —

  A SHORT TIME after we arrived home, Finch found me in my office.

  “Hey, Mom? What do you think of me going out tonight? There’s a pop-up show at Twelfth and Porter,” he said. “Luke Bryan’s playing. I know I’m grounded—but after that conversation with Lyla and all the drama with Polly, I could really use a night out. Please, Mom?”

  I hesitated. My gut told me to say no, but my heart wanted to say yes. We really had made so much progress today. “I don’t know, Finch,” I said, still thinking.

  “Can I at least email Bob Tate?” he pressed, referring to Kirk’s ticket broker, who could not only produce last-minute tickets to any show or sporting event, but also swing VIP passes or any other perk Kirk wanted. “See if he can get tickets?”

  “How much do you think they’ll cost?” I asked, feeling determined to make him more aware of money.

  “I don’t know,” Finch said, glancing down at his phone, typing something. “Maybe a couple hundred apiece since the venue’s small….”

  “A couple hundred apiece?” I said, shocked—not so much by the price itself but by Finch’s nonchalance.

  I made myself say no, then compromised. “You can go out, but find a way to have some cheaper fun.”

  “Fine, Mom,” he said, looking disappointed.

  For one second, I felt bad. It was so much more fun to make Finch happy, and my general overall philosophy was: if you can say yes, why not say yes? Of course that was Kirk’s philosophy, too, which had led us down the path of virtually always saying yes to our son, no matter the cost. After all, Kirk would point out, wasn’t it arbitrary to pick a random amount of money as a cutoff? If we could easily afford an eighty-thousand-dollar car for Finch, why get him a forty-thousand-dollar car he’d love so much less?

  Now I wanted to go back to that conversation about Finch’s car—and so many other things. I wanted to list all the reasons why not for Kirk. He shouldn’t take these things for granted….He needs to earn it….If the bar is already that high, where will he go from here?…And most of all: There is a difference between privilege and entitlement. It was a concept that seemed as lost on Finch as it did on his father. What made Finch, as an eighteen-year-old kid, think he could reach out to his dad’s ticket broker? That money was no object, although he’d never earned a dime on his own?

  I watched Finch type something else on his phone, then look back up at me. “I need to go get a haircut….If that’s okay with you,” he said with a trace of an attitude.

  “Watch your tone,” I said, although I knew my admonition probably fell under the category of “too little too late.”

  “Sure thing, Mom,” he said, sliding his phone into his back pocket as he walked out the door.

  * * *

  —

  MORE THAN THREE hours later, Finch returned to the house with the same shaggy hair he’d left with.

  “I thought you said you were getting a haircut,” I said, annoyed—with both the state of his hair and the fact that he hadn’t done what he’d said he was going to do.

  “The place was packed,” Finch said, referring to the Belle Meade Barber Shop—where he always went to get his hair cut. “I waited forever…and then finally left.”

  “You waited for three hours?” I said, thinking that while the place could be busy, it was never that busy.

  “I had other errands to run….And then I hit some balls at the club. With Beau.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And guess what?…He actually has tickets to Luke Bryan tonight. And he offered me one of them.”

  “Oh, really?” I said, wondering if Melanie had anything to do with this, or if Beau and Finch had just finagled it on their own. It crossed my mind, not for the first time, that Beau hadn’t been grounded for the party he threw. He was never punished.

  “Yeah. So? Can I go?”

  Something inside me told me to still say no—that the whole thing seemed a little fishy. But I’d explicitly told him that the price of the tickets was my issue, and now that was resolved.

  “Please, Mom?” Finch said, putting one arm around me. “Just this one night?”

  I sighed, then relented. “Okay,” I said. “But your punishment resumes tomorrow.”

  “Got it,” Finch said, grinning and already texting.

  I cleared my throat as loudly as I could, cueing him to look up at me. “Anything else you might want to say to me?” I asked, attempting light-heartedness, but also making a final point about the importance of basic gratitude.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Thanks, Mom. Seriously, I really, really appreciate it.”

  I nodded, then stepped forward to initiate a hug. It felt a little awkward, as it had been a while since we shared any real physical affection. “You’re welcome, honey,” I said. “I love you so much.”

  “I love you, too, Mom.”

  As he began to pull away, I held on to him for an extra few seconds, whispering, “Please be good tonight. No more trouble.”

  “No more trouble, Mom,” he said. “I promise.”

  I’ve never been to therapy—not because I don’t believe in it but because I can’t afford it (although I guess it would be more accurate to say that I would rather do other things with my limited disposable income).

  A few years back, however, I did start spending time with a retired shrink. Her name is Bonnie, and she’s an older widowed lady with just the right amount of eccentricity, who had hired me to build a tree house for her grandkids. A couple weeks into the project, when I discovered that her fanciful Swiss Family Robinson design exceeded her budget, she suggested we trade services. At first I agreed to the deal only to be nice—so that I didn’t leave a half-finished tree house in her yard—but I quickly grew to really enjoy our time together.

  I liked her open-ended questions, especially because I could work while I talked (which seemed a lot less intense than sitting on a couch saying all the same things). Anyway, we started with Beatriz and Lyla, quickly touching on all my single-father woes. That eventually led her to the subject of women and why I wasn’t dating and then my entire romantic past. She asked about my first time—how, where, and to whom I’d lost my virginity.

  I gave her the full scoop, telling her
all about the summer I turned fifteen, when my buddy John landed us jobs at Belle Meade Country Club. John lived on my street and grew up basically like I did (i.e., not exposed to golf). But somehow he developed a love for the game. I was pretty indifferent myself, but it was an easy, decent-paying gig. All John and I had to do was pick up balls from the range, clean the carts and clubs after use, and work with the caddies to get the members’ bags ready to play. Incidentally, all the caddies at Belle Meade were black. We heard the reason was because members didn’t want their daughters falling in love with them. Rather than worrying about the obvious racist implications of this, John and I took it as an insult to us, i.e., why weren’t members worried about their daughters falling in love with us white bag room boys?

  Cue Delaney.

  At sixteen, Delaney was an older woman—a rich older woman—who drove a cherry-red BMW convertible, a birthday gift from her father. As if that wasn’t impressive enough, Delaney had a reputation for being somewhat advanced. (We called it something a little different at the time.) We saw the way she sauntered around the pool in the tiniest string bikinis, undoing her top while she sunbathed facedown, exposing ample side boob (which we heard had also been a gift from Daddy). She loved to flirt and did not discriminate, shining her bright sexual light on everyone—married men, black caddies, and lowly bag room boys.

  John and I both developed a crush on Delaney, viewing her more as a potential sexual conquest than as a girl we thought we could actually date. At some point, we placed a far-fetched bet—twenty-five bucks for every base one of us got to with her. Over the course of the summer, we managed to work our way into Delaney’s social circle through another bag room boy who knew some members, and the bet no longer seemed so unrealistic. Then, one evening in early August, in addition to getting a blow job from Delaney in the backseat of her convertible, I earned myself seventy-five dollars from John. A true windfall. Unfortunately, word got out about our escapade—and I was fired. Delaney tried to intervene on my behalf, but her father quickly squelched her campaign for justice. He also told her she could never see me again, which only fueled our interest in each other, as those things have a tendency to do.

  We ended up going all the way a few nights later, which should have earned me another twenty-five dollars from John, but I didn’t charge him. It just didn’t seem right to get paid for your first time, especially with a girl as hot as Delaney.

  “Did it cross your mind that this was a sexist, demeaning bet?” Bonnie asked as she sipped her tea.

  “Yeah,” I said, sanding away. “I think it did. A little. But it wasn’t her first time. Besides, I got the feeling she was using me, too.”

  “So you were using her?”

  “At first. When I made the bet, yeah.”

  “But then?”

  “But then I started to like her. A little.”

  “And how was she using you?” Bonnie drilled away. “Also for sex?”

  “I like to think so,” I said with a smirk.

  Bonnie smiled back and shook her head.

  “I’m kidding. Delaney could have slept with anyone….I just made her feel like even more of a rebel.”

  “How so?”

  “You know ‘how so.’ Sleeping with a bag boy—a status that was beneath her. She got off on bucking the system, whether in the form of her swimwear or her choice of screws.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “Not in so many words. But she talked about that shit a lot. Money and social class. She even used that word a lot. Classy.” I rolled my eyes, feeling the inferiority all over again.

  “So you didn’t feel like…star-crossed lovers?”

  “No. I felt like a pawn,” I said. “Then, one night, she really went too far.”

  “Uh-oh. What did she do?” Bonnie asked.

  “She used the expression salt of the earth to describe my mother.”

  Always getting it, Bonnie winced, then groaned.

  “Yeah. I kinda lost my shit. I told her it was a condescending expression,” I said, envisioning Delaney sitting on the cement floor of my basement, sipping from a can of Budweiser, calmly insisting that the term was a compliment—synonymous with sweet and wholesome.

  I told Bonnie how I had asked Delaney what about my mother came across as sweet or wholesome when all she had done was say, Hello. Nice to meet you. Would you like a drink? We have Diet Pepsi and OJ.

  Bonnie laughed a hearty, openmouthed laugh. “And her reply?”

  “She got defensive. She didn’t like getting called out. She liked doing the calling out….But I pressed her. I asked if she’d ever call a doctor or lawyer ‘salt of the earth’? Or if there were any country club members who she would describe as ‘salt of the earth’?…She said no, because they all ‘sucked.’ I remember thinking that they couldn’t all suck, any more than all single mothers were ‘salt of the earth.’ But I dropped the subject. I figured it didn’t matter enough to argue about it.”

  “Why didn’t it matter enough?”

  “Because she didn’t matter enough,” I said with a shrug. “I was over it. Her. Right then and there.”

  “So you broke up that night?”

  “Yup,” I said, not admitting that we’d actually had sex a few other times before I decided, once and for all, that I didn’t want to be the guy she slummed with.

  It didn’t take Bonnie long to give me her full hypothesis. She didn’t use the words chip on your shoulder, but more or less that’s what she said. Basically, she concluded that I’d felt used by Delaney, my self-esteem damaged by both her and the whole Belle Meade Country Club experience. Somewhere deep within myself, she believed, I believed that I didn’t measure up—and afterward sought out people and situations where I’d feel less vulnerable to rejection. The irony, of course, was that I ended up with Beatriz, who ultimately left me, too, hence reinforcing my fears and sense of isolation. Bonnie’s words, not mine.

  Her theory made good sense, but for the fact that I didn’t spend a lot of time dwelling on the past. Nor did I think much about my present lack of friendships. In fact, the only time I really thought about my social life at all was when Lyla pointed it out, sometimes in the form of concern (“You should go out more, Dad”) and sometimes in the form of an accusation when I would tell her she couldn’t do something (“You want me to be like you and have no friends?”).

  But then all this happened with Finch, and suddenly I did feel a little lonely. Lost. It kept striking me as pretty pathetic that I had nobody to discuss the situation with.

  Which is how I remembered that I actually did have someone to talk to. So I drove over to Bonnie’s.

  “You think it’s weird how few friends I have?” I asked her pretty much out of the gate, as we stood in her kitchen and she fired up her stove to make us tea. Tea was the starting point of all of our visits.

  “Weird? No. I wouldn’t use that word. You’re an introvert. Not everyone needs a posse,” Bonnie said, stressing the word posse. She loved to sprinkle in what she considered to be current slang—although she was usually about a decade off.

  “But I had a posse as a kid. Before Beatriz,” I said.

  Bonnie nodded. “Yes. I remember you mentioning that. One of the fellows was the guy who got you the golf course job?”

  “Yes. John. Also Steve and Gerard,” I said, giving her a rundown on our foursome, how we had grown up together, roaming around the woods near our neighborhood as boys, then coming of age with a backdrop of beer, pot, and heavy metal music. When I think back to high school, I think of that group of guys, plus John’s longtime girlfriend, Karen, as cool as any dude, sitting around and just shooting the shit, talking about everything and nothing. Our favorite topic was how much we hated Nashville, at least our part of town—and how much we wanted to get the hell out of there and have lives different than those of the grown-ups grindi
ng it out in low-paying jobs around us. With the most book smarts and drive among us, only John actually succeeded in doing that. He went to Miami of Ohio for undergrad, Northwestern for business school, then landed on Wall Street, trading bonds, smoking expensive cigars, and wearing his hair all slicked back like Michael Douglas playing Gordon Gekko. Meanwhile, I went to junior college for three semesters before running out of money and going into carpentry, and Steve and Gerard went into their respective family trades, becoming an insurance salesman and an electrician. The only real twist in the story is that when John and Karen broke up, she ended up dating Steve, then breaking up with Steve to marry Gerard. It was a wonder we’d survived those breaches of the man code at all.

  “So who do you now consider your closest friend?” Bonnie asked as her kettle began to whistle, then screech. She grabbed the handle with an oven mitt, moving it to a back burner, instantly silencing it.

  I smiled and said, “Other than the lady who stiffed me for the tree house?”

  Bonnie laughed and said, “Yes. Other than that old bat.”

  I shrugged, explaining that the four of us, sans Karen, still tried to meet up when John came back to town to visit his folks every other Thanksgiving or so, but the dynamic felt a little forced.

  “So are you lonely? Or is this about something else?” Bonnie said.

  I looked at her, thinking that she was kind of brilliant. “Something else,” I said. “But I might need something stronger than tea.”

  Bonnie smiled, turned off the stove, and poured us both a glass of clear liquor, neat.

  “What’s this?” I said, swirling it in my glass.

  “Gin,” she said. “It’s all I have.”

  I nodded, then took the glass and followed her to her back porch, where we sat on wicker chairs and gazed up in the tree at my handiwork. As we sipped, I told her the whole story. Everything. Ending with Nina and Finch’s visit, and Finch asking for my permission to ask Lyla out.