“And you will always be mine, Momma.” I grinned at her. I was ten years old and the words slipped out of my mouth easily.
That conversation had been repeated several times during my childhood and teenage years. There were different variations, but the meaning was always the same. When I was five or seven or ten, I hadn’t really comprehended what she was saying to me, and by the time I was sixteen and old enough to understand, I was already hardened toward love. Women and relationships weren’t to be trusted. Love existed, but it was hard to find, and the only person I could rely on was my mother.
That didn’t stop me from having relationships, of course. And it hadn’t stopped me from believing in love. Maybe it was because my mother loved me so much. And maybe it was because she herself had also loved. I hadn’t become jaded from believing in love, but I had become jaded in trusting myself to fall in love and find the right person. She had ingrained in me a love of work before relationships, and I lived my life trying to honor her existence as best as I could. I sighed as I turned onto the freeway. Sometimes I wondered what my life would have been like if my mother hadn’t had her heart broken. What would she have told me about love if it had all worked for her? I didn’t think about it often. Maybe because I was a guy, or just that I had other, more important matters to worry about. Though I’d let my guard down once. I’d let love carry me away to a land far away for three solid months as a teenager.
I broke my mother’s heart when I was sixteen. That was the year I got a girlfriend and fell in love. Josie was her name, and she was a free spirit of seventeen. She loved art and classical music and wanted to live her life traveling the globe. I was dazzled by her beauty and impressed by her knowledge of the world. I loved that her thoughts were big and bountiful, and she made me feel like I could do anything I wanted. A part of me felt that she was my soul mate. I’d never met someone as into Bach and Wagner as I was. We would talk for hours on end about movies, artists, books, and love, and at the end of each phone call, I felt that we were closer and closer.
My mother noticed the change in me right away, though to her credit, she didn’t say anything. She waited for my relationship to take its course, because she knew, as most adults do, that teenage love rarely lasts. Josie and I dated for three months. I lost my virginity to her, I spent all my weekends with her traipsing through museums and stores, and it was only when she asked whether my father could pay for our first trip around the world that I realized all that glitters is not gold.
“But your dad is Jeremiah Bradley, right?” She flipped her long blond hair and looked at me quizzically. “That won’t cost him anything.”
“I never said that.” I frowned and leaned back, her touch making me feel more uncomfortable than happy at this point.
“I know you didn’t say that, but it’s true, right? That’s the rumor going around school.”
“There’s a rumor about me?”
“You know rich kids always gossip.” She shrugged. “That’s why we’re different. We’re there because of our brains, not our money.” And she was partially right. Josie was a scholarship kid and her immigrant family lived in Queens. However, I hadn’t gotten in due to my grades; I was attending the prestigious Harrow Meade Academy because of my father. Just like my younger half brother, David, was. Even though he and I had nothing to do with each other. We knew we both existed, but there was no relationship or bond between us.
“You want me to ask my father to pay to send us abroad?”
“Yeah.” She looked happy, not noticing the withdrawn expression on my face. “Twenty grand should cover it.”
“Okay.” I nodded and jumped up. “Let me see what I can do.” I kissed her on the cheek and went home early for the first time in months. My mother knew as soon as I walked through the door that we’d broken up, but she didn’t say a word. Not for two months, and then she sat me down and told me that there are wolves all over the place, people who will fake excitement and happiness to be with you, for a price. That I should never let my guard down. I just sat there and nodded. She was correct, of course. Josie hadn’t really cared about me. She’d only been after a way to get some money to start the adventures she’d always been talking about. This later proved to be true when she started dating a female cousin of the Vanderbilts and went on a family ski trip. Josie and Sarah were the talk of the school, as there had never been a public lesbian couple gracing our hallways before. A couple of kids who knew I’d dated her teased me and told me I’d turned her gay, but I didn’t respond. I knew the truth. Josie was the kind of girl who would be into anything and anyone for a price, and that had nothing to do with me.
*
Ring ring. I pulled into my parking spot as my phone rang. I looked at the screen and picked up the phone.