Shane learns about different types of love.
There is the love of a mother for her child. Shane’s left him when he was two, in the care of his father.
There is the love of a father for his son. Shane’s left him in the care of his grandmother when he was five.
There is the love of a grandmother for her orphaned grandson. Shane’s died when he was 10. Shane starts to learn that love is tied to grief. He moves in with his aunt and her three daughters. There is the love of a sister for her handsome wayward brother’s even more handsome child, love from cousins, whose warmth lets Shane feel as if he has siblings. Because he is almost a part of a family, Shane learns to connect love to longing. His blue eyes, dark brow, his tousled hair and gravelly voice cause longing in others. Women find the gloom below the surface intoxicating. Shane finds their intoxication intoxicating. He almost feels sorry for the people he will captivate then destroy, pity becoming another kind of love. And yet another kind, the intoxication from vodka, a passion that lasts while the others are fleeting, love as a warmth inside that he didn’t know he missed until he felt it.
Shane learns about a dormant longing, of a newly adult son for his mother. A longing that vodka mimics, a phantom of a scrap of a once real thing. That longing pulls Shane to his mother, a love of a son for an absent mother who will also feel a pull, tinged with regret. An adult son crosses the border between the US and Canada, to meet his mother who believed she left her sorrow at that same border.
There is a longing of a son for his mother, a mother for her son. There is regret for what was lost but also a blank slate. Shane and his mother learn that you can write a new kind of love on this blank slate. Shane learns that his looks are a passport to yet another border crossing. Shane and his mother push and pull and as he finds a new way into her arms, she takes him in then sends him away at dawn claiming he, her son, is the untrustworthy one. Shane longs for his mother all day, wandering a new city until he is allowed back when she returns from work, as if temporary banishment purifies them both.
Shane learns the fine border between clean and dirty, home and exile, warmth and chill. He also learns from his mother that his power has limits. Shane crosses back over the border, bruised but elated, debased and victorious. Shane waits for an invitation to return that never comes. He rebuffs the arms of the cousins and aunt who welcome him back home.
When Shane’s mother dies, he learns that the love of a mother for her son comes with an inheritance. This fuels six months in a hotel room with booze as company, room service as his only friend, a womb he never has to leave, until he becomes a broke still dashing man rich with an acute sense of revenge that satisfies.
When the police arrive to evict Shane from his cocoon, he learns a new kind of comfort, seeing life through bars, whispering promises of return to his one true living love, the bottle. The reunion turns his insides out, his viscera throb for all the world to see; his memory tricks him into thinking he is the purest of creatures, a son loved unconditionally by a mother to their very end.
