In this short story by Jack Stilborn, a construction executive builds his ten-year-old son a bridge to adulthood.
The realization hits Adam as he parks his SUV. Margot’s Lexus is waiting for him in their driveway, a silent accusation. He has missed the meeting. The meeting Margot had arranged.
“Christ,” he mutters to himself. “Last thing I need.”
Margot has been pressing Adam to have the talk with Paul, their ten-year-old son, man to man. Adam has been temporizing. He wants to be a buddy to his son, not an educator. He doesn’t say it but with sex education on the school curriculum, they are paying the experts to do this. Why not just get out of the way? What he says to Margot is that he doesn’t want to tell Paul anything that would create confusion. When she comes up with the idea of a parent-teacher meeting to put Adam in the picture, he runs out of excuses.
Paul is small for his age, at least two years away from puberty. However, he has plainly outgrown the standing family explanation, that Daddy put a seed into Mommy when they were sleeping. Out of the blue several weeks ago, during their ritual Sunday pizza night, Paul had casually wondered about something. Through a mouthful of Hawaiian it sounded like ‘gendular morphia.’
Margot and Adam had exchanged blank looks.
“That’s a new one for us,” Margot said. “But we’re glad you feel comfortable asking us, Paul. After all, that’s what we’re here for.”
“We’ll have to get back to you on this one,” Adam added.
After Paul was safely in bed, ‘gendular morphia’ had driven them to the Internet, which didn’t seem to have heard of it either. “gender dysphoria” was the closest they could find. But their little Paul? In Grade 5?
What kind of an Ironist are You?
As Adam enters the house, he hears Margot’s music. She often has it playing when she is cooking. Tonight it’s jazz he has heard before, a singer lamenting something.
In the kitchen he finds Margot stone-faced by the stove, stirring the contents of a pot. The rigidity in her small shoulders confirms what he sees in her face.
“Mmmm!” Adam says, hoping to mollify her. “That smells delicious!”
“Puttanesca,” she responds, not looking in his direction.
He flinches. Surely the choice of sauce – he vaguely remembers an association with women of loose morals – must be accidental. Margot couldn’t know about the woman on yesterday’s flight from Toronto, the way they had started talking so naturally. The way her lips had shaped the words. Her voice and the glances that lingered, the feeling of her closeness beside him.
Her business card is in his wallet. It shouldn’t be there and he knows it. If only he could stop thinking about her. But something in him doesn’t want to.
“Margot, I’m really sorry,” Adam says. “The clay bed under Regency Court is deeper than we thought. We spent the day in emergency meetings. I didn’t even have time for lunch–”
“I had a good conversation with Miss Amyot about the sex curriculum,” Margot interrupts. “It focuses on relationships and respect as much as biology, Adam. I was very impressed and it’s too bad you didn’t have a chance to talk to her about it. You could have learned something.”
“Yes, Margot. I hear you. I’m really sorry. Very sorry, but there isn’t anything I can do about it now. I’m glad you managed to get there and it went well.
“Do they…you know,” he continues. “Will he know about the basic physical stuff?”
“Yes, in Grade 5 they cover the reproductive system and how the body changes during puberty. But as I said…”
Margot can’t resist her little reminders.
“…They put a lot of emphasis on the relationships that the physical things happen inside of, on respect and caring for others. It’s very different from the way it was for us and I guess that’s why some of it has gotten so controversial.”
“OK,” Adam says. “So what’s left for me to deal with then?”
“Miss Amyot said that now is the perfect time for you to talk to him about what he will experience with puberty, from a man’s point of view. And sex too, before things start to happen.”
“Yes, like we’ve both been thinking.”
Sometimes Margot needs to be reminded that Adam is not her junior partner. Too late, he realizes this was not the time.
“Margot, you’re very good with Paul,” he tries to warm the chill intensifying in the room. “He’ll be able to talk with you when he needs to. I wish I’d had parents like that when I was his age. I guess we both do.”
Paul is their common ground, regardless of what else seems to be happening in their marriage. For Adam, their love for their son continues to make them a team.
“If there’s time before dinner, I could start talking to him right now,” Adam says, seeing a chance to redeem himself. “Sooner the better, right?”
Margot nods agreement. Rewards him with a brief smile of encouragement.
Adam heads for Paul’s room. He is grateful that his role in sex education is deflecting attention from the parent-teacher meeting that was minus one of the parents.
There is no point going on about it with Margot, but his day was a tough one. The meeting with the foundation people ran long. A deep clay pocket at the site hadn’t been picked up in the initial survey. Adam is the business man, they are the experts and delegating is one of his secrets of success. When they present the problem without a recommended solution, he files a mental note to look for another sub-contractor. Eventually, thanks to input from Adam’s project manager, a plan to install helical piles as well as excavating and filling beyond original specifications is adopted. But everything is connected to everything else. You can’t get away from this. Cost-savings elsewhere will be needed. Maybe design changes. Schedules will need to be renegotiated. Problems, problems.
Adam strides to Paul’s doorway. He enjoys being decisive, getting things done. He hopes he can have a big-brother-to-little-brother kind of chat with his son, good buddies hanging out together and figuring life out.
Paul is at his desk, facing a rhythmically flashing computer screen.
“Hi Dad,” he says, as Adam enters the room. “I almost got to level 7. Hamid got there yesterday and I was trying to stay with him but a solar storm just got me.”
“Well,” Adam says, wondering what kind of game Paul is playing. “At least you survived to fight another day and sooner or later, you’ll …er… get there.
“So, how was your day?” Adam’s question feels awkward, almost formal. He wonders if Paul notices.
“OK.” Paul’s voice is expressionless.
Adam stands by Paul’s bed momentarily, then settles cautiously onto it. He is twenty years away from college football but his back still reminds him of the price to be paid for campus stardom.
“So…,” he takes a breath. “Mom and I think it’s time for you and me to be talking about …ah…growing up, and puberty. You’re soon going to be a man, Paul, and I can talk about what that’s like, you know, with the changes and everything.”
Adam hears his father in his voice. His father, long ago.
“So, how about we talk a bit before dinner, OK?”
“Yah, I guess,” Paul mumbles, eyes fixed on his screen.
“I went through the same thing with my dad, you know,” Adam continues. “Grandpa was a terrific father, but he wasn’t comfortable talking about this stuff. So it made me uncomfortable. I never really went to him with questions, even when I had them. And then after he and Grandma got their divorce….”
Adam pauses. How could he have gotten off topic already?
“Anyway,” he resumes, “Let’s do it better. Why don’t we start with what they’ve taught you at school. No point me telling you what you already know, eh?”
“Well, I guess we’ve mostly done it,” Paul says. “You know, about how babies get made, and what the names are for the sex organs and all that. And this year, we’ve already been doing puberty. So I’ve learned what’s supposed to be happening to me, and what’s happening to the girls too. And..,” he goes silent.
“Yes?” Adam says. “Remember, I went through this too. Nothing you’re going to tell me is going to surprise me. We’re on the same team here, buddy. So if you have any questions, Paul…”
“Well…,” Paul hesitates, now looking intently at a planetary map on his bedroom wall. “It’s just that nothing seems to be happening to me yet. Some of the guys at school are starting to get, you know, like pubic hair, and…”
“I hear you,” Adam says. “They should have told you that things don’t always happen to everybody at the same time. You’re ten, so I bet they aren’t happening to a lot of the other guys yet either. I didn’t start getting pubic hair until I was about twelve. It might run in our family, maybe.”
“OK,” Paul says. “So I don’t have to do anything? I just wait?”
“Basically, yes,” Adam says.
“And what about what happens between men and women?” Adam continues. “Do you have any questions about that?”
“Well, not really,” Paul says. “Except we learned that sometimes men might want to be close with other men, and women might feel that way about other women too. So what about that? I mean—”
“Yes, sorry,” Adam interrupts. “You’re right. Or I mean they’re right. I should have mentioned that too. It’s another way the whole thing can go.
“Puberty and everything that goes with it is something that just happens to us, Paul. We don’t always choose what happens, you know. It’s all part of life, basically.”
Paul nods.
“Puberty brings these new urges,” Adam continues, “and they can be really strong urges. And like you’ve learned in school, they often are between men and women but they don’t have to be. I’m wondering if you have any questions about that part, what actually happens when, you know, people decide to have sex.”
“Not exactly, Dad,” he says. “We covered that in school too, sort of. And…well, Jimmy found these videos online where men and women were doing stuff to each other.”
“I remember being pretty shocked about it when I was your age,” Adam says.
Paul is looking at his father now. The face under the over-sized Blue Jays ball cap is anxious. That cap, Adam thinks. It makes Paul look so small.
Adam gropes for words. How is he to explain it all?
Paul is talking. Adam tries to focus.
“Totally gross!” Paul is saying. “Why would people want to do that to each other anyway? And I bet it hurts the women. So I’m not going to do it. There’s no way I’d do that to a girl. Or anybody.”
Adam remembers how he had felt when he first learned what were then called “the facts of life.” He remembers the vertiginous feeling, wondering what else in his world would suddenly turn out to be so different.
“Well,” he says. “Believe it or not, Paul, I remember feeling the same way. It’s just not something that you would ever imagine people doing. We don’t choose to be this way, it’s just the way we’re made. It’s the way life continues. We have these needs that make us keep the species going.”
“Well, I’m not. I don’t see why I have to keep the species going, Dad.”
“I get that, Paul,” he says. “Nobody asked us, right? But we’re just made that way. It’s like, well…it’s just like needing food. We don’t choose to be hungry either. It just happens to us. And then we need to find something to eat, because mother nature is making sure we stay alive so we can keep the species going. And eating when you’re hungry, biting into a delicious pizza or something, you already know that’s pretty awesome, right?”
Paul looks mystified but Adam is warming to his analogy and doesn’t notice.
“Imagine that you hadn’t ever eaten anything,” he says. “You’re part of a world where you and your friends don’t need to eat. You just play games all day and play with all the animals too. And then people come along and tell you that soon you’re going to feel that you need to kill the animals and eat them…”
Paul’s nose wrinkles.
“Gross, Dad! I don’t see what killing things and pizza has to do with puberty—”
“No but Paul, what I’m trying to say…” How can words help his son, instead of making him even more confused? We want to be with him through this, but how can we? Experience happens inside us; we all have it alone.
Margot is waiting in the kitchen. Even now, the woman on the plane is in his mind, the more he tries not to think of her. Adult life is out there. It is out there, waiting for his son. There is nothing Adam can do about it.
But Paul is reaching out. He needs his Dad to be there for him.
“Paul, what happens may look gross but when it actually happens to you, when you actually feel it, it’s going to be awesome for you.”
Paul looks unconvinced.
“All I can tell you is that we all need to do the best we can. Mom is a terrific person and she and I, we do the best we can. It’s not simple, Paul. Life may look simple but it isn’t. None of us know why we’re here or what we’re supposed to be doing. Sometimes we even do things when we know they’re wrong. But as long as we’re alive, we have these wants and needs and we just have to figure things out as we go along.”
Paul sits in his chair, mystified again.
Adam feels exhausted; trying to think of what to say to Paul, trying not to think of how he felt last night. He finds himself staring hopefully at the wall, at the planetary map.
“Miss Amyot keeps telling us we shouldn’t just think about ourselves,” Paul says. “Yes, that’s a good point for sure,” Adam responds. “Sometimes that part isn’t easy but life can be great, Paul, and we want yours to be great too.”
“I have a lot of things to like,” Paul says. “But puberty is gross. I’m just going to try and enjoy being a kid while I still am one, Dad.”
“I don’t blame you,” Adam says, giving his shoulder a gentle punch. “You’re a pretty good kid and Mom and I are really proud of you. I’m going to go and help her finish up with dinner. We’re not going to let you go hungry. At least that’s something we can do.”
Adam makes his way down the hall.
He feels it before he is aware of it. Cole Porter’s classic is flowing from the kitchen speakers: Let’s Fall in Love.
“Birds do it; bees do it
Even educated fleas do it…”
Euphoria dances in the melody. The singer’s voice is warm honey, riding the sound with longing and wistfulness, awareness that everything ends. It’s as if life is singing to him, wonderful inexplicable life. The journey we take on our own.
About the Author:
Jack Stilborn reads voraciously and writes fiction. The Tyranny of Good Intentions, his satirical novel about politics, was published in 2025 (Chicken House Press). His short stories can be found in Blank Spaces, The Spadina Review, MTLS and Allium. He lives in Ottawa, Canada. His website is at www.jackstilborn.com.
