Edward Adrift

“You’re right.”
    “I am?”
    “Yes, of course you are. I thought I needed to protect you—”
    “I wasn’t in danger. And I’m forty-two years old. I can protect myself. I’m developmentally disabled. I’m not stupid.”
    “I know. You’re right. You’re absolutely right.”
    I had prepared to say more on this topic, but now it seems like piling on, so I don’t.
    “I was wrong about something, though, Mother.”
    “What?”
    “I was wrong about Jay L. Lamb.”
    “No, you weren’t. You deserved to know before this. I just—”
    “Do you love him?” I ask.
    She looks at me as if she didn’t expect the question, which is OK. I didn’t expect to ask it, not like that.
    “Yes. Very much,” she says. “It surprised me. I didn’t think I had it in me to love again. But…yes. I love him.”
    I surprise myself with what I say next.
    “I’m glad.”
    I surprise myself further by realizing that I really am glad. I wouldn’t have chosen Jay L. Lamb for my mother. I have to be honest about this. But I don’t get to choose. If I did, I would want my father back. There are so many things I’ve learned. I would like to tell him about them. I would like to be his friend. I’m good at it now.

    We talk about one more thing before I leave, and that is my father. I tell her how he’s been in my dreams, and as she listens, she keeps curling the knuckle of her index finger into the corner of her eye.
    “It upset me that you said you don’t miss him,” I tell her. “I miss him all the time. I wish he hadn’t left us.”
    My mother invites me to sit down next to her on the couch. I do.
    “I was tired,” she says. “It was hard to be married to Ted Stanton. It wasn’t just the drinking, which was bad and getting worse, or what he did to you, although it will take me a long time to forgive him for that.”
    “I forgive him.”
    “You’re a good boy. But, listen, Edward, it was all-encompassing. Being married to your father was like being married to this city, and to every thought he had or word he said. Since he’s been gone, I’ve done what I want to do. Do you understand? I make the rules now. I choose what gets my time and attention. I never did that before.”
    I understand. I should. It was my most common complaint about him when he was alive. How does the saying go? It was his world, and we were just living in it? Something like that.
    “Did you love him?” I ask.
    “Of course I did.”
    “I did, too.”
    “And he loved us,” she said. “He’d be proud of you now, seeing you do the things you want to do.”
    There’s nothing I can say about that except that hearing it makes me happy and sad all at the same time. That’s peculiar.

OFFICIALLY TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2011
    At 6:18 a.m., I walk out to a spot where I can see the city lights below me. I’ve been driving for two hours, and my muscles are stiff. The first hint of sunlight peeks in from the east. The smell of pine and grass, even in late December, teases my nose. My left hand, cold and not yet limber, holds my bitchin’ iPhone.
    I dial the number. Traffic below me slowly rises from the trickle I watched from the parking lot as I ate my breakfast sandwich. Big rigs move east and west across the highway below me.
    The call connects.
    “The Derrick Motel. How can I help you?”
    “Hello, Sheila.”
    There is a pause and then a tiny gasp.
    “Edward?”
    “Yes.”
    “You didn’t call me Sheila Renfro.”
    “No.”
    “Where are you?”
    I look at the city, gleaming in the first light.
    “Sheridan, Wyoming.”
    “What are you doing there?”
    “Wondering if you have a vacancy.”
    “You’re coming here?”
    “Yes.”
    “But your mother—”
    “My mother says she is looking forward to seeing you in the spring when we go to Texas to see her and her new boyfriend.”
    “You want me to go to Texas with you in the spring?”
    “Yes. We can close up the motel for a few days for that trip.”
    “That means—”
    “Yes.”
    Sheila screams. She says “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!” And then she says, “Edward Stanton, you are the special man I’ve been waiting for. You are.”
    “I know I am. You were wrong when you said I wasn’t.”
    “Edward, I am so happy to be wrong about that.”
    “I’ll be there in nine hours,” I say, and the words are hard to form because I’m grinning so widely. “Nine hours depending on the vagaries of traffic and gas stops.” I think my face is going to