When I'm Not Sure How To Answer

My son and I discuss our favorite
Flannery story and find that we think
more alike than we know how to acknowledge,
at least immediately. He asks me about
underlying themes, why her stories
are always so sad, why nothing good
ever comes until it's too late. I want to tell
him that I know why, that I've read enough
and thought enough and lived enough
to know, but I just make one of those screwed-
up eyebrow faces and say, What do you think?
And he, who has grown accustomed to a mother
who either knows some things or fakes it well
enough to play a trump and be convincing now
and then, shrugs his shoulders and lifts those black
eyebrows at me and says he isn't sure but maybe
he thinks it's a southern thing, writing about decay,
about losing what you thought mattered, about an entire
way of life shifting abruptly and loosening the foundations
from the red earth keeping them part of the whole.
I shrug my tired shoulders and nod and think
how my heart aches for him already, that he should
know these things and want to know more, want
to digest and invest in a life of books and characters,
a life lived through the eyes and words of a woman
who gave me Macon and Greenleaf, a deaf girl abandoned,
a young man blinding himself in search of truth,
a woman with a fancy hat on a bus in a city unkind,
whose real life took her to Fire Island and The Hamptons,
who could never escape, nor would if she could, the bold
untamed places in the heart many fear to visit, the place
the lonely and disquieted spirits come to again and again.