My son brought his boyfriend home for Sunday dinner, and the second I saw that young man’s face I went cold with a serving spoon still in my hand. Twenty minutes later I had locked him in my own basement and was calling the police — and I was wrong to do it, and I would do it again, and both of those are true.

PART 1 — THE GOOD DISHES

I want to say one thing before anything else, because I know how the first line of this reads.

It was not about a boy bringing home a boy. Elliot came out to me at fifteen in a car outside a swimming pool and I said the only thing I have ever been glad I said on the spot, which was “okay, and?” and then we went and got food.

It was not that.

Elliot is nineteen and he was home from his first year at Halvorsen State, and for about six weeks he had been mentioning somebody. Not in a big way. In the way they do at nineteen, where a name keeps appearing in stories that are ostensibly about something else.

So I said bring him for Sunday.

I cleaned that house properly. I did a pot roast. I put out my mother’s dishes, which come out at Christmas and at nothing else, and Elliot noticed and gave me a look that was about eighty percent embarrassment and twenty percent delight.