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  Except maybe it wasn’t. I never mentioned Riv to Sam. Occasionally one of us would suggest that we get together as couples some time, but neither of us ever followed up on it. We started meeting for lunch a couple of times a week. Then we were seeing each other every day.

  Once we were discussing films and he mentioned one he’d just seen, The Scent of Green Papaya. I admitted that I’d never seen a Vietnamese film, in fact I’d never seen any film with subtitles.

  Riv invited me to see it with him. I had a great time, watching the movie and talking about it afterward with him. After that Riv and I started going out to the movies together regularly.

  Sam was far away in California. I was not. Riv and I never talked about being together as if we were sneaking around. We never discussed what our families might have thought that we were doing. We just met each other at the front of the theater. We each bought our own ticket. It wasn’t dating. We were just enjoying a movie together, enjoying time together, enjoying popcorn together.

  He was smart, interesting, educated. He’d grown up in Connecticut, a place so far away and exotic to me it might as well have been Djakarta or Khartoum. He’d gone to prestigious schools back East. He’d spent two summers living in Europe. He’d backpacked through Nepal. He’d been on every continent except Antarctica and he’d even seen it from a ship. I was fascinated by his stories, flattered by his attention.

  He was so different from Sam, in every way. He’d been places, done things. The most exciting thing my husband had ever done was learn how to cook tamales.

  I began thinking about Riv in every spare moment. He was the first thing on my mind when I got up in the morning. He was the last thing on my mind when I went to bed at night.

  Lauren would be sharing her latest drama and talking to me, but I was thinking about him.

  On the weekends that Sam was home I was annoyed that I was forced to stay in Lumkee and have family time.

  I avoided my mom, my friends. I didn’t have time for them anymore.

  I wanted to be with Riv. And I began to resent everything and everyone that stood in my way.

  So when I walked across the stage to get my diploma on that beautiful spring afternoon I was less than happy. My husband was there. My children were there. My parents were there. And they were all cheering and applauding me. All I could do was wonder whether Riv was there. Was he in the audience somewhere watching me? I wanted him to be there.

  After commencement, my parents took the whole family out to a lovely dinner at The Fountains. Mom was in her element, sweetly scolding the waiter to get us a better table. Lauren followed her lead with such a pretty and pleasant facade of condescension. Nate was bored and sullen. My dad was quiet, as he was most often was since Mike’s death.

  Sam stood and offered a toast on my behalf.

  “To the smartest woman I’ve ever known,” he said. “Now she has the paper to prove it.”

  Everybody laughed.

  He grew more serious. “I think everyone at this table knows, or should know, that this family wouldn’t have survived the last few years without you, Corrie. You have worked, sometimes at two jobs, making sure that our bills were paid. And you’ve done it generously, selflessly and without a word of complaint.” He grinned wryly. “Oh, we had the occasional whine, but no actual complaints.” More laughter. “Through all of these terrible times in our family, through all the emotional stress and financial struggle, you never lost sight of your goals. I’m not sure if I can express how proud I am of you. But just let me say that if our children and their children and grandchildren grow to have half the strength and heart of Corrie Braydon, the world will be a better place.”

  Sam’s eyes were filled with tears. I was also swept with emotion. Mine was mostly shame.

  The following Tuesday I drove into the city to meet Riv for lunch at the Interurban. He seemed so thrilled to see me. As if we’d been apart for a month instead of three days. The blood was pounding through my own veins.

  The place was really too busy and noisy for the discussion that we had to have, but I steeled my determination.

  “I don’t think we should see each other anymore,” I told him as soon as I was seated.

  There was a moment of complete silence between us. He was looking at me closely as if trying to decipher my plainspoken words. Finally, weaving his fingers together and resting them on the edge of the table in front of him, he nodded to me thoughtfully.

  “You don’t need to threaten me, Corrie. I realize that it’s time for us to move to the next level,” he said. “I’ve felt it myself. We’re more than friends. Relationships are either growing or they’re dying. I believe I’m ready to let us grow.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m ready to expand our relationship to include physical intimacy,” he said. “And I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you’ve chosen to explore this with a rational and interactive discussion. So many women just want to be caught up in the moment and be swept away by passion. I realize that this alleviates for them any sense of their personal responsibility in their own decision-making. But we are adults here, I think we’re capable of being honest with each other.” He paused only to take a studied breath. “I’ve been wanting to have sex with you,” he continued. “I’ve even been working on the logistics of it. I have a friend in the math department, he keeps a little place off campus for this sort of thing. I’m sure he’ll allow us to use it a couple of afternoons a week.”

  “Riv, I don’t think—”

  He cut me off with an upraised hand. “Please don’t get anxious about any of this,” he said. “You’re a very attractive woman. I’m certain that we’ll be as compatible together in bed as we are in conversation. I mean intercourse is intercourse, that’s what I always say.”

  “Riv, I don’t have affairs,” I stated bluntly.

  He smiled. “Corrie, I think you’ve got the verb wrong in that statement. You haven’t had affairs. Okay, that’s nice to know. But that’s all past tense. Now that you’re breaking the constraints of middle-class mores, you’ll come to understand that affairs are as much a part of marriage as wedding cake and kids.”

  I was stunned by his words and shook my head.

  “I know you haven’t studied much anthropology,” he said. “What they’ve determined is that humans are not naturally monogamous.”

  “Maybe not when we were nomads on the savannahs,” I said. “But we’ve been that way at least since written language.”

  He patted my hand. “Yes, well, monogamy was forced upon us earlier than that,” he explained. “As soon as we began to walk upright. It was a type of socio-physiological adaptation.”

  “That certainly sounds like a three-dollar word,” I told him. “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

  His tone was patient, almost tutorial. “Because of the change in our pelvic tilt,” he said. “Women had to birth their babies at an earlier stage of development. If you look at other mammals, you can see that most newborns can walk within hours.”

  I nodded. That was true.

  “Our offspring require much more care,” he said. “They could never survive on their own outside the womb.”

  “No, of course not,” I agreed.

  “The human mother is busy with her offspring for years,” he said. “While she’s doing that, she had less ability to feed and protect herself.”

  That made sense.

  “So the species evolved the necessity for a family unit,” Riv said. “With the father a more constant presence. Modern man simply institutionalized that into a vow of fidelity.”

  “You don’t think God or values or morality had anything to do with it?” I asked.

  He laughed. “No, of course not,” he said. “When that societal modification came about, the human life span was significantly shorter than it is now. I think it’s right and reasonable for a couple to commit to an exclusive child-rearing relationship when their children are small. But five to seve
n years of monogamy is sufficient for that. To expect healthy, intelligent men and women to remain monogamous longer than that, well, that’s just silly.”

  I sat across the table from him for a long moment. He was so good-looking. He was interesting. He was sophisticated. He was like no one I’d ever met in Lumkee. I would never meet anyone like him there. But what seemed silly to Riv, seemed to me a very basic question of honesty.

  “I see it differently,” I told him. “What I see is that if you’re married, then you’re married. If you don’t want to be married, society says that you don’t have to be. One of my in-laws would have said ‘either fish or cut bait.’ And if this is what you think of the future of our relationship, then it’s time for me to cut bait.”

  Sam

  1993

  Having Nate spend the summer with me out in Bakersfield was one of those things that seems like the best idea at the time and turns out to be a near disaster.

  I moved from the motel to a small furnished apartment in a nice working-class neighborhood. There was no cable TV and no computer. I thought, for the summer, he should give his mind a rest. I enrolled him in a summer day camp at St. Jude’s Church just down the street. The staff seemed like a reasonable bunch, mostly guys, which seemed like the best idea considering Nate’s issues with the opposite gender. The program had a curriculum that included swimming, basketball, wood shop and choir.

  We went down there and met everybody. It all seemed fine. Nate was easygoing and appeared happy to meet everybody. I gave the director, Mr. Perez, my cell phone number and asked him to call me if there were any problems. He assured me that he would.

  I anticipated that everything wouldn’t go smoothly. There are always kinks to be worked out of every new operation. But none materialized. Every evening, I would come home from work and Nate would be there, wearing his camp T-shirt. Sometimes the music on the radio would be too loud. Or he would have already eaten everything in the refrigerator. But those were normal expectations for a kid his age.

  He looked good. He’d shot up in height over the summer and was nearly as tall as I was. He had a healthy-looking summer tan. He ate heartily and was consistently in a better mood than I’d seen back in Oklahoma.

  On Monday mornings I would leave a check for his tuition. On Monday afternoon, there would be a receipt from the church. I even got a mid-summer progress report. Mr. Perez had written that Nate was blending in very well, though he felt that he was below average in both his religious-education level and his music skills.

  I was so pleased, and because it was Nate’s birthday we went out for pizza to celebrate.

  So you can imagine how shocked I was when I returned home one Friday afternoon and he wasn’t there. I walked through the apartment then around outside. He wasn’t anywhere. I knocked on my neighbor’s door. They hadn’t seen him. There was an old man always sitting on his porch across the street. He said Nate had left in the morning and he hadn’t seen him come back.

  I went back to the apartment and called the camp director’s number. Of course there was no answer. The program had closed an hour earlier. Surely someone was there. I let it ring until the answering machine picked up. Then I hung up and called again to let it ring some more.

  Any parent who’s ever been separated from their child knows the sense of panic that I felt. I tried to maintain my cool. There was no need to assume that on his walk home he’d been beaten by muggers and left for dead. I simply needed to retrace his steps.

  I walked the seven blocks between the apartment and St. Jude’s. I was calm. But I was also aware. I looked in every store window and down every alley.

  When I got to the church I went through the gates and into the building. It was empty except for an old woman praying in the front. I walked around outside, through the school-yard area and the back parking lot. I sighed with relief when I spotted a group of kids playing basketball, but Nate wasn’t with them.

  “I’m looking for my son,” I told them. “Nate Braydon. Have you seen him?”

  They all shrugged and shook their heads.

  “Don’t know him” was the general consensus.

  “He goes to the summer camp here,” I said.

  “I go to that,” one of the boys said. “But I don’t know him. Is he one of the little kids?”

  “He’s fourteen.”

  The boy raised his eyebrows. “Then he’d be in my group, but he ain’t,” the guy said definitively.

  “About six foot, brown hair, blue eyes?”

  The kid shrugged.

  “Mr. Perez is in the gym,” one of the other guys said. “Maybe you should ask him.”

  “I thought it was locked up,” I said.

  “You can get in this back door.”

  “Great, thanks.”

  I hurried over to the entrance they’d indicated and, sure enough, I found Mr. Perez lifting weights.

  “Hey, sorry to barge in on your workout,” I said. “I’m Sam Braydon, Nate’s dad.”

  He wiped his sweaty palms on a towel and stepped forward to shake my hand.

  “Hi, yeah, I remember you, Mr. Braydon. How ya doing?”

  “Not as well as I could be. I got home this afternoon and Nate wasn’t there,” I explained. “Do you have any idea where he might be?”

  The guy’s brow furrowed. “Me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I haven’t seen him since he left here,” Perez said.

  “Do you remember what time he left?” I asked. “Or which direction he went? Or if anyone was with him?”

  Perez was looking at me very strangely, and when he spoke his words were slow and considered.

  “I meant, I haven’t seen him since he left the program in June. He transferred over to Peter & Paul about two days after he started here,” he said. “They have that marine biology intro study. We lose boys to that program every year.”

  “What? You’re the one that sent me the report,” I pointed out. “You said he was fitting in very well. But that he wasn’t doing well in music class.”

  “We don’t send home reports,” he replied. “It’s a summer program. The students aren’t working for grades.”

  “The report was signed by you,” I said.

  The puzzled look on Perez’s face disappeared completely and he was suddenly very professional, very in-charge.

  “I think we’d better go up to my office and start making some phone calls.”

  Over the next hour and a half we didn’t find Nate, but the truth about his summer activities slowly came out.

  He had brought a letter to school from me, informing the staff at St. Jude’s that I had decided to move Nate into the summer program at Peter & Paul. It was a very well-written adult-sounding letter. I’m not sure something I’d actually written would have sounded that good. Perez called the director at Peter & Paul and determined for a certainty that Nate had never attended there.

  “The receipts could be just as fake,” I said. “But the checks are cashed.”

  “Have you seen the canceled checks?”

  “No, those go to my wife in Oklahoma,” I said. “But I know the money was taken out of my account.”

  “He may have washed the checks,” Perez told me.

  “Washed them?”

  “There’s a process where you can get the ink off,” he said. “Then you just fill in the payee and the amount and forge the name. I bet if you go to one of the little check-cashing places around your apartment, they’ll tell you that Nate’s been cashing checks there made out to him.”

  “Where would he learn to do something like that?”

  “Bad companions, I suppose.”

  “He doesn’t have any companions,” I said.

  Perez nodded. “Does he use the Internet?”

  Ultimately, we contacted the police. Officer Reynolds very quickly discovered that Nate did indeed cash checks at the Korean grocery around the corner. And that very morning, he’d cashed one for three hundred dollars.

  �
��Three hundred? I don’t know if I even have that much money in my account.”

  “The woman thought it was a lot,” the officer told me. “But he’s been cashing checks there for a couple of months and they’ve all been good.”

  Officer Reynolds told me that Nate spent most of his mornings in front of a computer screen at the public library. Several people in the building easily recognized his picture. Beyond that they weren’t quite sure what he did with his days. Although he was known to hang out at the mall, flirting with a girl at the pretzel stand named Lisa.

  “Lisa thinks he was going up to L.A. today,” the policeman told me. “She says he’s been talking about it for a while.”

  “L.A? Why would he go to L.A.?”

  The policeman looked grave but answered a very official “I wouldn’t want to speculate about that.”

  I checked Nate’s room. He’d taken his backpack and some of his clothes.

  “That’s a good sign,” Officer Reynolds told me. “If he was planning never to come back, he would have taken everything.”

  The words never come back went through me like a cold chill.

  “We should be able to locate the ticket agent at the bus station to verify if that’s how your son is traveling,” he said. “And, of course, we’ll notify LAPD to be on the lookout for the boy.”

  I sat alone, stunned, in my little apartment. I needed to call Corrie. But I had no idea what I was going to tell her. With a terrible sense of dread, I picked up the phone.

  “Oh, hi, Daddy,” Lauren said. “Listen, can we call you back, I’ve got somebody on the other line.”

  “No, honey,” I answered. “Tell your friend goodbye and let me speak to your mother.”

  She hesitated, momentarily surprised by the unusual request.

  “Sure, Daddy,” she said.

  A minute later Corrie was on the phone.