Too Close to Home

She excused herself, was gone no more than half a minute, and returned with a framed high school photo. “That was his graduating year, it would have been four years before he, well, it’s pretty much how I remember him.”

Brett Stockwell was a good-looking young man. Sandy-colored hair that came down over his ears, brown eyes, fairly unblemished skin for a boy his age. He had a sensitive, artistic look about him. Not jock material.

“I think I can see your eyes in him,” I said.

She took the picture back and studied it, as though looking at it for the first time. “He looked a lot like his father. Took after him, I think. Borden was a small man, only five-five, and Brett had that same kind of build.”

“You were saying he wasn’t like the other boys.”

“He didn’t care much about sports. Never went out for football, didn’t care much about that stuff. He liked to read. And he loved movies. But not the ones everyone else liked. He liked the ones with the words at the bottom.”

“Subtitles.”

“That’s right. Movies in different languages. He liked to watch those. He had an appreciation for things that other people didn’t care much about.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “We don’t need everyone to be the same. What kind of world would that be?” I had another drink of my lemonade.

“And he loved to write,” Agnes Stockwell said. “He was always writing things.”

“What sort of things?” I asked.

“Oh, you name it. When he was little, he liked to write stories about going to other planets. People traveling through time, things like that. And poems. He wrote hundreds and hundreds of poems. Not the kind that rhyme, though. Poetry’s not like it was when I was a girl. It doesn’t have to rhyme anymore. Doesn’t even seem like poetry if it doesn’t rhyme. It’s just a bunch of sentences otherwise.”

“I can’t say as I know a lot about poetry. Ellen, she likes to read poetry sometimes.”

“Is that your wife?”

“Yes.”

“You should bring her around sometime. I’d love to meet her.”

“I should do that. I think she’d like to meet you, too. She knows you as the one who gives us lemonade.”

She smiled, then, “Sometimes, on my birthday, Brett would write me a poem. He’d try to make those ones rhyme because he knew I didn’t understand the other ones as well. They were a bit more like the ones you find in greeting cards, you know?”

“Did he show you all the things he wrote?” I asked.

“Oh, some he did, some he didn’t. He liked to have something done, all polished up the way he liked it, before he showed it to me. And some things, as he got older, I think some of those things were a bit more private. A boy doesn’t want to show his mother everything, you know.” She blinked at me, and her eyes seemed to twinkle.

“Yeah, well, I know what you mean,” I said. “Do you think that’s what he wanted to do with his life? Become a writer?”

“Oh, without a doubt. That was his dream, to be some famous novelist. He talked about writers he admired, like that Truman Capote, and James Kirkwood, and lots of others. And I really believe, if he hadn’t. . if he’d made different choices, I think that’s what would have happened. Because he was good, you know. He had tremendous talent. And I’m not just saying that because I’m his mother.” She paused. “Was his mother.”

“Others thought he had talent?” I asked.

She nodded. “His teachers, they said he was very good. Some said he was actually quite brilliant.”

“Really?”

“When he was in high school, he had this one teacher, what was his name?” She closed her eyes for a moment, searching. “Mr. Burgess. That’s who it was. I remember what he wrote on one of Brett’s short stories. He wrote, ‘John Irving, watch out.’ How about that?”

“Wow.”

“You know who John Irving is?”

“I do,” I said.

“Brett got in trouble once, his senior year it was. Wrote something that upset some of the staff. The subject matter was a bit, it was a bit mature. Do you know what I mean? And the language, it was not totally appropriate for high school.”

“What was it about?”

“It was about other students. Not actual students, but a story about boys and girls his age, and the things they did that their parents didn’t know about. A kind of sexual awakening story.” She said the words as if there were quotation marks around them. “A little too out there for the folks at Promise Falls High School.”

“Did Brett get in trouble?”

“He might have, if it hadn’t been for Mr. Burgess. He defended Brett from the administration, said that his work, while dealing with controversial material, was honest and a fair representation of what was actually going on. He said Brett didn’t deserve to be suspended or punished in any way for pointing out things that everyone else knew was going on but didn’t have the courage to admit.”

“Well. He sounds like quite a teacher.”

“Brett never showed me that story. He’d have known that I’d have tried to talk him out of handing it in or showing it to anyone. I’m not the sort of person who likes to make a fuss.”