She stalked over and grabbed the notebook from his bed, not really sure what she was looking for, her mind going to that place parents’ minds went: Worst-case-scenario-land. He’s writing songs about suicide! About dealing drugs! She flipped to a random page: song lyrics, a few notations about melody—Pat had only a rudimentary understanding of music—fragments of sweet, pained lyrics, like any fifteen-year-old might write, a love song, “Hot Tanya” （awkwardly rhymed with I want ya）， some faux-meaningful tripe about the sun and moon and eternity’s womb.
He reached for the notebook. “Put that down!”
She flipped forward, looking for whatever had been so dangerous that he’d give her his pot pipe rather than admit he was writing a song.
“Fucking put it down, Mom!”
She found the last page with writing on it—the song he must have been trying to hide—and her shoulders slumped when she saw the heading: “The Smile of Heaven,” the title of Alvis’s book. She read the chorus: I used to believe/He’d come back for me/Why’s heaven smiling/When this shit ain’t funny—
Oh. Debra felt awful. “I— I’m sorry, Pat. I thought—”
He reached up and took the notebook back.
She so rarely saw beneath Pat’s smooth, sarcastic surface that she sometimes forgot a boy was there—a hurt boy who was still capable of missing his father even though he didn’t remember him. “Oh, Pat,” she said. “You’d rather I thought you were smoking pot . . . than writing a song?”
He rubbed his eyes. “It’s a bad song.”
“No, Pat. It’s really good.”
“It’s maudlin crap,” he said. “And I knew you’d make me talk about it.”
She sat on the bed. “So . . . let’s talk about it.”
“Ah, Jesus.” He looked past her, at a point on the floor. Then he blinked, laughed, and this seemed to snap him out of some trance. “It’s no big deal. It’s just a song.”
“Pat, I know it’s been hard on you—”
He winced. “I don’t think you understand just how much I don’t want to talk about this. Please. Can’t we talk about it later?”
When she didn’t budge, Pat pushed her gently with his foot. “Come on. I have more maudlin crap to write and you’re going to be late for your date. And when you’re tardy, P.E. Steve makes you run laps.”
P.E. Steve drove a Plymouth Duster with deep bucket seats. He had a gone-to-seed-superhero look, with blocky, side-parted hair and a square jaw, and an athletic body just starting to swell with middle age. Men have a half-life, she thought, like uranium.
“What should we see?” Steve asked her in the car.
She felt ridiculous even saying it: “The Exorcist II.” She shrugged. “I heard some kids in the library talking about it. It sounded good.”
“Fine with me. I figured you more for a foreign-film buff, something with subtitles that I’d have to pretend to understand.”
Debra laughed. “It has a good cast,” she said, “Linda Blair, Louise Fletcher, James Earl Jones.” She could barely even say the real name. “Richard Burton.”
“Richard Burton? Isn’t he dead?”
“Not yet,” she said.
“Okay,” P.E. Steve said, “but you might have to hold my hand. The first Exorcist scared the shit out of me.”
She looked out the window. “I didn’t see it.”
They ate dinner at a seafood place and she noted when he took one of her shrimp without asking. The conversation was easy and casual: Steve asking about Pat, Debra saying that he was doing better. Funny how every conversation about Pat assumed a baseline of trouble.
“You shouldn’t worry about him,” Steve said, as if reading her mind. “He’s a lousy floor-hockey player, but he’s a good kid. The talented ones like that? The more trouble they get in, the more successful they are as adults.”
“How do you know that?”
“ ’Cause I never got in trouble and now I’m a P.E. teacher.”
No, this wasn’t bad at all. They sat early in the theater with a shared box of Dots and a shared armrest, and shared backgrounds （She: widowed a decade earlier, mother dead, dad remarried, younger brother and two sisters; He: divorced, two kids, two brothers, parents in Arizona）。 Shared gossip, too: the one about some kids discovering a cache of the shop teacher’s raunchy porn above the lathe （He: I guess that’s why they call it wood shop） and Mrs. Wylie seducing the gear-head Dave Ames （She: But Dave Ames is just a boy; He: Yeah, not anymore）。