Edward Adrift

you something, because I think you’re fucking this whole thing up.”
    “OK.”
    “You don’t want to go to work for that donkey-nuzzler Lamb guy, do you?”
    “No, not really.”
    “Not really, hell. Not at all.”
    Scott Shamwell is correct.
    “You ought to kick his ass,” he says. “That’s horseshit, man, making you come to work for him while he’s boning your old lady. And it’s horseshit the way they treat you, making you come back from Colorado like you’re some kind of little kid or something.”
    Scott Shamwell’s indignation amuses me, but the image of my getting into a fistfight with Jay L. Lamb, or anyone, is absurd to me.
    “But what if he loves my mother?” I say. “And what if she loves him?”
    Scott Shamwell doesn’t say anything for several seconds.
    “Scott Shamwell?” I say.
    “Love is something else, man,” he finally says. “If she loves him, you gotta let it go, because she’ll never forgive you if you don’t, and you’ll never forgive yourself if it’s real. Love is bullshit and weird and stupid, but shit, man, if you have love, everybody should leave you alone and let you keep it for as long as you can.”
    Scott Shamwell looks sad as he says this. He breathes in, and then he expels his breath in a sigh.
    “If you ever want to sell this car, you let me know, dude.”
    “I will, Scott Shamwell.”
    He opens his door. I open mine. We both step out.
    “Happy New Year, Ed,” he says.
    “In a week, yes. It’s still 2011 now.”
    “Whenever, man. You take care of yourself.”
    I watch as he walks over to his motorcycle, and I wish my ribs didn’t still hurt so I could ride in his sidecar. I think it would make him feel better. I also don’t think I’m going to see him again for a while, and that’s strange. It’s conjecture, which I dislike, and imprecise, which I dislike even more.
    By the time I’ve worked out the uncertainties, Scott Shamwell and his motorcycle are a noisy dot three blocks away on Clark Avenue.

TECHNICALLY TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2011
    A bizarre dream wakes me up at 2:21 a.m. In it, I see Scott Shamwell’s face but hear Sheila Renfro’s voice, and she says one word over and over and over: “Love. Love. Love. Love. Love.”
    When I finally pull out of the dream, I make an instant trip into the clarity of the waking world. For the first time, even as I remember the psychedelic aspects of my dream that would be absurd here in the conscious world, what I saw and heard makes complete sense to me. I can’t believe I didn’t realize this before.
    I’ve worked hard to keep my life contained—in this house, in this town, in my job at the
Billings Herald-Gleaner
. But no matter how hard I’ve worked, the circumstances of my life have not been as airtight as I would prefer. My job went away. My friends went away. My mother is going away, and, from the looks of it, so is her new boyfriend.
    And I’m lying here in my familiar bed, in the room I sleep in every night. Outside the door, my things are where I’ve put them and where I expect them to be. My notebooks record all the things I’ve tracked for all these years, and I’m no closer to controlling those figures than I was the day I started them.
    I don’t want to do this anymore. Everyone I know has found where they want to be. I’m still adrift. But there is something I can do about that.

    I pull on my shirt and jeans and socks and slip into my shoes. In the garbage bin behind my house, I find my mother’s Keurig. The box is dented and wet, but it’s otherwise OK.
    I put the box into the trunk of my new Cadillac DTS and drive to my mother’s condo, with right turns on Seventh Street West and Lewis Avenue and Broadway. It’s dark and the roads are wet, which makes the reflections from the streetlights look like smudges of yellow paint across the asphalt.
    I ring the buzzer on my mother’s condo once, and then once more.
    Finally, her groggy voice answers: “Yes?”
    “Let me in, Mother.”

    Telling my mother that she has violated my sovereignty is not the ordeal I thought it would be. She listens to me intently, her eyes following me as I pace the living room of her condo. I do not like looking people in the eye when I speak to them, especially when the topic is something like this, but I make myself finish.
    “I’m not a child, Mother. I’m not incapable of making my own decisions. And you need to stop treating me as if I am.”
    Her eyes are clear and unblinking.