My mother Erica used to stand at the sink watching us argue over trigonometry at her kitchen table.
“One of these days,” she’d say, “the two of you are going to figure this out.”
Jeffrey would grin at her without looking up.
“Figure out what, Mrs. Ballard?”
“You know exactly what.”
Then he’d look at me. And I’d roll my eyes.
“We’re friends, Mom.”
What Was Actually True
That was the truth. Or it was the part of the truth we were willing to admit to anybody, including ourselves.
Here’s what I understand now, at sixty, that I could not have said at seventeen.
Losing my best friend frightened me more than dating him ever excited me.
And I think he felt exactly the same way.
So we kept it simple. We kept it safe. For two and a half years we kept it safe.
Until one night the summer we were nineteen.
The Worst Double Date Night of 1984
We’d both had terrible evenings.
