"Where is he!" she demanded to know from the sundry people who had risen from the pit of the house to the parlor.
"Up!" said someone; and she found him in her bed copulating with his girl beneath him. She grabbed him by the neck, dragging the naked body through the frenetic crowds. With a burly frame kept muscular by her ritual of weekly if not daily racket ball sessions, she was able to pull him around no differently than she had when he was five years old. Enjoying his ride and his naked exhibition beyond any pleasure he had ever felt before, he squealed with laughter even unto being hurled into the snow.
"I love you Mom," he guffawed.
"I'll bring your bitch out next and you can do that in the streets." As she turned to do just that someone brought out Nathaniel's clothes and the crowd began to disperse from the house.
When he returned late in the afternoon she was on her deck. Like her migraine, an unpredictable storm was coming upon her. Trees hurled their limbs at the dusk because they themselves were being hurled. They were angered because they were being angrily smote. It seemed to her that everything was smote in jilts of unpredictable existence, and love itself was no guarantee of anything. It was selfishly using a child and being used and merely this. Bland philistine lives devoid of color and galleries in a marriage where two conventional parents were always present could produce Klu Klux Klan members, Timothy McVeighs, serial killers, snipers, child molesters, unibombers, or bigoted bible thumpers blowing up abortion clinics. Weakened and in pain, she half way yearned for a priest to hand her a round piece of unleavened bread to melt in her mouth for a reduction of tension in her life, the melting of her quandaries, and the belief that crucifixions and violence and those who were born in the wrong socioeconomic state and whose short and painful lives were consumed by hard labor and drudgery for survival in the injustices and truculence that abound were all part of God's plan. She wistfully thought of the statues of saints and patron saints that had their home warming familiarity. Then he approached her.
"Hi. Sorry about everything. Teenagers, right? We like parties. I didn't have permission and things got out of control. Are you angry?"
She noticed how muscular he now was. For the first time she felt intimidated by it, seated there as weakened as she was. She cleared her throat and looked on him like an object such as a wall that she would see and her hubris would bypass as immaterial. He had felt it before and hated that look of hers beyond all others. Her treatment of the dog, he assessed, was sometimes better than this. "I think I'll try something," she mumbled aloud contemplatively. "When do you think you'll be paid from that burger joint you work for?"
"Why?"
"Do you have money?"
"Some."