Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [45]
“Ryan, up to Wade’s room. Ellis, to the living room. Tyler, to the kitchen. And Wade, come with me.” Alone with him, I asked Wade what happened. Nothing. He told me absolutely nothing. He wouldn’t say who was driving. He didn’t tell me what the housekeeper later told me about his resisting the idea. He said nothing at all. I tried the others, one at a time. Each one caved, telling stories that differed only slightly, as the teller of each version and Wade were portrayed most sympathetically. Lots of “Wade and I tried to talk them out of it.” Lots of “It was not my idea.” Lots of “Ryan/ Ellis was driving.” After I had grilled all of them, I put them back in the same room. And I talked about the fact that they were fifteen and sixteen years old, that in five or six years they would be entering the same world I was in, doing business with me, trying to sell me a house or a car or insurance. And I told them they had to start acting like responsible people, because I wasn’t going to forget what they had done. They were getting too old for do-overs. Did they understand? They said yes, apologized, and started to get up.
“Not so fast,” I told them. “I have something else.” They sat back down. “You all are lousy friends. Really lousy friends. You have a lot to learn about loyalty. Every one of you—except Wade—told on your friends, not reluctantly, not eventually, but immediately. What kind of friend does that make you? If you want to have friends you can count on, you cannot wait until the day you need them. You have to be true and loyal friends every day before that day.” I had exactly the same conversation with those boys that I would have had with my son; it never occurred to me to do less. The relationship we had—and have today—wasn’t won simply by buying enough soda and string cheese. It was won in hard times, by treating them as if I cared about what happened to them. Which was easy, because I always have. I talked to them about everything, and Wade, bless his heart, would sit there—maybe embarrassed, but always patient with his mother. When a boy showed up proud with a hickey on his neck, I tried to explain that it was not a mark of passion but a mark of ownership. When there was a conflict at the high school over the Confederate flag, we talked about that. When they would twitter and laugh about a slang word that meant breast, we would sit at that kitchen table and, as coldly and dispassionately as I could, we would say every slang word for breast over and over until it was no longer funny, no longer cool. Girlfriends, teachers, politics, sports—nothing was off-limits. If they wanted to get away from Wade’s mother for a while, they would bound up the back steps to the playroom or run to the backyard and the half-court’s worth of cement that we called a basketball court. Wade would linger to the end, give me a hug, and then join them.
When Wade died, these friends lost a friend on whom each one had relied at one time or another, on whom they knew they could depend for a lifetime, whom they loved. They also lost their way of doing things, or thought they had; they lost their place for