My son finds me at the edge of the pool with a second drink, working through the Sunday crossword on my phone. A timer marks how long it takes for the crossword to go from something I’m doing to something I’ve done. My son removes his shoes and socks and joins me. He wears an expression of discreet contentment, the look of someone being led into a surprise party he already knows about. I suspect he’s been smoking weed, but I’m not going to say anything. I’ve been wrong before. I set my drink and phone down on the pool deck, take out my wallet and hand it to him, and then close my eyes and list forward slowly, slowly, until I’m face down in the water. I kick off from the wall and drift toward the middle of the pool into a patch of colder water and do the dead man’s )oat for as long as I can. It’s the sort of thing that, when he was little, would’ve made him hysterical with laughter. He’s smiling when I resurface. How drunk are you? he says.

Article continues after advertisement

Not even two drinks drunk, I say, heaving myself up onto the edge. When I was a kid, I say, I never thought my parents were drunk. Though they usually were. I just thought people got happier at night. He gives me back my wallet and we sit there without talking as the chill night air seeps in.

I wake up before dawn feeling clearheaded, feeling like I’ve been granted a pardon after a long sentence. Looking at my son, who’s lightly snoring in the other bed, a single parasitic earbud in his ear, I think, Even the hardest days aren’t so hard. The birthday party when he ate bad sushi and we had to wait in the emergency room while he vomited into a shopping bag. The constant arguments during quarantine. The back and forth about him smoking weed. Today. Remember this, I always tell myself.

This clarity, this feeling of clemency that has everything to do with you and that you have nothing to do with. Remember it for when you need it next. But how do you remember a feeling?

Two missed calls from my mother, just past four a.m. One new voicemail.

Hi, honey. It’s after seven… guess you’re still asleep. They patched me up and now I’m home. Sitting here waiting to call the handyman to get rid of that cactus. I hate it. It doesn’t even flower. I just remembered something you might be interested in. I love you so much, baby. I wish you’d call me back.

I listen to it in the café while waiting for coffee, then replay it. Her voice is soft, beseeching. Never before has she called me honey or baby, so either the call was meant for Elias Parker or overnight she has summoned a newfound tenderness toward me.

I call her back. Her phone rings once and goes to voicemail.

The waitress calls me sweetie. Today I guess I’ll be the apple of everyone’s eye. Her cheeks are covered with light freckles that intensify down her neck and into the collar of her uniform. She wears a ring on every finger, each with a different stone—brown stone, green stone, blue, bluer, red—and it stirs something, a wisp of feeling or memory, as she brings me coffee and orange juice. I wanted to sit in the café and collect some thoughts about the trip while my son sleeps in, but I’m distracted by the waitress’s rings. Everything reminds me of something else.

The coffee tastes like urn. The orange juice tastes like can. Orange juice always makes me feel slightly ill because when I was a kid that’s the only time my mother would buy it. I’d ask for juice and she’d pour me a glass of Sunny Delight. She preferred it over real orange juice even though she grew up within sniffing distance of the orange groves. She never had much truck with nature. She liked things that came in predictable shapes, things you could open: cans, bottles, boxes.

For Halloween one year I dressed as a box of Surf detergent. She thought it was so clever she sent a photo of me to the corporation that manufactures Surf. Three months later they mailed her a coupon for $1.50 off her next purchase. She was livid, she ranted about it for years… but what had she expected? Free Surf for life? She never could shed her faith in products she saw advertised on television. She knew Ivory was 99.44 percent pure and Calgon would take her away. These days I can hear her TV in the background when we talk on the phone. It’s always tuned to the jewelry network, where the commercials are the show, and the shows are all about jewelry.

I sip orange juice in the café. I scribble. What do I have so far? Nothing I couldn’t have come up with from home. Circus music. Solar system bracelet. My mother’s disappointment with the wound clinic. I wonder what she’d expected. A koi pond?

A concierge? And does she really not remember who bought her the cactus?

I call the manager of her retirement home to ask if he can send someone to remove it. He says he already did. Someone stopped by her unit but she’d reconsidered. She likes it where it is. Your mother’s a very spirited lady, he says, a slight barb in his voice. I’m sure you heard about the protest a few weeks back. I’m glad we reached a compromise.

The call concludes with awkwardly deployed pleasantries.

We sure are happy for your mother, he says.

Us too, I say.

The protest was over pesticides, she tells me when she calls back. She wanted the groundskeepers to stop spraying behind their building because egrets and ibises nest there. She radicalized some other residents and they all put homemade signs on their doors and wrote letters to the director of the retirement home. Finally the director gave in and they stopped spraying. She didn’t tell me about it because she thought it would embarrass me. You know how you get, she says. These birds are incredible. I’ve seen them since childhood but Elias Parker had to point them out for me to notice them. I saw a roseate spoonbill the other day. It landed, opened its wings to sun itself, and )ew off. None of the bird people here believe it. They’re such snobs.

They say it’s too far north for a spoonbill. I said, Okay, then someone should tell him that.

Elias Parker? I say.

No, she says, the bird people.

But who’s him?

Back and forth we go until everything is tucked in and put to bed. Him is the spoonbill. She tells me her shin feels fine but since she started taking the pain meds she keeps hearing people on TV say her name. And, no, she can’t explain why she changed her mind about the cactus. A voice told her to say no to whoever was knocking on her door so that’s what she did. Did the people on TV tell you that? I ask. She doesn’t laugh.

I bought her the cactus the last time I visited. It’s a flowering ocotillo. The day before I )ew out she said she had a surprise. She wouldn’t tell me what it was. She didn’t want to spoil it. Her coyness, the way she protected it, I suspected it involved my father, something she remembered or found.

I met her in her dining hall. I hadn’t seen her in a year and was startled by how old she looked. She’d let her hair go fully gray and her eyes, usually clear bright blue, had dimmed. She had trouble standing up to hug me, so I leaned down and brie)y put my arms around her and felt her body, somehow fragile and rigid at the same time.

Two men sat on either side of her, one in a hat with WHO RESCUED WHO stitched across it and the other wearing a pearl-button shirt. I’d been up since three a.m. and I started babbling about Blue Zones, regions in the world with high life expectancies. I watched a documentary on the airplane and I told them about a centenarian in Costa Rica who rides horses and chops firewood, while the man in the hat regarded me with open scorn between bites of chicken-fried steak. The key to longevity, I told them, in this part of Costa Rica, is all the work that needs to be done morning to night—if they died, who would do all the work? Also, it had something to do with corn. Meet Elias Parker, my mother told me, gesturing to the man with the pearl-button shirt. He’s a retired dentist. He’s the one I told you about.

At this point I’d never heard the name Elias Parker in my life. I shook his hand and thought that was it, but he followed us back to her unit, came inside, and fixed himself a scotch at the sink. I whispered to her, Who is that? She repeated his full name and I said, No, what I mean is, who is he, like, to you? That’s when she told me they’re in love. I looked at him again, running his hand under the tap and flicking water into his scotch glass, and asked her, Is he aware of this?

We sat on her couches while they reminisced about high school. Or while she reminisced and Elias Parker interjected in his vaguely Hungarian accent: Oh yeah, we use to like zee dances. Remember passing notes in the hall? my mother said. Sure, Elias Parker said. Love notes. For me it’s all so sweet like a dream.

__________________________________

From Only Son by Kevin Moffett. Used with permission of the publisher, McSweeney’s. Copyright © 2025 by Kevin Moffett.