Iris rolled onto his body and ground against him. “Look at me, I’m just running away, aren’t I?”

The next morning, Iris had just left when Ray came by the apartment.

Ray: “Hey fagbag! How’s it going?”

David: “I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my entire life. Ever.”

And David’s mom, she loved Iris, too. He brought her home a few weeks in. Connie picked them up at the end of the Blue Line, honking in glee with her arm out the window—“So you nabbed my son, huh?”—laughing her head off as they got in the car and notably marking the first time David saw Iris even a little bit disarmed.

On the drive to Boring, they chit-chatted about David’s data entry job, who Obama might pick for VP, Iris’s hometown and how she liked the Northwest and blah blah blah. But at home, when Iris went to the bathroom, Connie turned to David with wet eyes and said, “She’s so nice,” a thing that Connie had never said about any human he had brought home. It made his heart move into his throat.

Bluster and dewy eyes aside, though, Connie was kinda having a rough time of it. It made David sad. Divorce. Again. Poor Mom. A man leaving again, this time David’s stepdad, a stern but loving architect. They’d met when David was nine and Connie was drowning in med school applications.

David liked to tell the story of Connie straightforward and twinkle-eyed, a plucky tale of a single mom and son, straight out of a PG movie or middle-grade children’s book. Truth was, when David’s dad left, Connie didn’t exactly pick herself up off the floor right away. Truth was those were rough years. Moving every few months, heat shut off in winter, stealing food from corner stores. Days she didn’t get out of bed.

That kind of thing.

Yet, then: the stern but loving architect and, soon after, a med school app that came back yes. Connie’d grown up in a big screaming family in a tiny house in LA before coming to Seattle, and then suddenly she was living in the Portland exurbs with her kid and new husband, going to OHSU. Turbocharged upward mobility, manna from heaven; she finished med school as David finished middle school.

And now. Here Connie was again, alone. Financially secure, at least. But alone. David’s heart really did ache for his mom on this. He could hear it in her voice in her phone calls that had become just a little upped in frequency (“Hey kiddo, how ya doing? Well, I’m just driving home from the clinic …”). He could hear it in her voice at the end of those calls, when David would say he should probably go, he and Iris were about to make dinner, nice to talk to you, I’ll call you next week … and Connie’s cackle and good nature and I-love-you-goodbye were all just a little bit dimmer.

But bringing Iris home was a good time. They had wine after dinner and watched A Fish Called Wanda. (David’s suggestion; Connie loved that movie.) They slept in David’s old room. When he got up in the night to pee, and then returned with his feet padding on the quiet carpet, he saw Iris’s body silhouetted and slumbering in the shadows of his bed, and God, he wanted to sit down and cry right there.