Eventually it did end, but only for this night. Charley knew that he’d be sleeping in this bed a lot from now on.
“I love you so very much, Mom,” said Charley.
“You’re a very good fuck yourself, son,” she replied.
Charley was cradling the delicious weight of his mother’s warm body in his arms, in the sweet rest which always follows good sex. Suddenly he sat bolt upright and looked down at his mother beside him.
“Hey, wait a minute!” he said. “I thought you said we weren’t going to do this tonight.”
“No, no, that’s not what I said!” she laughed. “I said that tonight we weren’t going to do what we did last night. And we didn’t, did we.”
“Fuck no, we sure didn’t,” he laughed, falling back down onto the bed.
“This time we fucked instead,” she giggled, cuddling into her son’s embrace and letting her eyes close.
Paula thought about Ralph before she went to sleep, silently asking him for his approval of what she was doing with Charley. She had good reason to know that he would approve of it.
In the final moments of Ralph’s life, as he lay in a hospital bed and held his wife’s hand, he reminded her of a request he’d made of her years before. Ralph had told her, several times, that if their active and pleasurable sex life ever came to an abrupt end she should find another partner for good sex as soon as that could be done without causing a public scandal.
Paula knew now that she was going to be all right. She was ready now to move ahead in her new life without her beloved Ralph. She blew her husband a thank-you kiss in the dark.
And Charley somehow knew the same thing. He knew that his mother had reached an important place in her grief journey and was now able to move on. And he knew somehow that his father wasn’t chuckling at him now. In fact, he was pretty sure that his father was smiling.