Lavender

Chapter 3

Wow, life following the funeral couldn’t have been darker. My mother descended into a pit of despair unreachable by anyone. She didn’t speak except on the phone to relatives in France. When we saw each other, she ignored me, until I returned the favor, and days passed when we wouldn’t speak.

I dissolved into a nether beast consumed by the need to f**k, and occasionally, on very bad painful days, be f****d. Incessantly, viciously, and relentlessly I hunted men in any and all forms possible. The rest areas proved fertile hunting grounds and there were occasions when condoms littered the ground and my balls ached for mercy, but I didn’t stop until I fell exhausted and filthy with sweat, c*m, and dirt to my knees. I even f****d a cop who threatened to arrest me after catching me cruising a rest area. I f****d the need right out of his smug face, and his eyes bulged with the shock of being taken by a man while handcuffed to the rotting fence. I refused to give him my number and left him chained there.

Public bathrooms, gym steam rooms, local bars, anywhere men congregated, I found relief. One night, I picked up a hitchhiker and had him blow me while I careened through the Los Padres Mountains in my old pickup. Those roads on the best days are perilous; at night, they are downright treacherous. How many times we nearly went off the road into the dark depths of the forest I couldn’t count. I wanted to die. I came when we emerged on the other side of the mountain and the Pacific Ocean spread like a black wasteland. I’d barely rolled to a stop before the terrified hitchhiker jumped out.

My diet consisted of barely cooked steaks and muddy beer. Nothing about that time was pretty or decent. The mirror in my bathroom revealed not a man, but a demon—lean, raging, and unbearably wounded.

One day when I woke up in my own bed, a rare occurrence in itself, my mother stood over me. It’d been weeks since we’d spoken.

“I bought a ticket.” She sat beside me.

Unable to look her in the face, I rolled over. My eyes burned with insomnia and my head buzzed.

“It’s time to go.” She touched my back. “Whatever you’re doing to yourself, please stop.”

“Get out.”

Later, I found her sitting in her room, an open, half-filled suitcase by her side. She looked at me with such pain, the hairs on my neck stood on end. I kneeled beside her.

She touched my face. “Promise to scatter his ashes.”

I nodded.

“His family will try and take…” She sighed and forced a smile. “It doesn’t matter. You are smarter than all of them.”

“I’m not that smart.”

She smiled. “Smart, handsome, talented…I couldn’t be prouder.”

“Don’t leave. I don’t want to be alone.”

She looked surprised. “Says the boy who always loved being alone.”

“Not now.” Tremendous ache gripped my heart. The vacancy of my father’s death enveloped the farm like a black fog. “I can’t face this alone.”

“You don’t need me, Lawrence. You’ve always been independent and strong. If you needed me, you’d get on a plane and run away like the coward I am. It’s me who can’t face it.”

“Maman ne partez pas.”

“Ahh, you speak French only when you are desperate,” she said and touched my cheek again. “Stay, look after the lavender, and try not to hate your mother.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We both are, but now we have to stop being sorry. You have to take a shower, and I have to finish packing.”

I got up.

“You’ll scatter his ashes?”

I nodded and left the room.