Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

This is not my boy. My boy is the one who carries groceries up three flights of stairs for old Mrs. Laska, without her even having to ask. My boy is the one who always holds open the door for a lady, who says please and thank you, who still keeps in his nightstand every birthday card I’ve ever written him.

Sometimes a new mother turns to me, a shrieking infant in her arms, and asks me how she’s supposed to know what her baby needs. In a lot of ways, having a teenager isn’t all that different from having a newborn. You learn to read the reactions, because they’re incapable of saying exactly what it is that’s causing pain.

So although all I want to do is go into Edison’s room and gather him up close and rock him back and forth the way I used to when he was little and hurting, I take a deep breath and go into the kitchen instead. Edison has left me dinner, a plate covered with foil. He can make exactly three dishes: macaroni and cheese, fried eggs, and Sloppy Joes. The rest of the week he heats up casseroles I make on my days off. Tonight’s is an enchilada pie, but Edison’s also cooked up some peas, because I taught him years ago a plate’s not a meal unless there’s more than one color on it.

I pour myself some wine from a bottle I got from Marie last Christmas. It tastes sour, but I force myself to sip it until I can feel the knots in my shoulders relax, until I can close my eyes and not see Turk Bauer’s face.

After ten minutes pass, I knock softly on the door of Edison’s room. It’s been his since he was thirteen; I sleep on the pullout couch in the living room. I turn the knob and find him lying on his bed, his arms behind his head. With his T-shirt stretched over his shoulders and his chin tilted up, I see so much of his daddy in him that for a moment, I feel like I’ve fallen through time.

I sit down beside him on the mattress. “Are we gonna talk about it, or are we gonna pretend nothing’s wrong?” I ask.

Edison’s mouth twists. “Do I really get a choice?”

“No,” I say, smiling a little. “Is this about the calculus test?”

He frowns. “The calc test? That was no big deal; I got a ninety-six. It’s just that I got into it with Bryce today.”

Bryce has been Edison’s closest friend since fifth grade. His mother is a family court judge and his father is a Yale classics professor. In their living room is a glass case, like the kind you’d find at a museum, housing a bona fide Grecian urn. They’ve taken Edison on vacation to Gstaad and Santorini.

It feels good to have Edison hand me this burden, to wallow in someone else’s difficulties for a while. This is what’s so upsetting to me about the incident at the hospital: I’m known as the fixer, the one who figures out a solution. I’m not the problem. I’m never the problem.

“I’m sure it’ll blow over,” I tell Edison, patting his arm. “You two are like brothers.”

He rolls onto his side and pulls the pillow over his head.

“Hey,” I say. “Hey.” I tug at the pillow and realize that there’s one single streak, left by a tear, darkening the skin of his temple. “Baby,” I murmur. “What happened?”

“I told him I was going to ask Whitney to homecoming.”

“Whitney…” I repeat, trying to place the girl from the tangle of Edison’s friends.

“Bryce’s sister,” he says.

I have a brief flash of a girl with strawberry-blond braids I met years ago when picking Edison up from a playdate. “The chubby one with braces?”

“Yeah. She doesn’t have braces anymore. And she’s definitely not chubby. She’s got…” Edison’s eyes soften, and I imagine what my son is seeing.

“You don’t have to finish that sentence,” I say quickly.

“Well, she’s amazing. She’s a sophomore now. I mean, I’ve known her forever, but lately when I look at her it’s not just as Bryce’s little sister, you know? I had this whole thing planned, where one of my buddies would be waiting outside her classroom after each period, holding a note. The first note was going to say WILL. The second was going to say YOU. Then GO, TO, HOMECOMING, and WITH. And then at the end of school, I’d be waiting with the ME sign, so she’d finally know who was asking.”

“This is a thing now?” I interrupt. “You don’t just ask a girl to the homecoming dance…you have to produce a whole Broadway event to make it happen?”

“What? Mama, that’s not the point. The point is that I asked Bryce to be the one who brought her the HOMECOMING note and he freaked out.”

I draw in my breath. “Well,” I say, carefully picking through my words, “it’s sometimes hard for a guy to see his little sister as anyone’s potential girlfriend, no matter how close he is to the person who wants to date her.”

Edison rolls his eyes. “That’s not it.”

“Bryce may just need time to get used to the idea. Maybe he was surprised that you’d think of his sister, you know, that way. Because you are like family.”

“The problem is…I’m not. ” My son sits up, his long legs dangling over the edge of the bed. “Bryce laughed. He said, ‘Dude. It’s one thing for us to hang out. But you and Whit? My parents would shit a brick.’ ” His gaze slides away. “Sorry about the language.”

“That’s okay, baby,” I said. “Go on.”

“So I asked him why . It didn’t make any sense to me. I mean, I’ve been to Greece with his family. And he said, ‘No offense, but my parents would not be cool with my sister dating a Black guy.’ Like it’s okay to have a Black friend who comes on family vacations but it’s not okay for that friend to get involved with your daughter.”

I have worked so hard to keep Edison from feeling this line being drawn, it never occurred to me that when it happened-which, I guess, was inevitable-it would burn even more, because he had never seen it coming.

I reach for my son’s hand and squeeze it. “You and Whitney would not be the first couple to find yourselves on opposite sides of a mountain,” I say. “Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina and Vronsky. Maria and Tony. Jack and Rose.”

Edison looks at me in horror. “You do realize that in every example you just gave me, at least one of them dies?”

“What I’m trying to say is that if Whitney sees how special you are, she’ll want to be with you. And if she doesn’t, she’s not worth the fight.”

I put my arm around his shoulders; Edison leans into me. “That doesn’t make it suck any less.”

“Language,” I say automatically. “And no, it doesn’t.”

Not for the first time, I wish Wesley were still alive. I wish he hadn’t gone back on that second tour of duty in Afghanistan; I wish that he hadn’t been driving in the convoy when the IED exploded; I wish that he had gotten to know Edison not just as a child but as a teen and now a young man. I wish he were here to tell his son that when a girl makes your blood rush it’s just the first time of many.

I wish he were here, period.

If only you could see what we made, I think silently. He’s the best of both of us.

“Whatever happened to Tommy?” I ask abruptly.

“Tommy Phipps?” Edison frowns. “I think he got busted for dealing heroin behind the school last year. He’s in juvie.”

“Do you remember in nursery school, when that little delinquent said you looked like burnt toast?”

A slow smile stretches across Edison’s face. “Yeah.”

It was the first time a child had mentioned to Edison that he was different from everyone else in his class-and had done so in a way that also made it seem bad. Burnt. Charred. Ruined.

Before that maybe Edison had noticed, maybe he hadn’t. But that was the first time I had the Talk with my son about skin color.