***PUBLISHED***Shortened and edited version can be found on Amazon under a new name, A Not So Typical Love. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MHQ1J27

Today is the day my mother is going to speak to me again. This was something I told myself every month since my mother left when I was ten. She hadn't spoken since, trapped in her body, trapped in her mind. Physically she was fine, but mentally...mentally "she's out to lunch" as Tim would say.

Tim, my older brother by eleven years, had given up, but I didn't. I couldn't give up. She liked it when I played her favorite punk and post-punk music of the seventies and eighties with a few songs of the nineties thrown into the mix. The only songs on my phone were her favorites, which were in the hundreds, maybe even thousands. Before her mental collapse, she had been playing me those songs since I was in her womb. She was a "punk rock girl," Dad said. And since then, punk and post-punk music was the only music I listened to, the only music I could relate to because it connected me to my mother.

Old photos of my mother in her teens reflected her various punk phases. She and Dad met their freshman year of college when she was just seventeen during what's been referred to as her "Nancy Spungen years." Nancy Spungen was the girlfriend of bassist Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols who allegedly murdered her in the Hotel Chelsea in Greenwich Village. They were both a couple of junkies. He died not long after of a heroin overdose. Anyway, Mom's hair was dyed platinum blond back then. She wore lots of makeup with fish net stockings and leather pants or skirts that barely covered her butt. A few years later she went through her Patti Smith phase with dyed black hair and wore hardly any make-up. Patti Smith was her all-time favorite.

Now Mom's hair was wiry gray and mostly in disarray because she wouldn't let any of the group home staff comb it. She usually wore sweatshirts and sweatpants and was at least fifty pounds overweight, nothing like that punk rock girl.

Tim said she didn't know who I was, but I knew she knew who I was. I just wished she would speak. I hadn't heard her voice since I was ten. That's when she was sent away and never came back. It was all Dad's fault. If he had been home more, none of this would have happened. That's what I told myself, anyway. Sometimes I blamed myself. I was a horrible kid, a horrible son.

God Save the Queen played through my iPhone as we sat at the picnic bench in the small backyard of the five-person group home she had been living in for the past five years. She spent a number of years in an institution in addition to various other group homes that never seemed to work out. She had the most success in this home, over an hour away from my home, the same house she left just shy of her forty-seventh birthday. Now she was nearing her fifty-seventh birthday, which was two weeks before mine. I was going to be 20 and continued to be nothing but a nuisance and burden to Tim.

During my bi-monthly visits, Tim sat in the car, only venturing out to get me. He never saw the point in visiting. He also harbored a lot of resentment as if this was all her fault since he was the one who more or less raised me.

Dad was a geoscientist who traveled from one face of the earth to another, rarely ever coming home. Maybe we saw him one or two months out of the year. It had been this way for years.

I think Tim resented me, too, because I wasn't like most guys my age. I was more than a little weird. People didn't get it. They didn't get me. I talked when I felt like it and no one could force me to do things I didn't want to do. Tim was always afraid I'd have a freak out if I went away to college or even if I commuted to college so I took college classes online. Driving also didn't seem to be an option for me. Too many so-called freak outs. Everyone determined that I was safest at home.

An MIT graduate, Tim was a research scientist for some big pharmaceutical company in Cambridge. He traveled over an hour everyday to and from work to our little country house on the ten acres of wooded land.

Mom's eyes lit up when I sang along to the song. "God save the queen...she ain't no human being..." I think I even spotted a smile. She knew me. She knew my voice. I saved it most for her.

Tim, unfortunately, interrupted my serenade. "Come on, Jordan, we've been here for ages," he said, barely acknowledging Mom's presence. Glancing at my watch, I realized we had only been there for thirty minutes. Tim could be really impatient at times.

"I gotta go," I said to her. She didn't like to be kissed or hugged, like me, so I just turned off the music and shoved my phone in the pocket of my hoodie. "I'll see you in a couple of weeks."

I got up and went to Tim who stood at least ten feet away from us. Rain started to spit, causing spots on his glasses, which I knew would start to annoy him. I put my hood up and followed him to his Subaru Forrester.

"You should really appreciate what I do for you," he said, getting in the car. "You waste an entire Sunday coming here for nothing. I know I know. To you it's not nothing."

Halfway through the ride home, Tim's phone rang, which he immediately answered. "Hey," Tim said happily as if he were relieved to hear a  friendly voice.

After a few seconds, Tim didn't sound too happy. "No," he said. "Deal with your own problems."

There was a pause as the person on the other end spoke.

"What about your parents?" Another pause and Tim sighed. "You promise it's just for the summer?" A pause again. "Fine, okay...yeah...yeah." The call ended and Tim tossed his phone inside the console. "We're having a guest for awhile," Tim said. "Remember Jamie? Jamie Perron, my punk ass friend from school?"

He had a lot of so-called "punk ass friends," so I wasn't sure which one he was referring to. Tim was plain and boring with no sense of adventure. I shrugged my shoulders, unable to accurately remember him.

"Well, anyway, he'd been living with this girl for the past six months. A girl...that's a laugh. Well, anyway..." Tim said "Well, anyway" a lot. "He cheats on her with a dude so naturally she kicks him out. So you know what he does? He comes crying to me. He needs a place to crash for the summer. I guess he's doing this teacher exchange thing in the fall. He's going to London and a teacher from London is taking his place so he'll just be living with us for a couple of months."

"How did he cheat on her with a dude?" I asked. The whole scenario was weird to me.

"Huh?" he said, always a little surprised when I chose to speak. I was just trying to make sense of it all. "A dude is a guy...you know, a man." Yeah, I know that.

"So why would he cheat on her with a man if he has a girlfriend?"

"Because he can't make up his mind," Tim said in an exasperated tone. "I know he's always preferred dudes, but every now and again he falls for a girl and it never lasts. I'm surprised this one has lasted as long as it did. I can't even believe he moved in with her."

"He cheated with a dude so...so that means he had sex with another man?" I said.

"Ooo, someone's curious today," he said. "Yeah, that's what it means. I'm almost 100 percent sure he's gay. He says he's bi, but he seems to have sex with more men than women. Who knows? I don't care one way or the other."

When I was eleven, not long after our mother went away, Tim bought me this picture book that explained everything you needed to know about sex. That was the extent of my education.

There were no pictures of two men having sex in the book or two women for that matter. I never had any friends and I especially didn't have any girlfriends and I never thought to ask any sexual-related questions. I guess I didn't have any questions, or ones that I can remember. I just knew that sometimes stuff would come out and I'd wake up with sticky sheets.

"Do you think Dad would mind?" I asked.

"Do you think he'd mind what?"

"Jamie staying with us for the summer."

"Dad won't be around, anyway." We still lived in the same house we grew up in. "So why would he care?"

Shrugging my shoulders, I slouched in my seat, already freaking out with the idea of having someone else living in our house.

A/N

I just wanted to say that I really do appreciate criticism as long as it's constructive (i.e. ways to make my story better or mistakes you've noticed) and not simply hateful or rude comments. If you dislike my story or really hate it, then just stop reading it and avoid such negative comments. I wouldn't do that to other writers and I hope readers don't do that to me. Thank you.

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