Where the Moon Is

“Where do you want to go eat?” I ask him.

“Oh, are we going to eat?” He asks.

“If you are tired we don’t have to go anywhere. You seemed like you wanted to go so I came straight back home.” I say after dropping our youngest son off in town and restraining myself from the temptation to stop for a snack on the way home.

Earlier Hubbin had indicated a desire to go shop for a new vent for the leak-riddled RV but later decided he wanted to go back to the campground and measure the vent first. The trips would be 25 miles in opposite directions or a hundred miles all told. He looked too tired for a trip to the next state for our favorite Chinese food.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he tells me and suggests we call a couple of friends who live near another restaurant he likes. As he disappears into the bathroom I check the clock and look up at the hours of the restaurant. It’s already almost 7 PM. By the time we get our friends and then to the restaurant it would be a half-hour before they close. These are the two people who have animals and rise early. Last-minute plans when they’ve probably already eaten and are ready to wind down for the day are probably not likely to go well. All the more when  Hubbin is already tired. I tell him this when he gets out of the shower and he concedes.

“So I will do whatever you want to do,” he tells me.

“Well, it’s not about what I wanted to do,” I say” I came home because you seemed kinda down and I thought maybe you’d like a distraction.”

“You can go back to the lake if you  don’t want to be here.” He replies.

There.

He pokes at my happy thing.

He’s tired and feeling ignored so poke poke. I don’t want to play. He’s tired and hungry and the autism is starting to manifest a mean side he wouldn’t show anyone else but me. Now I’m tired and hungry too. One of us has to take the high ground. One is us has to try to be nice.

“I came straight home because I thought you were going we were going to eat, but we don’t have to just tell me what you want to do?”

“You can do whatever you want.” He says “you go back to the lake.”

“That’s not part of the plan right now.” I insist” I’m here for you. Just let me know if you want to go eat or if I can take my shoes off. ”

 “I wish Pauline’s was open,” he says.

Pauline’s is a restaurant in the next town that we both know closes at 3 PM.

“We’ll eat whatever you want,” he tells me again. This is the point where he’s telling me he can no longer make a decision. I will have to choose and if it’s bad then it’s also my fault.

“This is why I prefer to be alone at the lake,” I think to myself. It’s not because I lack empathy for him or because I don’t want to be around him but because I’ve waited almost 8 hours for him (and the kid) to decide what they were going to do and now he’s writing a social contract that disguises his failure to be happy as something that I want.

This is when I decide to go back to the closest local restaurant which we haven’t visited since it changed owners four years ago. It’s predictably awful for the price but he perks up when he’s got me all to himself and begins to talk about politics. This topic baffles me because he usually is telling me to let the subject go. Tonight he’s actually lighting up so I listen politely as I eat my mushroom burger.

The meal was disappointing. We agree on this as he drives us out through familiar wheat fields and the cattle farms between us and the next town. At the next town, he drives past Pauline’s to confirm that it is closed. Then he circles around the gas station with an RV wash which he shows me before he goes inside to buy a diet soda and chocolate muffin. He eats his emotions in the car. The cloying odor of chocolate makes me a little uncomfortable. It makes me think of a trip to the emergency room 20 years ago for a “heart attack” that turned out to be indigestion brought on by chocolate muffins and stress. He offers me a bite. I decline. I’ve never enjoyed a chocolate muffin since that terrifying race to the hospital.

Hubbin starts talking about his uncle again as he turns the car back toward home. This is what the drive is about. The flat stretches of agriculture remind him of home. It’s not the physical place he used to live, it’s the home in his head that he can never get to. That place is populated with things as they should be and people who are long gone. The edges are smooth. The events are predictable. The weather is always just right. The only very wrong thing is that it’s a place he can never quite get to.

The substandard mushroom burger is sending me warnings. By the time we make the turn toward the house a giant flower moon, a blue moon as well has risen. It’s framed at the end of the drive by the darkening shadows of trees lining the street of well-manicured middle-class ranchers. There’s a pickup truck parked in each driveway. I think, “oh so beautiful and I missed seeing it from the lake”… then I catch myself, I’m seeing it here and now with my “boyfriend” in the car next to me. It’s perfect and beautiful right now.

Is beautiful even with the mushroom burger mistake threatening my insides.

It’s easy to be mad when I report lowered blood sugar and weight loss and he seems surly instead of pleased that the happy place he’s provided is actually good for me. He expects others to be happy when he’s not. He’s used to the idea that the good for others is unreachable for him and comes at his expense. It’s easy to sink back into a black hole when you run home to encourage the person you love and he clips the wings off your happy buzz. Take the high ground. Being nasty won’t calm your upset stomach. Being angry won’t make you any less tired.

As the night winds down I curl up next to him on the couch and let him control the TV. I stay with him until the old movie he chose ends.  I’m almost too tired to make it down the hall to bed. I stay with him in the hopes that he’ll sleep a little better, rest, knowing he’s not alone. It doesn’t matter where the moon is. The moon is what matters.