Between my first and second years of college, I returned home to spend the summer with my mother and sisters. One day, I came home and found a boxed set of The Joy of Sex on the coffee table.

“Well, that’s odd,” I thought to myself. But my mother had gotten divorced my final year of high school and ever since then, she had rediscovered herself as a woman, declared bankruptcy, bought a copper-colored Porsche, and had a series of boyfriends. Most of whom were safely married (safe for her), some of whom were the boys she had always told us not to date. There was the guy who rode a Harley and stole all her feather pillows (mind you, I was not allowed to ride on the back of a motorcycle – but she happily tooled off to the Cascades with him for the weekend). And the guy who totaled my Celica (which had been my father’s car until my junior year in high school when he gifted it to me and bought a Rabbit, which might be why she let this guy crash it, but it was my car); the Celica didn’t have much value left in it – it was a 1970 and the sparkly paint had flaked away in the Arizona sun – but it was the principle of the thing.

So it didn’t surprise me that she was studying this book so intently that she might suddenly realize she was running late and leave it lying about.

When she came home, I was on the couch probably reading (the TV only got the farm report and Canadian channels and I could only take so much CBC news). She spotted the book, shot a glance at me, veered away. Then came over and stood over me.

“I need to talk to you,” she said. I glanced up from my book.

“I have young children in this house,” she declared sternly. “I cannot have you leaving your books around.”

I realized she meant the book on the coffee table, not the book in my hand (probably Laura Ingalls Wilder).

Now, I had thumbed through The Joy of Sex elsewhere (I was not touching my mom’s copy, ew), and the thing that had struck me was how complete it was (I guess for the time) and that the main point that the author had made was that love made sex all that much better. Which made an interesting counterpoint to the books that my mother had read for as long as I could remember and let me start reading at age 11: Shogun; The Thornbirds; Princess Daisy; Phoenix Island. You may not know Phoenix Island but let me tell you, it was a doozy: beautiful people trapped on a remote island after a plane crash; sex; rape; castration; gay sex; more sex; even more sex. Counterpoint to The Joy of Sex.

So it should not have been any big deal that anyone was looking at this book.

Nevertheless, my mother read me the riot act. When she had finished, I waited a moment and then pointed out that that was not my book. “I assumed it was yours.”

She stared at me; I stared at her. The look on her face clearly asked whose book it was…

And then my 14-year old sister walked in, said casually, “Oh there that is,” picked it up and left just as casually.

I continued to stare at my mother until she left, not in the direction that my sister had gone.

My mother rarely confronted my sister about her behavior.

One night I had been out for the evening with a friend. When we returned, it was almost midnight. He turned off the road onto our steep driveway (you had to downshift to first gear to make it up), paused where the flat interurban crossed to shift into second, and started up the second slightly-less steep hill that curved about 1/4 mile up to our home.

And then braked suddenly. An old beater of a car was blocking the driveway.

We looked at each other. My mother’s home was in a somewhat remote, wooded area, and you couldn’t see or hear neighboring homes, even lights at night. And it got dark, a darkness you cannot imagine in the city or the suburbs.

“I think I’d better walk you up,” he said, getting out to open my door, shutting off the engine but leaving his lights on. We edged cautiously past the mysterious car, imagining what kind of skeeve would drive such an old, beat-up car. It was the heart of serial killer country at the peak serial killer time. My heart began to beat faster – or maybe that was just the hill.

As we crept just out of range of his headlights, we suddenly heard footsteps, and then a voice out of the dark, high with youth, whined, “Hey, man, can you move your car? You’re blocking me.” The kind of voice that today would call you bruh.

And I realized it was only my sister on her way out. My friend gave me a quick hug and darted back to his car while I continued up the hill towards our pitch black home, cursing my sister for making me walk through the mud and stones in my heels.

She had left the door to the house unlocked.

It wasn’t much of a lock, just a tiny little nub in the middle of the knob that you twisted to “lock” the door. The house was so flimsy that anyone could have pushed the windows or even the walls in – I often worried that some frenemies might some dark night push it off the cinderblock piers and roll it down the hill – but still, the psychological safety… Since my sister hadn’t locked the door, I could only assume she didn’t have a key.

On the way to bed, I stuck my head in the door to mom’s room the way she liked me to and softly called out that I was home.

“Did you lock the door?” she mumbled, barely awake.

“No,” I said and paused then added that my sister was out.

“She’s not out,” she replied, turning over onto her back, coming slightly more awake. “Lock the door.”

“If I lock the door, she’ll be locked out. I just passed her on the driveway with some guy in a beat up car.”

“Your sister is not out,” Mom said, coming fully awake now and glaring at me. “You’re always trying to get her in trouble.”

That was often true but not in the case.

“She’s out.”

“She’s not out. Lock the door.”

“Check her bed.”

“I don’t have to check her bed. I trust her.”

“You don’t have to believe me. Check. Her. Bed.”

“I’m not going to distrust your sister like that.”

I looked at her for a few more seconds.

And then locked the front door and went to bed.

That’s my post about this book.

You didn’t really think I was going to write about the content, did you?