The Garden Path by Kitty Burns Florey

she would have articulated that surge if she hadn’t been so involved in the moment. He refused to pretend, he insisted on truth, he would tell her his trouble. How she hated it when people pretended there was nothing the matter, as Edwin had insisted on doing for so many years. The stiff upper lip had never appealed to her: in this she was more Italian than English—though her English mother was, to the end, as honest and open in her quiet way as her flamboyant father, who wept without shame, even as an old man, when something moved him. And Peter, the dear boy, sat before her in the rose-patterned wing chair, with wet eyes.
    â€œI am tired,” he said after a sip of sherry. “I’m not sleeping very well.” She didn’t ask why not; she waited, sipping her own drink but keeping her gaze on him. “Hollis left me,” he said finally.
    â€œOh, my dear.” Rosie moved forward to touch his knee, then stopped. It wasn’t a mother’s touch he wanted. “When was this, Peter? And why?”
    He and his friend Hollis had seemed settled for keeps. In fact, it was the permanence of his relationship with Hollis that had made Peter decide to confess to his mother, formally, a year ago December, his preference for his own sex—the only secret he had ever kept from her for long. “Is it like a marriage, then?” she had asked him, saying any old thing to disguise the initial shock that wasn’t really a shock but the jolt that comes with confirmed suspicions, and with a sort of relief that it was all out in the open, and that it could have been so much worse. A long-term relationship instead of barhopping and diseases and absence of love.
    â€œIt’s better than any marriage I’ve ever seen,” he had told her, his face shining with such delight that she couldn’t take his words as a reproach. And how, when a sexual preference she considered incomprehensible provided her son with such joy and contentment, could she disapprove?
    And when Rosie met Hollis, she loved him too. They were like twins, those boys—both of them dark and handsome and clever. Hollis, an architect, was also a gifted painter and cartoonist; Peter was a superannuated graduate student in Italian literature. What they had in common was no less than everything—Dante and Robert Venturi and Shaker furniture and traveling and scuba diving and English murder mysteries. They were perfectly matched, even wore the same shoe size, had identical soft brown mustaches, hated beets. They never touched each other in her presence. Their tact was immense. They could have been two brothers who’d grown up close, sharing the same jokes, the same tastes. In fact, when the three of them were together, they concentrated their attention on Rosie, teasing and flattering her as if they were her young lovers instead of each other’s. But the affection between them was obvious. It had warmed her, and she would miss it. She would miss the teasing, and the flattery too, and the absurd cartoons Hollis used to send her in the mail, and all the fun the three of them had had for so long.
    â€œWhen?” Peter repeated after her. “Last Saturday night at ten-thirty precisely. He took all his stuff. I helped him pack.”
    â€œOh, my dear.” She could see the tears run down his cheeks, and she could see, too, what she’d never really noticed before: the lines in his face, the wrinkles around his eyes. Peter was twenty-nine years old. Rosie thought fleetingly that his thirtieth birthday, coming up in eight months, would be as big an event for him as her fiftieth would be for her. “Peter, honey,” she said.
    â€œAnd as for why ,” he went on, his steady voice incongruous with his tears, “he left to get married. He’s gone to Vermont. He’s got a job there and everything.”
    â€œYou mean— married ?”
    â€œTo a girl—excuse me, a woman he met at