Some of the pictures sparked corresponding memories of the times and places they were taken. A picture of Aaron in his early teens sitting next to his father holding up a fish triggered the memory of his father’s voice urging him on. His father, Lucas Pilan, Luke, encouraged him. “Give her a fight. Don’t let up. Keep the rod solid in your hand. Pull back, steady … steady … reel her in, slow and easy.” Aaron was so excited and yet afraid to lose the fish. He didn’t even like fish, but he wanted this one for his dad, who loved a good pan-fried trout with beer batter.

Focus shifted to another picture of his father in a hospital bed, looking embarrassed but still smiling. Aaron recalled how his dad maintained his good humor to the very end, even as the chemotherapy treatments and medications brought on recurring bouts of nausea, making him so tired that he slept through most of the day. Though his body was frail, Luke’s spirit held strong. He’d smiled and laughed constantly, as if the discomfort was merely a distraction. At times his father would say, “I’m catching an early retirement out of this one … don’t you worry, it’s no big deal. You can’t keep a good man down.” He’d spout off ridiculous things like this while bedridden, in extreme pain. Aaron had often wondered if it was the pain meds talking, or his father trying to smooth it over, keeping up appearances for his family, or perhaps lying to himself.

Aaron recalled his problems in school. How he was held back in the tenth grade to repeat the year because he’d spent so much time with his father in the hospital. And then, again, he missed an entire month of school after his father had died. Ironically it wasn’t the cancer that killed his dad, but the complications of internal bleeding after removing the tumor in surgery.

Another photo in the collage was Aaron at sixteen, just before his father’s diagnosis of cancer. He sat with both parents at his birthday party; all three of them smiling with faces pressed together side by side and cheek to cheek. Aaron’s mother, Angela, was a slight woman of dark brown hair, so dark, almost black, and sad brown eyes. Aaron obviously inherited something of Angela’s cheek bones and the sad tilt of her eyes. They seemed happy. An average American family living day by day, blissfully unaware of how death would irrevocably change their lives, robbing Aaron of all his joy for years to come.

And then his mother had changed in the blink of an eye. Almost overnight his mother had disappeared, replaced with a complete stranger. She began dating all different kinds of men her friends introduced her to. She never warned Aaron of her intentions. She just did it. The extent to which she had consulted Aaron about her desire to date and move on with her life had been an off-hand comment about how they both had to go on their lives and Luke wouldn’t have wanted them to be lonely. Before he knew it, she was out on Friday or Saturday nights until two-three-four in the morning. Sometimes she didn’t bother coming home till the next day. Angela’s behavior immediately after his father’s death seemed a horrible betrayal of everything he held sacred.

They grew distant quickly. Aaron wasn’t assertive enough to let her know how he felt. Long accustomed to the quiet, unobtrusive temperaments of both Aaron and his father, Angela didn’t bother to ask what Aaron thought. Had she asked, it would’ve been purely courtesy. Angela Pilan had been bowling over her boys for years. She’d always found a way to get exactly what she wanted. Luke hadn’t been the kind of man to set limits or argue with his wife. The Pilan men are long-suffering. Luke had been happy just to have Angela in his life. He taught Aaron to go with the flow when it came to the whims of his mother.

In going with the flow, Aaron withdrew from Angela. He found solace in his friends, Kyle and a couple other buddies. His grand plans for college and career were shelved for the day to day life of pursuing girls and enjoying the teen social scene of parties, movies, and music. It worked. Kept his mind off things at home he’d rather not deal with. Aaron stopped talking to his mother about anything he thought or felt. About anything at all. She didn’t seem to notice. Or perhaps she preferred it that way. She never tried to reconnect with her son. Angela pursued the single’s lifestyle, and Aaron took care of himself, rarely requiring anything from her.

Angela was busy making up for lost time, meeting new people, making new friends, and jumping from boyfriend to boyfriend almost monthly. During their family years, when Luke was still alive, Angela had maintained the habit of going to the local Catholic Church on Sundays. After his death, all pretenses were dropped. Aaron wondered that maybe he’d never truly known his mother all these years. It was as if she’d been maintaining appearances for Luke’s sake, and now the real Angela showed her face for the first time.

As he spent more and more time hanging out with Kyle, making plans to get their own apartment, it seemed the life he’d once known with a mother and a father was something experienced in a dream.

The final episode between him and this woman Angela, this stranger he called mother, happened the day he met Charles Miller. An insurance salesman, Charles and Angela had hooked up three months prior. Somewhere during these three months, in which Aaron hadn’t known the man existed, Charles and Angela had fallen in love and decided to marry.

This day was crisp and clear in Aaron’s mind, branded and labeled as the day he lost whatever remaining sliver of the mother Angela had once been to this stranger, Charles. The man showed up at the house––the first time Aaron had ever seen him. Aaron realized right away his mother was serious about her relationship with Charles.

He gave it an honest effort to talk with Charles, to accept him into his life. Aaron’s limited conversations with the man ranged over sports and religion, subjects on which Aaron had little comment or interest. Apparently, Angela had been miraculously restored in her faith by the divine hand of Charles Miller. All the two of them ever did was preach Jesus and salvation. Aaron couldn’t run the opposite direction fast enough. It was painfully obvious they had no common ground to converse or build a relationship. As it turned out, it wasn’t necessary for Aaron to welcome Charles into their home.

After meeting Charles, and sharing a meal together as though they were now a family, this strange woman inhabiting his mother’s body pulled Aaron aside to talk with him privately. She told him you’re nineteen years old, and its time you moved out and became an adult, and that she wanted to live her life with Charles without the weirdness of another male adult in the household. Aaron had listened to her in a daze of shock, simply nodding at the proper moments to indicate understanding. Understanding was the furthest thing from his mind on this day. He didn’t get it at all. Where was his mother? Had she been invaded by body snatchers? Had she become one of those pod people? Who was this woman telling him to leave the only home he’d ever known? How could she toss him out on the street like the spring-cleaning trash?

He didn’t recall if he had spoken to Angela beyond his dumbstruck nods of acknowledgement. He was too numbed with shock. He packed his clothes and stuff and moved into Kyle’s apartment that very evening. When asked about it by Kyle and friends, Aaron answered simply, “It’s the right time.”

Until this very moment, lying in bed with Michelle’s glorious naked body wrapped around him, Aaron never had a reason to look back on the past. It wasn’t necessary.

Delia had never cared about Aaron’s past, and Kyle had seemed to understand in a silent agreement that there was nothing to discuss regarding Aaron’s mother. Aaron and Angela’s relationship degenerated to the bare bones minimum of contact. He spoke to her on the required holidays in the American Christian custom. They exchanged gifts through the mail at Christmas and birthdays. Beyond that, neither one existed to the other.

Aaron kept on rolling forward, avoiding the need to think back and remember those bygone days when he’d once known what it was like to have a family. Those memories were too painful and always sparked resentment towards his mother. He blocked those memories away, trying his best to forget. There his memories stayed, buried in the riverbed of his life. He never found cause to dig into the soil and expose the past. It was easy for Aaron to fill the empty hours of his days with Kyle and Delia. As long as he kept busy, he had no time to brood on the past.

He lived his life cheerfully ignorant of the rest of the world outside Kyle and Delia until the day the world put Michelle in his path. Fate had gifted him––or cursed him––with this new turn of events. Aaron lay in bed holding the most beautiful woman in the world, bearing his soul through their mutual psychic bond, tears of blood streaming down his face from the remembrance of grief, pain and frustration he’d suppressed for years.

Michelle now knew everything about him: his past, his pain, his grief, his loneliness, and the little shoebox of a life he’d lived prior to meeting her. She was his confessional, his priest, his savior, his own personal Jesus Christ, laying his demons to rest with her touch, presence, and silent acceptance.

Purged of his sadness, allowing the memories to drift away to return to the vault of things better forgotten, Michelle agreed through silent psychic communication that this would never be spoken of again. Happy, limbs tangled together, they rested, content. She felt the satisfaction of problems resolved, demons conquered, and the comfort of a deeply rewarding connection. As dawn peeked over the horizon she drifted off to sleep like the dead in his embrace.

* * * *

CHAPTER 12

Talco pounded pavement for three nights straight, passing around the artist’s rendering of the blonde tramp to every pimp, prostitute, and hustler he could find. Not one person recognized her. No one had ever seen or heard of her before. She’d never worked these streets, at least not anywhere near 60th and Palmetto.

He considered it a risk to speak with most of these people. Many of them were ex-cons. The rules of his probation forbid any contact with felons. It was completely absurd. How should he know if someone was a felon? Was he supposed to ask every person he met? “Hello, my name’s Talco, oh … by the way, are you a felon? I was just wondering because I’m on probation.”