I’ve been in Spain since May 7th, visiting Khrystyna Lukashchuk, the artist who illustrated Prince Tarkten and The Rocking House.

This week, I’d like you to have a vacation too, so I’m bringing back an oldie but goodie.

Searching for something else, I stumbled across the 2009-2011 blog posts that became the basis for Sweet Baby Lover. The editor cut this post from the book because “It doesn’t advance the plot. It doesn’t tell us anything new about you or Trent.”

But it does tell you something about the relationship between my mother and me, at least what it was for most of my life.

I’m glad she and I have stopped dancing like this.

125. Sandy Hook

6 March 2011

I’ve been at my mother’s condo since last Thursday. She lives in a New Jersey senior community where the cellphone strength languishes at one bar. There is no Wi-Fi.

We had dinner on Thursday night at Barnacle Bill’s. She and I eat there once every time I go back. Because we got to the restaurant 35 minutes before it opened and were first waiting on the long bench outside the door, we scored one of the five tables-for-two by the window.

My mom looked away from the window, took in the dark wood walls of the restaurant splattered with nautical memorabilia. The air was thick with the sound and smell of frying fish. “What was it Trent liked so much when we were here?” She looked toward the raised section close to the kitchen, where the three of us sat last time.

I dug for the memory from five years earlier. “Umm… the mussels. No, the steamers.”

“He loved the steamers.”

“Yes, he did. He loved the steamers.”

“He’d never had them before?”

“No, he’d had them before, in San Francisco.” [Unspoken: when he was there with Jane.]

My mom takes another bite of her burger with cheese sauce and I take another bite of my grilled tilefish. I’m not sure how much I feel like talking about Trent this afternoon. But my mother feels like talking about Trent. She keeps going.

“He loved Sandy Hook, too.”

“Yes, he did.”

And now I know where my mother, who never speaks without a destination, is headed, in her eel-like way. She’s still trying to determine, five years after it happened, how Trent and I could leave her house as the sun came up, go to Sandy Hook, and not get back until just before sunset.

“What did you do that day that you went to Sandy Hook?”

“We went swimming.”

I do not tell my mother that we didn’t go to the regular beach but to the nude beach, the gay nude beach. You don’t have to be gay to go to the gay nude beach, but you shouldn’t stare and you can’t take pictures. If you take pictures, several men will pick you up and toss you and your camera into the ocean.

I don’t tell mom about the beach where Trent took off everything and so did I, or the smell of his skin in the heat of the sun. I don’t tell her about putting my swimsuit bottoms back on to go swimming, or how good it felt to be naked in the heat.

I don’t tell her how we slipped from the beach in the early afternoon and went behind some bushes for only a few minutes before the mosquitoes drove us from our hiding place.

I don’t tell her we found a place behind a tall dune, where the sky was bright blue behind Trent’s hair that gleamed gold in the sun. Trent knew I thought we should head back, and this was a test. Trent was asking me to choose: Trent or my mother? I let Trent stake his claim, let the blue sky fall on me.

Mom persevered. “He must have really liked swimming.”

“Yes, he liked to swim in the ocean.” I don’t tell her, because he’d never swum in the ocean before, Trent took a tumble in a wave that left a little blood on his forehead. If I’d known it was his first time, I would have shown him how to handle cresting waves.

After the dune and the blue sky, Trent and I walked across the slim road to the bay side of the peninsula, where Trent discovered horseshoe crabs. “Sweet Baby, they’re like dinosaurs!” Trent put on his snorkel gear and looked around underwater but found nothing as fascinating as the crabs.

My mom peered at me. “I wonder why he liked to swim in the ocean so much?”

Knowing I could keep this up for as long as she could, I smiled. “Well, Mom, there’s no ocean in Michigan.”

Her unsmiling brown eyes lingered on mine, then returned to her burger.

Later in the visit, I did tell Mom something. Not about Trent, but about Jenna. It was a mistake.

Chewing the Cud of Good

I’m on vacation. What’s a cud of good you’re chewing, something you’re thankful for?