Shopping with his mother was a torture he could not well enough articulate, only know he was now too old to suffer.
“What do you think of this one?” She held up a grey sport jacket. Their mission was to find something to wear to brunch with his grandmother, a woman who found fault with every single thing he ever wore.
“Why do we even have to go to this stupid thing?” Peter said. “You hate it, I hate it, dad hates it...”
“Because someday we won’t be able to,” his mother said. “Every birthday your grandma has is a miracle, at this point. How about this shirt to go with it?”
“It’s pink. I don’t like pink!”
“Lots of men wear pink now!”
Peter tried it on and his mother inspected it, her eyes darting past him to a couple shoppers browsing the men’s section a few racks away.
“That boy over there. Didn’t you know him from Boy Scouts?” She whispered, collecting the shirt from him. “Isn’t his name Adam? You used to get along well. Go say hi!”
“Mom, no. I don’t really know him anymore. That was years ago.”
“Oh, just go say hi. Ask him what he’s up to these days,” she said. “He ended up transferring to Albany Academy, didn’t he?”
The boy’s name was Adam, Peter could confirm. He almost wasn’t a boy; there was hair on his upper lip yet unshaved, and he looked capable of filling a men’s sport coat, one of which he had over his arm, along with a pair of black pants.
Adam was with a boy, though, who couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old, and—from the shape of his eyes and nose—was certainly his little brother. He held up a black shirt to the boy’s neck, measuring its length against his shorter body as Peter approached.
“Hey—Adam, right? Peter, from Boy Scouts,” Peter said, having been prodded across the department by his mother. He smiled and shook the other young man’s hand in a way young men are not used to, like they were playacting.
“Oh hey, yeah,” Adam said, scratching the side of his head. His brother frowned and went to look for more shirts.
“How’s it going? Been a few years.”
Adam looked to his brother, who was holding up a different black button-down shirt to his little neck. “I’m alright, yeah. And you?”
“Great! You transferred, right? To Albany Academy?”
“Yep!”
“Still swimming? How are your times?”
And so on. Adam was no longer in scouts. He did not swim anymore. He was unsure about where to go to college. He shifted from leg to leg with each answer, looking to his brother. Peter’s cue to leave repeated many times.
“We should get you a black tie, too, bud,” Peter heard Adam say, after he’d let them be.
“He was such a polite and promising young boy,” Peter’s mother said on their way home in the car. “What was his last name?”
“Flowers.”
“Oh that’s right. I can’t picture the mother. She never came to Scouts, for some reason. I don’t think she ever contributed to any of the bake sales or anything, it was always the dad. Rude, very rude guy, always tired and angry,” his mother said.
Peter didn’t hear her. He was on his phone, looking up Adam Flowers on Facebook, finding out all he needed to know.
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