The Boy Comes Home

She stands at the kitchen sink on a Saturday morning, rinsing a bowl, waiting for a visit from her son, who hasn’t been home since leaving for college. Looking out the window, her eyes fall on a landscaped cluster in the corner of the backyard—two aspen trees skirted by red twig dogwood and bordered in gray river rocks, the whole scene dusted in a late snowfall. Her vision blurs and then doubles for a moment, the side effect of a new medication she’s taking for a recent heart condition. She puts the bowl in the dishwasher and wonders how many times she’s gazed out this same window, watching her boy, lost in his own world of play. Even as a young mother she marveled at this, seeing how he and his two older sisters shared her world but also occupied worlds of their own. What part connected them to her, born of her body, born in the covenant, but having bodies and spirits of their own?

She was surprised this morning to get a call from her son, saying he and his girlfriend were coming to town. “For Dad’s wedding,” he simply said. She was glad he didn’t say more, glad he didn’t go into it all. It’s been more than a year since her divorce, and today her husband is marrying someone else. But her boy wants to stop by the house, and that’s good. He wants to pick up some things from his childhood—trading cards, books, an old video game system in the attic. He can only stay a few minutes, he said, but she’ll take it. She’s just glad he’s coming. She wants to get this right.

In the past three years she’s seen him exactly twice, once when she passed that way to see her mother in Oregon, and once for his twenty-first birthday, when she met his girlfriend, Lindsey. Things are different with her daughters, who live in other states but call every few days and visit whenever they can. The girls let her love them, which is all she wants from her boy. Some connection to her son, who’s part of her—that’s all she wants. Some inkling that it won’t always be a strain to talk and laugh and be—what exactly?—family, mother and son, maybe even friends? 

Other mothers have told her, “Boys are different. With boys, you have to let them go, let them be men.” The boy’s mother has tried this. She’s complied with the distance he puts between them. She even tried not to hate the therapist at the college health center who advised her boy to stop coming home for the holidays. “Christmas just wouldn’t be healthy,” her son explained over the phone his first semester. “I just don’t think I can handle it.”

But today he is coming home, even if just for a few minutes. She has on nice jeans and a mint-green shirt, which she’s wearing untucked. She wants to look nice without looking like she’s tried. Though she hardly ever wears shoes in the house, even in the winter—her husband used to tease her about this—she wears clogs this morning. Maybe she can walk her boy to the car after, keep him talking, have a few more precious moments. She’s off work today, which is a blessing, and she’s decided not to bring up certain topics. She won’t ask about the Church. She’s given up on his serving a mission. When she visited a year ago, it was obvious that he and Lindsey were sleeping in the same room. If he really loved her, wouldn’t he marry her? But no, she mustn’t go into that. She mustn’t do anything he can’t “handle.”

Searching the pantry, she finds a bag of peanut M&M’s, his favorite. She grabs a little crystal bowl from the cupboard, fills it, and places it on the kitchen island bar, thinking it might make him stay another minute.

The glimmer of the bowl’s geometric shapes plays a trick on her vision—the medication once again. She stops and puts one hand on the island, blinks two or three times. She and her husband joined hands across the altar in the holy temple more than twenty-five years ago, a glistening chandelier above, mirrors on the walls, the images going on forever, symbolizing the eternity of their lives together. But marriage was harder than they thought. She struggled not to be her parents. He worked hard but was distant. After the first year, she somehow knew their marriage wouldn’t last forever. It would end in the next life if not in this one. The only question was when.

But they were good people, dedicated to the Church and the principles of home and family. They worked hard and raised three children. The kids all had some college. None of them were in jail. Their daughters moved out and married good men, one in the temple. When their boy left for college, she and her husband only had each other, which wasn’t enough. He found an apartment on the other side of town, telling her he hadn’t really loved her for years. He said it as though she didn’t already know. He left her with the house and almost everything in it, taking only what he could fit in a few trips with his car. That hurt the most—how easily he walked away from their life together.

He still went to church and so did she. But what about their connection to the children? What was sealed and what was broken?

But she stops herself—enough of all that. Her boy is coming, and she needs to think about him.

She goes to the living room and adjusts a magazine on the end table. She doesn’t look at the picture of the Savior on the wall, hanging on a nail where she once kept a Families Are Forever frame. When she turns, a wave of faintness hits her, just for a moment. The medication is for a recent heart arrhythmia. She knows the feeling when her blood pressure drops. Her heart rate is sometimes slow, sometimes irregular. Maybe it’s forgotten what it’s beating for. Mostly she’s just tired. “Let’s keep an eye on it,” the doctor said. “We’ll try this medicine first.” So far she doesn’t like it at all.

The faintness passes as she hears her boy outside. She goes to the top of the home’s split-level entrance, touches her hair, and smooths her shirt. The boy comes in without knocking. A good sign, she thinks. “Hey, Mom,” he says, stomping each foot on the rug as he always does, knocking the snow off his shoes.

“Hey, Bud,” she says, “you made it.”

He’s heavier, his face scruffy but not quite in full beard. She can see his father in his features.

“What happened to the box elder tree out front?” he asks.

“I had to have it cut down,” she answers. “Bugs were everywhere. Is Lindsey coming in?”

“She went to the store,” he says. “She dropped me off.”

She’s disappointed but doesn’t show it.

He takes off his coat and hangs it where their coats are always hung. He’s wearing jeans with a maroon-and-white-striped polo shirt. Lindsey’s influence, she thinks, and approves. She notices a sweater hanging at the top of the stair rail. She needs to be doing something. She can’t look anxious. “Was there snow all the way?” she asks, taking the sweater from the railing. She turns to put the sweater over the back of a chair as he bounds up the stairs.

“Just the last hour,” he answers.

He’s in the kitchen now. He goes to the island bar and sits at one of the stools. She won’t get a hug, she realizes. She’ll accept that. It’s time that she wants—time to connect, time to keep from losing him forever.

“Did that insurance paper come?” he asks.

“From the dentist?” He’s still on her insurance, a fact that prompts most of their calls. “That dentist worked on you before. I don’t know why all of a sudden there’s a problem.” She doesn’t want to talk about this now. He’s here, sitting at the bar, halted by the bowl of M&M’s. He takes a handful and tosses one in his mouth. He looks around at the house, and she wonders how it might look after three years of being away.

She remembers the boy he once was. “A huggy boy,” she used to say when he was in that stage boys go through, needing so much praise and encouragement. “I’m tall, huh, Mom? Did you see me hit the ball? Watch!” She probably deflated him too much in those years, afraid that he’d get prideful. She knows she made mistakes. But she can’t pretend it’s nothing that he’s here.

“Will you be in town all day?” she asks, feigning a casual tone.

“Yeah. We’re staying tonight with Mitch.”

“Mitch Killian?”

“Yeah, he’s married and they’ve got a kid. Can you believe it?”

Seeing the salt and pepper shakers on the counter, she groups them by the toaster. “How about dinner later?” she says. “We could go out.” She’s thinking of neutral territory, keeping it light.

“Our schedule’s pretty tight. The wedding’s at one o’clock, and there’s a reception after. We’re leaving early in the morning.”

Her daughters have told her the details. Her husband’s marrying a woman he met on an LDS dating app, a widow who lost her husband in a boating accident. There are two teenagers still at home. Her husband’s leaving his apartment to move in with them. Her daughters have met the woman through video calls. “She seems nice,” they both said. The widow is sealed to her first husband, so there won’t be a temple marriage. The widow’s bishop is performing the ceremony. The boy’s mother has thought about this more than she wants to—the husband she’s sealed to being married to another man’s eternal companion. Surely these arrangements can’t be interchanged so easily.

The boy pops another handful of M&M’s and glances down the hallway. “Do you still have that ancient computer?”

They’ve joked about this before, how she’s slow to get new technology.

“No,” she says, pleased. “I broke down and bought a laptop.”

“Wow, really?”

“It’s got a touch screen.”

“Impressive!” he says and smiles.

She loves his smile. She’s always loved his smile.

She thinks of getting the laptop to show him, but knows that’s silly. Instead, she leans against the kitchen counter, just standing there—something she’s never done before in this kitchen. What does she want? She doesn’t know.

It’s all new ground. It’s always been new ground with this boy. Not like her daughters, who are just like her, wanting the things she wants. With this boy it was different. Bringing him home from the hospital, a baby boy. That was new. When he was five, watching him jump off the diving board into the deep end of the swimming pool, no sign of fear in him. Arguing when he wanted to play city league football, him shouting at her for the first time. “They have helmets, Mom!” And later, fights about his friends, his bedtime, his video games. She was big on rules, maybe too much. That was the way she was raised. But what she forbade he did anyway, sneaking off with friends. It was always new with this boy.

When he turned eighteen, she gave him the one gift he would accept from her. She helped him pack his things and drove him to a college on the other side of the state. She moved heaven and earth to get her boy away from her because that was what he wanted. She dropped him off at a dorm and helped him carry in his stuff. On the way home, driving alone in the car, she cried all the more because he hadn’t cried at all.

Now her boy pushes aside the M&M’s and checks his phone, looking restless. It won’t take him long to get his things. He’ll be gone in a few minutes.

Her next words come out before she thinks about them. “Okay, your things are in the attic. I’ve got stuff to do downstairs.” She goes to him and quickly kisses his cheek—she has no idea what she’s doing—and she heads toward the stairs, saying, “I’m still up for dinner, if you guys are interested.”

He touches his cheek. “I’ll talk to Lindsey.”

But she’s already down the stairs.

In the laundry room, she stands with two fists on top of the washing machine, tears welling in her eyes. She’s unsure of what to do next, mystified by the strength it took to walk away.

When he was a baby, just a few weeks old, they almost lost him. They brought him to the doctor, who said “meningitis” after a few minutes in his office. They took him straight to the hospital. Four weeks old, a shunt in his head to deliver fluids. Her husband and their neighbor gave him a priesthood blessing. And after that, a miracle. “No sign of the meningitis,” the doctor said the next morning. “Take him home.”

So she did. She took him home and loved him the best she knew how, never questioning, never doubting her instincts. She’d been given this gift of a boy. And such a good boy he was, always gleaming, willing to obey and please. She’d done well, she thought, until he blindsided her. He turned fifteen and suddenly everything was wrong, had been wrong all along, he told her. “Back off, Mom.” he’d say. “Jeez, Mom! Give it a rest.” His declarations of independence. Overnight he’d become someone else—tall and broad-shouldered, loud, bristly, a stranger, a man. He even smelled different. He’d moved beyond her reach. From there he just kept moving.

But this time, she was the one who moved. She moved out of his orbit to come downstairs, and it took all the strength she had.

She takes a load out of the dryer—some towels and the gold-colored family room curtains. She holds up one of the curtains before her. Upstairs, her boy walks back and forth through the kitchen, talking on the phone to Lindsey, laughing and going silent as he listens. She can’t make out the words, but she likes his tone, deep and assuring, the voice of a good man, she realizes. He’s just young, she thinks. He has a lot to learn. 

She bends to look into the dryer, searching for a stray sock or washcloth. That’s when the faintness hits again—only worse. Her vision blurs and doubles, and she clamps her eyes shut. When she opens them, the empty metal drum of the dryer looks different somehow, bigger, oscillating from gray to black, the tiny and innumerable vent holes like so many stars in the heavens. She leans in deeper, as though she might fall in and lose herself to the emptiness.

Sometimes at night she falls asleep imagining the whole world at the end of the Millennium, every woman and man paired off and sealed together, made one, to be alone no more. But she can never make it work. There are women who never marry, like Sister Foster down the street, fifty and unwed, who hasn’t been endowed despite a lifetime of church activity. Sister Bennett, who she ministers to, is on her third marriage and going through a divorce. Who would she be paired with? Her Relief Society president, Sister Bennion, is twelve years into her second marriage but sealed to her husband who died in Afghanistan. Then there are the men, the wicked men, the murderers and blasphemers and whoremongers who’ve lost their exaltation. Even if the missionary program and all the temples ran day and night for a thousand years, matches couldn’t be found for everyone. It would be impossible. The earth would be utterly wasted at the Lord’s coming.

She feels herself going farther into the dryer. She hears a rushing sound, feels the dryer spinning, as though it might be running with her inside. She gave her husband everything she could give. She gave her son everything too. If she was rigid, unwilling to compromise, couldn’t they see behind that? She only wanted what was right for them. She would give her life for them still. But it’s not enough. There simply isn’t enough within her to do the job. The spinning turns her, the rushing sounds grow louder. She might fall into its emptiness and cease to be. But something binds her, keeps her from falling too far, something connected to her but not of her. A welding link still seals her—to her daughters, her parents and grandparents, her kindred in the Lord—connects her to Christ Jesus himself, “by the Holy Priesthood, after the Order of the Son of God,” a voice whispers in the great metal drum of the dryer, piercing and healing the deepest center of her arrhythmic heart. Despite the choices of others, she is sealed through her covenants, joined by the Savior to all the faithful children of Mother Eve and Father Adam, from the beginning of the world to the end, whether in the dryer or out of the dryer, she can not tell.

When she comes to herself, she’s in front of the dryer with the clean curtains in her hands. She hears the sound of her boy calling for her. “Mom?” he calls as he rushes down the stairs. He ducks his head into the room, the phone to his ear. “What’s that steak place on Pioneer Drive?”

“Stockman’s Grill?” She’s surprised at the sound of her voice. Her cheeks are wet, and she wipes at them quickly.

He pauses softly and puts the phone to his chest. “Mom? Are you crying?”

“No,” she says, laughing quickly. “Just something in my eye.”

He looks suspicious but goes on. “How about dinner tonight at Stockman’s? You and me and Lindsey? Does that work?”

“Sure!” she says. “I’d love that.”

He brings the phone to his ear. “Yeah,” he says to Lindsey, “Stockman’s at seven o’clock.” He nods to his mom and disappears back up the stairs.

She takes a deep breath and wipes at her tears. Dinner at seven. She’ll have that at least. This is all she wants—a connection. Not something forced or hard, a gift freely given. This is her boy, born to her in the covenant, and she doesn’t want to lose him forever. She’ll take it. She’ll take it and be glad.

Jack Harrell is the author of two novels, a collection of short stories, and a book of essays on writing and faith. He teaches writing at Brigham Young University-Idaho.

Art by Kathleen Peterson.