Creep-Factor

Rain’s 21st birthday

His first legal drink was on me. I thought it fitting—mom and son having beer over a game of pool and waxing philosophical about his proverbial departure into grown-up land. It was a tongue-in-cheek affair since he already moved out months ago, but we had to do some kind of rite of passage.

“Okay, Mom,” he said. He put down his pool stick and picked up his beer. “Level with me.”

“Shoot,” I said.

“What’s up with Dean?” Rain said it in a way that gave me the impression I knew what he was talking about.

Dean wasn’t his father. Rain was three when his dad and I divorced, so Dean mostly raised him. But the intimacy was such that Rain still called him “Dean” and not “Dad.”

“Whadya mean?” I asked, truly puzzled.

“Don’t you think he’s got, like, a huge creep-factor?”

My mom always told me to trust my instincts. I was well-acquainted with them. As many times in childhood when a man looked at me a certain way or moved close to me a certain way, I knew what was coming. I was never wrong about that.

Dean? Creep-factor? Oh, certainly not. I’d feel that alarm go off in my gut miles ahead. I’d know. I’d recognize that kind of vileness.

Surely, Rain was internalizing something. Maybe because of the years of their strained relationship.

“Dean loves you,” I said. “He’s just stoic. He’s a man of very few words—you know that.”

“Well, yeah. But that’s not what I mean.”

Rain was not stoic. On the contrary, he was almost supernaturally empathetic, since he was old enough to recognize bullying in school. Since he was old enough to recognize when he was being lured into a dangerous encounter. If I trusted anyone’s instincts and impressions, it was his.

“What do you mean, Rain? Did something happen? Did you see or hear something?”

…I wish Rain’s instinct to protect my psyche hadn’t been so prominent. I wish now, he would’ve said more.

But he didn’t say more. “Just a feeling. But I’ve been wrong before!” He laughed, swigged down the last of his beer, and picked up his stick again.

“Don’t worry, Mom.”

So I didn’t worry. Not for a long time.