me? thinking about Suzanne Bittle late into the night as a way to process my own issues with my parents?? shocking
anyway i’m just thinking about how she’s probably a lady with a lot of friends. small-town religious moms are like that. you have your bible study ladies and the wives of your husband’s friends and the moms of your kids’ friends. probably some friends from high school or college, although it’s possible that you don’t have the same politics and beliefs as they do anymore—not that it’s impossible to stay friends with people you disagree with, but you have so many other friends with whom you don’t have to have any uncomfortable conversations. don’t have to avoid any topics or tiptoe around anyone’s feelings. and they’re real, lovely friendships! it just helps that they’re easy.
but then bitty comes out. and maybe she suspected that this day would happen, but when she let herself entertain the possibility, it was quiet and internal. dicky would tell her first, probably, and maybe they’d discuss telling coach. he would ask her not to tell anyone else—aunts and uncles, meemaw, the cousins, and he would be so relieved when she promised that of course, she wouldn’t breathe a word. she’d have time to sit and think about it, to compose herself. she would always still love her child, and that was pretty good around here.
in those wild hypotheticals, it was nothing like this. nobody else ever had to know, her mother, people. suzanne gets sympathetic phone calls from her many girlfriends; she lets them go to voicemail, where they all leave the same message. just wondering if she wanted to grab coffee. they were there for her. they couldn’t imagine. they used the word difficult—difficult time, situation, moment.
and she loves them for instinctively responding with food and a hug. her friends really love her. but she doesn’t want to speak to any of them—she barely wants to speak to her husband. he’s worried about her, watches her biting her gel manicure as she calls over and over. that feels okay, the anxiety over dicky not picking up his phone. anything could have happened! people can be awful—i mean, really awful.
but she also wonders who, exactly, she’s checking up on. yes, she wants her son, this person with a whole other life she knew nothing about, to be safe. to talk to her. but she also wants to make sure she still recognizes him. is he still the boy who would quietly ask her to tell coach that he’s not going to play football anymore? the boy who sat silently in the back seat on the way home from the supply closet? she used to hope, with a force that made it hard to breathe, that he’d be able to be less afraid someday.
but then she’s sitting on his unmade bed, cupping the phone in her hands, and she wishes he would have told her not to say anything to anyone. wait for people to forget. she loved being the person in his corner when he tried to walk the thin line between who he was and what everyone expected, but it looks like he’s done compromising. that makes her, suddenly, afraid.
she will have to go get coffee with those friends eventually. she will have to see them at church and at football games and cookouts. they’ll offer their condolences, they will say that they’re praying for her dicky, and she will not have to say whatever it takes to protect him. she will have to decide on her own whether to worry along with them about his eternal soul or to tell them that there’s nothing wrong with who he loves. she can let them talk about jack like he’s a gambling habit her son needs to break, or she can tell them that he’s a lovely young man, very respectful, just the kind of boy that she would have hoped a daughter would marry.
one of these options will mean that she’s no longer an easy friend. if she runs her mouth about this, she will become a person that all the ladies tiptoe around, and a glass wall will come down hard on her connections to the rest of her community. god, she’d lie to everyone she knew if dicky asked her to, but he hasn’t. he’s grown up and he doesn’t need to come home; he doesn’t depend on her love like he used to. a small and selfish part of her wonders if that absolves her of some responsibility.
suzanne spent the past twenty years protecting her son, and she would do it again in a heartbeat. but it’s different to fight for him. and she’s not sure that, faced with the rest of the world, she will.
