Tomato sauce simmered on the stovetop as Helen carefully plucked just enough spaghetti for one out of the packet. The snap and sizzle of the ground beef cooking beside her and the bloop-plop of the water boiling sounded so loud in the quiet house. The joint hung limply from her mouth as she worked. God, life really was boring sometimes. She had just become used to a house with someone else in it, someone that hung around and laughed at her jokes (hell, laughed all the time), shared her food and toothpaste, someone that was just starting to come out of her shell when she'd been spooked—Wait! No. Not spooked. Chickened out more like, right? Helen had never meant to scare her. She really did believe that Carol was on the same page. That was probably the problem with a people pleaser who lies for a living; you can't really believe what they say. 'Oh yeah! I'm totally fine!' never meant that. In retrospect, that should have been more obvious.

The phone rang shrilly against the symphony of culinary delights. The reprieve was most welcome. Glancing at the caller ID, she smiled and placed the joint in the ash tray for the time being.

"Hello, sweetie," she trilled. "What's up?"

The voice on the other end sounded almost as stoned. "Hey, Mom. Just seeing what's going on."

Helen debated relaying the whole debacle again. Last time she'd spoken to Robbie there was a lot of vague bitching and complaining. The time before that had been a lot of grinning like an idiot and talking about this wonderful new woman in her life. Maybe she should give him the details. But maybe it was best if she didn't. After all, he may have an entirely different perspective that didn't mesh with hers and disagreement wasn't what she wanted to hear.

She told him anyway.

Perhaps it hadn't been the best idea. Sons were supposed to take their mother's side, weren't they? Instead most of his part of the conversation had been, "Oh no, Mom, you didn't." And laughter as if he thought the whole thing was a plot from a shitty comedy program. He seemed completely oblivious to her distress and more than once thought she was blowing things out of proportion. Ungrateful little shit.

"I birthed you for 11 hours, you know. Tore my vagina in half." She took another drag and grinned.

"Mom!" His whiny voice was always a sign she was winning. She chuckled at his discomfort.

"What can I say? You owe me."

He laughed then. "I thought that's why I gave you all the free weed. Must be close to even stevens by now." He paused then, mulling something over in his head. "Seriously though, Mom. Like, you don't think you're being a little crazy about this chick?"

"Robbie," she groaned. Another long toke until she sputtered it out with a cough. She wanted to tell him he'd understand when he was older... but he was 26 now. That was probably old enough.

"What? You don't think it's even remotely possible she wasn't doing what you said and you just scared the shit outta her?"

Helen detested this idea that she could be frightening in her personal relationships. At work, yeah, sure, fine. That was good. But in her home? In her bedroom? That just didn't seem right. And if she detested something (especially something like that) she vetoed it outright. "Nope."

"Oh, come on. I know you better than Dad, maybe even better than Jules. You're fucking scary."

Scoffing loudly, Helen grimaced then remembered he couldn't actually see her face. "I am not!"

She wished she could see his face too. He'd have that incredulous raised eyebrow he inherited from her plastered on his face. "Yeah, you are. Remember that time you found me down at the beach with Mackenzie Williams? You, like, you went psycho outta nowhere and didn't let it go for a year."

"You were 12 and smoking dope. Who wouldn't?" She remembered it like yesterday.

"I was 17 actually and now I grow dope and give it to you." Okay, maybe not like yesterday. "This Carol chick sounds pretty cool and you sound like you. So, like, maybe chill out a bit. I give you the good stuff for that exact purpose."

Boys could be so purposefully dense when they chose to be. Her son was no exception to the rule. He had been a handful growing up for that reason. So much feigned innocence and ignorance. It was incredibly difficult to discipline a child who just pretended he had no idea what was going on. Ever. "Honey, she—she lied. It was totally humiliating. How is sneaking around behind my back 'pretty cool' these days?"

There was a long pause. "Yeah." The word was long and drawn out as if she made a good point, but the slight lilt at the end meant a big giant 'but' was coming up. "But, dude, you're you!"

"Dude?"

"Mom." He attempted to flail around to rectify the situation.

"Dude?" she tried again.

"You know what I mean! I basically spent from the age of 8 to the age of 23 lying straight up to you about everything cuz you are one scary lady and when you think you know something, like, no one can ever tell you any different."

"Differently." She could always rely on correcting his grammar to throw him off course. When there was no immediate response, she grinned. The meat was sizzling faster and louder now as she stirred in the tomato sauce. It smelled divine.

He sighed. Or maybe he was just exhaling a huge hit. "Whatever. Like, yeah, that was shitty of her but man, it took me, like, 23 years to tell you the truth and for you to actually believe me. Cut the chick some slack." He paused again. "I bet you never considered the fact she may not have been cheating on you, huh? You make lots of shit up in your head. Like that time—"

"You are not my son," she said but ended with a slight laugh to cover up her own sense of betrayal.

He echoed her laugh then. And it grew. And grew. And grew until there was a full-on guffaw on the other end of the line. And of course it was contagious. As she laughed alongside him, she could feel tension dripping away. Almost literally. It was an odd feeling after the last couple weeks. This is possibly the reason she had children, she thought.

The laughter began to fade into staccatoed chuckles until nothing was left except that silence. She knew it well. It was the kind of heavy blanket that meant there was more to say but no one was quite willing to break the silence yet. "You weren't like this with Jenn. Or Rosie," he said carefully, as if verbally tiptoeing around a landmine.

She knew what he meant. Insecure. Vulnerable. She hadn't been this insecure and insane with either of them. Jennifer had entered her life slowly and easily, and left it in much the same way. Rosie had been a fling that got stuck on repeat for too many months until she had to pull the plug for both their sakes. She didn't keep a bag of Jennifer's shit in her guestroom for a month afterwards and she didn't spend her days imagining revenge scenarios that would afford her some piece of mind. And Jennifer had cheated. But there had been no lying about it. Just one day she had come out and told Helen what happened the previous night with another coworker from the news, and how she wanted to see where it went. Had it hurt? Sure. But they talked, and talked a bit more, and just sort of drifted off. Like her fucking kitchen islands.

She stubbed the last bit of her roach out in the ashtray. "No, I was not." She also hadn't had a crush on either of them that had been going on for well over two years. She scoffed at herself. A crush. A woman of her age and experience with a stupid little schoolgirl crush, or what felt like one anyway. On a straight woman, no less. Of course, it hadn't started all the way back when Carol had been fucking her ex-husband behind her back, which likely wouldn't have even bothered her then. It had been a few years ago, at the LA Screenings when her chest grew tight as Carol walked over, introducing herself for the 100th time in that obnoxiously fake way she had about her. She'd told her to stop doing that and embarrassed herself by pulling the confused and awkward woman into a surprise embrace. Since that day, that was the greeting instead. And every single time Carol had been taken aback for some reason.

"Exactly."

The pasta seemed done. She grabbed a strainer from the cupboard and flicked off the heat on all the ranges. She said nothing more as she stared at the steam coming from the stainless steel pot.

"Even if this Betsy—"

"Beverly Lincoln."

"Beverly Whatsername is in love with Carol, who gives a fuck? You're you. Trust that, huh? You're a pretty cool lady, and if I can say that about my own mom, you've gotta listen." He giggled a bit for no reason. "You really think that if you dumped her ass like that and she didn't go running to Betsy, like, right away she was cheating on you with her? I woulda. You're so paranoid about everything." He laughed again, apparently lost in his own joke. "How much do you blaze anyway?"

All Helen could think about was her stomach grumbling as she mixed in the pasta. Her neck was getting sore from holding the phone with her shoulder and her son was on some sort of mission to piss her off even further. Her lips screwed into an unhappy line.

And yet his voice did not cease. "If you love her so much, maybe you should try apologizing or something."

"Don't be ridiculous." She couldn't decide which part was ridiculous: the idea she loved Carol or the idea she had anything to apologise for. Both. Yes, both were equally asinine. She barely knew the woman and it's not like she was the one running around behind Carol's back making dates with other women.

"Okay, Mom," he groaned in that idiotic way of his that implied she was the one being a moron in this conversation. "You do your thing but don't tell me I didn't warn you."

Wow, the pasta looked really delicious sitting there on the plate. "Note taken, Robbie. Don't you have homework to do or something?"

"I graduated 3 years ago." She could practically hear his shit-eating grin.

"Right."

He laughed then. "You have food there, don't you?" She wondered momentarily if he could hear her salivary glands sploshing about through the phone.

"I do, actually. And I'd really like to get to it if you don't mind laying off the love life advice." She considered the fact she may actually be drooling.

"No prob. Take it or not, not my business but just don't try calling Jules for a different take. She's gonna agree with me." When Helen made no verbal response, he sighed. "Take care, Mom. Relax. I'll bring you down some Cali indica in a week or so."

She twisted some spaghetti around her fork. "Thanks, honey. Love you, bye," she said quickly and switched off the phone. Fuck, she was hungry.