The Parents- fiction by Perry Genovesi

After the loss of their son mid-semester, the parents decided they would finish his degree themselves.

At the front desk of his old dormitory, they rented one of the large carts to begin moving their things into his room. The mother held the lobby door so the father could wheel the cart to the car. She found that pulling the door all the way open at this angle forced her into the crevice by the front desk. A metal newspaper rack dug into her hip.

The father wobbled the cart out into the night in a jagged path down the sloped lot toward their Subaru.

The mother ran out when she saw father and cart skate sideways and tumble.

She helped him up off the blacktop while the wheels of the cart spun by themselves.

"Think it got my ribs," said the father, hand under his shirt.

Inspecting the upturned cart, they saw that it was just a scuffed-up skateboard with the drawing of an eight ball on the bottom. A cardboard refrigerator box sat atop the board. The name of the dorm was abbreviated in three capital letters. The mother tried to conjure her son's image riding a skateboard and found she could not.

The opening car door taped a gauzy yellow light onto all the things they had brought to live in his room. The mother unhooked the dark red, white, and black plastic coat hangers from the window. Their wide shoulders clattered against the glass.

"Remember," he said as they wheeled back up the parking lot, "I'm forty-six."

"Such a liar," she said. "I'm going to tell them your real age."

"Don't you do that," he warned.

"What are you trying to do, pick up girls? Think you're on, what, your second youth? Like you're one of these girls' boyfriends?"

The parents rarely quarreled in years past. But she still forced a smile at the kids camped near an ashcan.

The dean of the dormitory strode over with his hand outstretched. The father offered his own to shake, but the man reached for the cart.

"Need to let you folks know," he said. "We follow a very strict no-alcohol-drug policy around here." His eyes bore into the parents as he delivered this warning. He then leaned on the box so the rim crunched under his armpits. He reached out and unzipped a bookbag. He looked at several packages of ramen noodles. "Nothing contraband. Good. We got a one-strike policy here." His voice strained as the box compressed his windpipe. "Don't let us catch you with anything."

"Excuse me," the father broke in. We're the parents." He expected the dean's face to rise up and meet his, for a look of red sincerity to flush over the man's face. But the dean just hung there. Finally the man said, "Please, just follow my rules and we'll get through this. You don't bother this community and we'll treat you okay. Please." Then he unhooked himself, dropped to the floor and walked over to the two elevators. He pressed a button the color of used bar soap, then waved the parents inside.

In the murky chrome of the closed door the parents were two cloudy blobs, the box a shared brown rectangle between them.

The mother cupped her palm to her nose. "It smells like urine in here," she said.

The sixth-floor hallway smelled like every conceivable food one could microwave. But some new feeling was attached to it now. The father, though he'd never admit it, pulsed with the distinct sense of starting over.

The cart climbed over a carpet lump. Though it was late, people were still playing music; some kept their doors open. A student lying on her stomach with papers fanned out in front of her watched the cart as it rolled past.

The mother dragged her fingers across a note on someone's door-mounted whiteboard. The tangy smell of lemons made her feel mischievous. She'd never been to college.

Their key clanked in the lock, and the door opened on a pale boy of about nineteen with puffy hair and glasses. He stood there in blue underpants and an open white robe. He was scooping a heaping tablespoon of coffee into a coffeemaker. The room already smelled like fresh coffee, and he plunked the spoon into the empty tin. He fastened the robe around his waist.

"Hi," he said. The father leaned across the small room to shake his hand. The mother watched the rise and fall of the father's shoulder blade under his shirt.

When two people live together for as long as the parents, they learn to read each other's emotion through gesture. And in the stunted rise of his shoulder blade, the mother knew the father couldn't remember the roommate's name. Neither could she.

"Hello…" the father said, pausing, to signal to the boy that he should say his name.

But the roommate interpreted this pause as grief. "Oh, please let me express my condolences," he said. The roommate talked toward the son's side of the room where everything was still in place. There was a folded-up red sweater on the denim bedspread, an open textbook marked with highlighter, and a poster of a rock group on the wall. The mother gawked.

To be polite, the father asked the roommate how he was faring in class. If he was prepared for finals. The roommate said okay but claimed he had to go to the library. This was probably, the father reasoned, to allow the grieving parents time alone with their memories.

Out in the hallway, the cart drew over one student with her head cocked over her phone.

The father was leaning his head on the wall, supporting his forehead with his knuckles. He began reading a scratched-in word out loud, but once he realized it was vulgar he hushed and read it to himself.

By the time the roommate returned, the parents were trying to sleep on the denim bedspread. On the cramped mattress, the father's lower back had to push against the wall. He wrapped his arms around the mother. She lay with her back against his chest. The wall felt like the pads of cold feet against his back. So he reached in the dark for his son's sweater, still folded at the bed's end. He eased it between his skin and the wall, and the parents fell asleep just like that.

The roommate told the parents that their son used to hang out by the benches on the side of the dorm with the smokers.

They decided to investigate later that afternoon. The father said he'd be chilly so he pulled the son's sweater over his head. The tight neck clawed at his earlobes. The mother watched with one eyebrow creased up. She saw that the red sweater defined the mounds in his chest. He looked like Santa Claus. She turned toward the closet and began prying back the rickety sliding door. The corners of the brown slab palpitated against the track.

She unspooled a long, wine-red scarf with the university crest tiling across it. The scarf stretched across the room all the way to the bed. When she patted it against her neck it tickled her chin, like the father used to when the son first left home for university.

About nine mostly male students hunched over their cigarettes. Most still wore pajamas—sweatpants with the university's name thatched down the leg. Two wood benches were set at right angles to each other, ashcan at its center. Dull-orange cigarette butts rolled in the wind. A student sat atop a picnic table. He turned and smiled drowsily; the blue smoke curling in the sky traced back to his wrist.

The parents were at once struck by the students' youth. They immediately felt every wrinkle in their own faces. It was similar to when one stretching early in the morning feels each strained muscle.

"The parents?" said the only girl there, standing. The mother thought she recognized the face but the image was sinking in her thoughts. "I'm not sure if your son ever mentioned me, but we used to date." The father was winding up to say, "Our son never mentioned you…" but did not.

Set atop her denim knee was a pink lighter.

The mother and father let the girlfriend tuck them into two empty seats on the benches. The father accepted one of her cigarettes. He kept switching between which two fingers he'd balance it on. He scanned how the other students held theirs. The girlfriend said, "And I wore this because I knew y'all were coming." Then she propped the cigarette near the corner of her lip. The girlfriend reached one hand under her weak chin to unzip her hoodie all the way to her stomach. The mother recognized the image from the poster in the son's room. "He bought it for me at their show." She stretched the shirt all the way down to her belt buckle.

"It's nice, I think," said the father.

From the girlfriend, the parents learned that the rock group had been their son's favorite.

Some time unwound. The father realized that what he thought were raindrops peppering the dirt was spit. At first, disgust hit him, but he soon felt his tongue buoying in his mouth.

The mother watched how the students sat and their posture sagged. She slouched herself. The mother did not smoke but let the side of her leg rub against the boy's next to her.

"Let me ask," said the father to the girlfriend. "Was our son always faithful to you?"

The girlfriend's head dropped. "Yes. I hope so?"

"Why would you even ask that?" said the mother. She looked away.

When she looked back, she saw a flock of students walking toward the dorm entrance. Class had just ended. Three slunk over to the smoking benches and popped cigarettes into their mouths. The mother slid up, turned toward the girlfriend and asked, "Did our son smoke? How about that for a question?"

The girlfriend draped her head in her hoodie and looked the mother in the eyes. But the girlfriend could tell the new arrivals distracted the mother. The mother kept nodding off toward them. "Only when he was stressed out about a test," the girlfriend said.

And with that, the beacon of work and effort bobbed to the surface of the mother's thoughts. "We should go," she said to the father. "It was nice meeting you all." Holding the cuff of his sleeve, she whispered, "We have to go to class!"

The parents seeped into the crowd.

In the pumpkin-colored Psychology classroom, the father bent over and dragged one of the desks across the floor. His spine was a visible track under the tight sweater. The legs of the desk rattled across the carpet. He pushed the desk against the mother's. He tucked a pen behind his ear and instantly forgot about it, leaving it tangled in his gray curls. The parents spread a spiral-bound notebook between them so both of the desks shared its cover.

The professor was a man with mossy brown hair holding an aquamarine binder. Once he called attendance, the parents both shot their arms up at the announcement of their son's name. The professor scribbled into the binder, then touched his eraser against his frown.

The mother thought, I think I could love him. She turned to the father and said, "You've got a pen in your hair."

In the mirror, dressing for the party, the mother stepped into her underwear. It felt like a long time since she'd had to make choices surrounding intimate things. This depressed her.

On the other side of the room, the father wrapped a white bath towel over his bare chest. He twisted one end over his shoulder to make a strap, then took a plum-colored marker and drew a line down.

"I don't think it's that kind of party," she said. "Toga."

"Hey," he said, "I can see up your skirt. But do I care? No." He pinched a white bandanna and tied it around his head.

"Of course you care," said the mother. "When people say they don't care they really do. If you didn't, you wouldn't have said anything."

"Is this working or not?" he said.

"There's distraction here," she said.

"What the hell's that supposed to mean?"

"I'm talking about our son," she hissed. In the mirror, she smoothed her dress over her hips. "You're busy scrambling for the fountain of youth here." In the mirror her gaze flitted from his glare to the wall. Then she rushed to the corner and slapped her palms against the rock band poster, to flatten the edges.

"Leave it!" he said.

"Let's go," she said.

The front windows of the house on the block of decrepit Victorian homes pulsed with music. The blinds were drawn down so the mother and father could only see silhouettes.

They trudged over wet leaves around to the back. Students crowded around the cellar door.

The father felt the heat at the base of his neck; the stares of the students who probably thought they were someone's chaperones.

Squashed together side by side, the parents stuffed themselves down the staircase.

They stood like coral while the party swirled around them. A high-heeled shoe with a broken strap lay sideways on the ground. In the basement window above, there were three pairs of legs in varying shades of peach. The creased backs of their knees pressed to the glass. The father leaned against the side of a pong table.

A boy in a white shirt with a bank's name on it had been squinting, pinching a pong ball between his fingers, elbow cocked toward the father. When the boy opened his other eye, the tunnel of his focus caved. Once he realized who this old man in a toga was, he at once remembered the university's agreement to help these poor old people.

"The parents!" he shouted, whipping around to his friends. "Guys, it's the parents!"

The father straightened himself against the table. His thoughts raced for a suitable introduction. He made a peace sign. He turned around to introduce the mother. But she was shrinking through the doorframe with one of the boys. Someone handed the father two overflowing red cups. The father decided he'd drink both.

Soon the father was stumbling near the edge of the pong table. He flung a set of cups onto the ground. When he toppled, the mother went to him.

"Maybe let's go outside," she said.

"Leave me alone."

She said, "I want to tell you – I kissed someone. I kissed someone who wasn't you."

"What?" he stammered.

"We can enjoy ourselves here, apart. In different ways. You and I just do it differently."

He steadied himself. "What you're talking about... is adultery," he said. He threw his fists about in the air. He called the mother the vulgar word he had read on the dorm room wall. Then he leaned and finally collapsed onto her, his lips wet on her bare shoulder.

The mother bent down and found the strength to steady him. His arms hung around her shoulders. The mother groped for the rail to the stairs for support.

The students parted to let the parents pass.