Jake, Son Of Zeus 5 Chapter Four

All teenagers spend several hours a day actively despising their parents, but Jake had had an easier time finding reasons to despise his than his peers did. His mother was a lovely creature, impish and young-seeming all her life. Had Delilah lived in Jane Austen's time, she would no doubt have inspired the creation of one of Austen's most flighty, self-amused minor characters. She could be counted on for nothing. When he was little, he would wear every bit of clothing he owned before she would get around to doing laundry, and until then it would remain in a heap in his bedroom floor, and from their cozy nest in the heap, she would read him stories. He was doing his own laundry, his own dishes, and signing his own permission slips while his friends still had bedtimes. He walked the two miles to school because when his mother drove him, he was always late. He made his own doctor's appointments, and by the time he started algebra in school, he was balancing the checkbook at home. He had plenty of reason to despise Delilah and worked hard at it, but it was that sweetness and innocence and fun that made it hard to remember to hate her all the time.

Zeus was easier to hate. He mentioned more than once that there's something about immortality that makes one lose track of time. Zeus missed seven of Jake's birthdays, five Christmases, every Thanksgiving and Independence Day, and the first half of Jake's high school graduation. True, he had missed some because of real emergencies or because Hera was being particularly nasty that week, but every missed appointment, every forgotten meeting, made Jake surer that it would've been better to stop breathing than to be Zeus's son. Zeus always tried to make it up to him, but until Jake stopped being a teenager and started being human again, he made no attempt to hide or soften his resentment, no matter what Zeus's bribery entailed. It was Zeus's fault that Jake had to take care of things around the house, Zeus's fault that Jake's mother was impossible to live with and could hardly be left alone.

But he never had the words to tell his parents, and once he was old enough to try to force himself to yell at them, the reasons didn't seem as important anymore. Jake's frustration was always silent. In the end, he was able to forgive his mother because she had never known how much and in how many ways she destroyed him.

By the end of Delilah's funeral, when the other black forms had made their way through the patches of shadow and sun to their cars, bowing their heads as though harboring guilty thoughts of what a beautiful day it would be to throw a Frisbee in the park, Jake was more of an adult than he had ever intended to be. He was alone in the world. In many ways, this was the best situation that he had ever been in. He was no longer his mother's caretaker. And it was true that Zeus was there, but Jake had ceased to see him either as a burden or as a help. He had never asked Zeus for anything, and it would be years before that possibility would even occur to him. By then, Jake would be more in need of that help than he ever had been, even on that day, standing by his mother's casket, not knowing what to do next.