My son Chase and I look at each other in the mirror, each of us under a slather of Blue Corn Scrub Mask. It’s a cold Sunday night in February, perfect time for a facial. It’s also the only time we look anything alike. With just our eyes peaking out from the masks, we look the same—other than his black Thai hair and Buddha horizontal eyebrows and my unruly brown brows and black-and-white hair shoved up under a terry cloth holder, giving me a crew-cut look. Our lips are redder against the blue and white sandy gunk, our ears look further from our faces. We sit for ten minutes alone in the bathroom while the masks suck out bad elements from our skin, formed 49 and 16 years ago and thousands of miles apart from each other.

My husband and I have two sons, Chase, 16, and Quinn, 15. Chase, adopted at five years old, came from Thailand; Quinn was a year old when he arrived from South Korea and dominated our lives for three years until his older sibling arrived. When the boys were about 8 and 9 years old, I started giving them facials in the quiet bathroom off our master bedroom. It began as a ritual to calm them before bedtime, then became a way to continue the mother touch that they increasingly shied away from as they became more “grown up.” At first, all three of us sat, slathered in blue mask, but now they ask separately for a facial. Tonight, Chase and I traipse downstairs after dinner, setting out our gear on the counter top—corn mask, warm mud mask, cucumber freshener, vitamin E moisturizer, and the peppermint foot cream. These facials are among the few relaxed, one-on-one times I have with him. Without the rushed routines of tennis practice, making dinner, doing homework, or taking out the trash, each of us can escape the world for fifteen or twenty minutes.

“Which ones do you want tonight, Chase?”

“How about the mask stuff, the warm mud stuff, the cleaner thing.” Articulate young man when it comes to cosmetics. I can imagine Chase ten years from now, trying to impress a young woman.

“Hi Jan, I’ve brought you some perfume stuff like you wanted, some powder stuff that matches it and a little pillow thing they call pot curry.”

“Pot curry, Chase? You mean potpourri?”

But I have him now, in this bathroom, for that stolen quarter-hour, and I wait to see what will come. Some nights we have deep discussions; some nights we just chat about the dog or tennis.

“I'm thinking about relationships. How do I get one?” Chase asks.

I rock in the chair; Chase sits on the bathtub edge, looking at his hands, not realizing that he is pounding his feet against the edge of the tub. Our bathroom used to be a kitchen, fifteen years and a major remodel before. It’s large enough for a rocking chair and for our 80-pound yellow Lab to stretch out. Chase perches on the bathtub’s wide edge, resting his right arm on the sink.

“I just don’t know what to say sometimes, y’know? I just sit there and can’t be funny like some other guys.” Chase’s voice has an uptilt at the end of his sentences, more like a child’s voice hoping for confirmation than a statement from a young man. He bends his fingers in, palm up, and looks at his nails; then he makes a fist. His work in the athletic fitness class is showing results – more muscles in his arm, veins showing when he flexes. I try to watch without staring, leaning my head back onto the chair, keeping my face soft but trying not to show much. He’s better at talking when the emotions are on low heat. I rock, pushing my hands into the seat arms, stretching.

I raise my eyes to his. Does he want words or just my mask face: a lift of eyebrows and my ear. I watch, reading the confusion in his face as a pause for him to shape his ideas. With this child of few words, I frequently try to gauge whether more will come. Tonight, he opens his mouth and pushes up his eyebrows, ready to say something else. So I wait.

“I don’t know why I can’t be funny, jump in to what people say. By the time I have something to say, the whole conversation is different. They’re onto something new. I'm just too slow.”

I turn on the hot water and let it run before wetting and then squeezing dry a washcloth. I put it on his face, gently pressing the warm cloth all over, wiping away chunks of light blue sand, again and again until it is all gone. He closes his eyes, leaning into the cloth and my hand.

“I'm not a ‘man’s man,’ you know? I like to be around guys, but I'm not the same. I can’t joke around the same way, can’t jump into those jokes.”

I dab cleanser on a cotton ball and wipe his forehead, down his wide nose, around the top of his lip. The adolescent beard hairs scrape just slightly as I cross his lip, catching a wisp of cotton in its wake. I wipe his smooth cheek and under the jaw. He tilts his head back, closes his eyes.

“Well, just take it step by step,” I say. “Sometimes things happen on their own time.”

“Yeah, but other guys know what to do. They know what to say.”

The warm mud mask is a marvel. I squeeze it onto my palm and spread it over his face. It warms to my touch, and I know he feels this same warmth on his face.

“Hunh,” he says, “how do you think they do that like that? Gets all warm. Feels good.”

I turn to look at my own face, reddish from the washcloth scrub, tiny wrinkles along the eyes, brows that slant upward toward the middle, as though I’ve got a perpetual question. I put the same mud mask on my face, wash off my hands and move back to the chair.

“I met a girl this week,” Chase says to his hands. He looks up quickly to see if I'm listening.

“What’s her name?”

“Lauren. Met her in the hallway. You know, between classes.”

I wait for more. It rarely comes. So I ask.

“What’s she like?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You know, she’s a girl. We just, you know, talk about stuff.”

“Hmmm,” I say.

Normally Chase and I are like oil and water. I'm the rule maker, I'm stubborn, I don’t understand, I don’t care if it’s the worst day of his life because I’ve told him he has to come home at 10:30 on a Friday. He thinks I’m slow, I “don’t get it,” can’t remember–because I supposedly never went through it–the ups and downs of high school life. I’m beyond human at times, just a hindrance. He drives me up a wall when he plants himself for three hours in front of the computer on a Sunday in his pajamas, and I chastise myself that I can’t get him to talk to me the way he does when he clogs the phone line chatting with friends.

But in the quiet of the bathroom, with no music and no NPR, we ease into each other. We sit in silence, we talk now and then. I listen with ease, which I don’t always do in the real world of his room or the kitchen. We need these times, although he won’t admit it. He’s already started asking for a facial less often, and I worry that one day he’ll not ask at all.

“So do you talk to Lauren after school?”

“Sure. We go to a coffee place and talk. She’s fun.”

I rinse the cloth again and start wiping his face.

“Think I'll ask her out for Valentine’s. For dinner. What do you think?”

I rub the cloth over his mouth and it comes out “fur dinn...wad ...think?”

“She’s a lucky girl.”

By Wednesday, the day before Valentine’s Day, Chase is almost finished with his plans – he’s invited Lauren (and got a note saying “yes”), he’s made dinner reservations at an Italian restaurant by the mall, and he’s talked to his dad about how to wax the car. He also has a secret shopping list.

“I'm going to get some stuff for tomorrow. For Lauren.”

Two hours and a mall trip later, he returns with loot for a fiancée, not a first time date. He’s bought a huge red stuffed frog (“she likes frogs”), a flowering rose bush in a tiny pot, candy, a single long stemmed rose, and a card. Later that evening, he writes a poem that talks of the eyes and lips of a person he loves. The poem will go into the card the next day. He takes the long stemmed rose to the kitchen, reads the instructions about what to do to make it last in a small vase, and sets it up on the kitchen table.

“Chase, all that stuff. That’s really nice. But I wonder if it’s too much?”

“Oh no. She wants it all. Her friend told me.”

Thursday night comes and we have a fashion plate leaving the house at 5:30 p.m. Sharp black shirt and tie, khaki pants and new woven leather belt, black shoes with the scuffs gone. Before he drives off in the Land Cruiser, newly washed, he loads it with the stuffed frog, plants, card, candy, and his excitement. Lauren’s best friend and her boyfriend will join them for dinner. The next day is no school, so Chase looks forward to a good evening, dinner and the coffee shop, till 11p.m., and then a long sleep in the next day. President’s Day weekend looms, and he’s counting on four long wonderful days to rest up, be with buddies, and have some fun. What more could a guy ask.

He’s home by 10 p.m.

We’re still up, cleaning up the kitchen. My husband and I look at each other as we hear the back door close. We wait. And wait. Ten minutes pass before Chase shuffles into the kitchen in his stocking feet.

“Her friend’s boyfriend couldn’t afford dinner so he didn’t come. So Lauren, her friend and I went to a movie. I'm going to bed.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, it’s fine. Was fun.”

My husband leans against the sink and makes a move to say something like “don’t you want to talk?” or “what happened?” I crinkle up my eyes a bit and squint, also wanting to say something but my facial experience with Chase holds me back. I wait to see what comes from him. Chase looks at us with eyes that say, “no questions.” He’s scrunched his Buddha eyebrows, moving them toward each other with a small furrow above them. Like many teenagers, Chase has emotions on the surface of his skin. Anger and joy can leap out, often when we least expect it. But tonight he just seems tired. The young man who left the house with straight shoulders and buffed shoes has lost his swagger. His shoulders slope forward, he stares into the refrigerator. He looks like an old man, weary from disappointments.

“Are you…what did she…” my husband stumbles into the words.

“It’s ok, Dad. Not now.”

He closes the refrigerator and leaves the kitchen. After we go to our rooms, he’ll probably come back and find some ice cream or a frozen pizza. Right now he doesn’t want to be where we are.

I ask him over the weekend if he wants a facial.

“Nah, that’s okay.”

“You sure? I'm going to do one for Quinn. Would be easy to do it for you, too.”

“Not now.”

I step from the doorway of his room and sit on the bed. Sometimes, if I invade his space like this, he’ll up from his desk, where the computer reigns, come over to the bed. We sit side by side, backs against the wall, legs sticking straight out in front, like little kids. I hope it will work tonight.

“You getting together with Lauren?”

“She’s busy.” He stays behind his desk, playing on the computer. He looks at the screen, not at me.

“No time—even to talk on the phone?” I keep hoping he’ll look up, come from behind the desk.

“Guess not. It’s ok, don’t worry about it.”

She’s busy the whole weekend. She’s with friends, but not Chase.

He says nothing but I watch him sink as the week moves forward.

“Any chance to see Lauren at school today?” I ask on Tuesday.

“Nope.”

By week’s end, he leaves school one afternoon without checking out, without telling one of us or the nurse or a counselor. Truant. That’s a first.

“I just needed time. Just couldn’t take it anymore.”

“You okay?” I ask.

“Yeah, it’s over though. We’re really good friends still,” he says.

A few weeks later we sit again in the bathroom, looking at each other through a new mask. The skin around our mouths gets clay hard so talking is more of a stretch. I stand at the mirror, washing the mud off my hands. We look like African tribesmen who wear thick hard clay masks and carry spears.

“Do you think I’ll be single forever? I mean through high school?” Chase sits again on the edge of the tub, stretches his arms above his head, looks at himself, looks at me. His feet scrape the carpet on the floor as he tosses one of my perfume bottles in the air. I try hard not to wince at the thought of a glass bottle falling into the sink.

“Gee, I hope so.”

“You know what I mean. Will I get a girlfriend? I mean, I had one, Lauren, you know, but now I'm single again. I wonder if I’ll find another one.”

I settle back into the rocking chair, keep my eyes and ears open, but try to just say nothing tonight. The new mask makes it hard to smile at him but I try to anyway–and I feel chunks of brown-grey mask fall on my skirt. I love seeing his feisty attitude again, feeling that he’s getting his grit back, that he wants back in to the social ring. But I want to tell him that he may have overwhelmed Lauren with his early love, that she was scared off, that plenty of others will come and go in his life before, or if, he finds someone to share it long-term. I want to hold him like I did when he was younger, squeezing the tears out until they became tickles instead. But mostly, I want him to know that the facials will always be there, and we can talk and listen behind masks sometimes better than with our everyday faces.