My Lunch with Max J • Written by Lesa Quale Ferguson

Max sat rapt by the campfire, flames flickering in his wide eyes, lips smudged with burnt marshmallows and chocolate. The story I told—off the cuff, unplanned—was about the train tracks behind my childhood home, where a lantern would swing in the dark late at night. I barely thought about it at the time. But stories aren’t just stories to kids like Max. As I try to remember it now, I realize the details blur, lost in the haze of memory, but what came after—the unraveling, the fear, the way the story lodged itself inside him—took over everything.

We had spent the day on the summer before kindergarten paddling boats, collecting beach glass, and trying to keep Max and my son Sam from stuffing too many s’mores into their faces. Max begged me for a scary story. I hesitated. I had fallen for this before. Months earlier, I had told him about my favorite Scooby-Doo episode with Phyllis Diller and the portraits of her dead husbands. He had obsessed over it for weeks. His moms were not thrilled with me.

Sam, ever the peacemaker, piped up. “Just tell a story. It doesn’t have to be scary.”

I relented. As always, I had no idea where it was going when I started telling a story off the cuff.

I told them about the train tracks behind my childhood home—the rattle of the train approaching, the curtains in my bedroom billowing from the disturbance, the lantern swinging, casting shifting light and shadows against the wall, a hush that seemed to brush against me, ice-thin and electric, as she glided up the railroad berm, a ghost in her nightgown, bound to the tracks.

I checked Max to make sure he wasn’t upset. On the contrary—he was delighted, licking the rest of the s’more from his lips. The moment felt small, insignificant—just a story.

I didn’t realize then that I had left my ghost inside the story—a tale of my father leaving—or that by telling it, I had given Max something that would haunt him once the fire died down.

That night, Sam was out the moment his head hit the pillow. Max was not.

At first, he whispered rapid, nervous questions. Then his voice rose—frantic. His anxiety had latched onto the story. I tried everything. Reading. Singing. I tried to pet his hair. Nothing worked. I became persona non grata—the purveyor of horror, Freddy Krueger threading the projector.

I stepped away. “I’m right here, honey, but me being in the room isn’t helping you.”

This only escalated things. He was crying now, and Sam started complaining. I went to get Dave, but he was exhausted from work, driving, and paddling the boys around the creek. Then my mom—a retired psych nurse and patron saint of people unraveling—got out of bed.

“I got this.” And she did.

By morning, Max was subdued. But openly resentful of me. He never stayed overnight again.

His moms, now burdened with yet another horror story to fuel his runaway fears, were understandably upset with me.

This wasn’t the first time I had thought I knew better. One afternoon, I took the boys to pick blueberries. In the back of the van, I lathered my hands to put sunscreen on Max, who protested. As soon as the cream touched his skin, the scream that erupted from him was so primal, so full of genuine terror that people came running as if I were eating a cub alive. My nerves shattered as I faced a crowd of concerned moms, wondering if someone should call the police. Moments like these should have clued me in that my old style parenting–fresh air, toughen up, and don’t indulge nonsense–wasn’t what Max needed.

But I hadn’t been listening—to his moms or Max.

I met Max when he was five months old. His moms went to the same church as us. Holly, the Youth Minister, had hosted a get-together for families with babies. Three families, including ours, showed up.

Sam, Dave, and I sat in a circle with two lesbian couples who had conceived their children through sperm donation. I had read enough queer author Dorothy Allison to know that these babies would likely be boys with higher-than-average IQs.

For nearly five years, our families were socially intertwined. We celebrated birthdays, held Halloween parties at church, and rang in the New Year over Indian food. We launched foam rockets, spent summers at the lake, and raised our children in a community as we thought it should be.

Max had a dazzling, fluid, sparkling mind. Watching him read and comprehend a chapter book at three was stunning. It was like traveling to a foreign land or watching the moon landing, things that defy how you think reality works.

But brilliance has its struggles: sensory issues, sensitivity, rigidity, and anxiety that latches onto things and will not let go.

Those of us raised in the industrial age are often confounded by the extraordinary—we were taught to fear standing out, regimented by rote, regular, and average. We were schooled never to break the norm for fear of social shaming and out-casting. Compliance was king. Max’s moms had wrestled out from under that paradigm.

One of Max’s moms, a journalist, wrote a series of exposés on the corruption and failure of the entire Buffalo school system. She and her now ex-wife were part of that generation of women—out and in love—who designed their own families. They had chosen Max’s father from a catalog and delivered Max into the world without financial dependence on a man.

That is more reproductive power than any woman has had in the history of womankind. It was the dream of women from the Bloodlands of Eastern Europe, waiting for the next wave of Nazi and Soviet marauders to kill their children and rape them. Woman have never held this kind of autonomy over their own bodies.

And yet, new ways don’t come with guides. Extraordinary demands we navigate an uncharted future. And I—full of opinions and answers from yesteryear—was too arrogant to see that.

Oh, I had answers.

“Be the Mama Duck,” I told his moms. “Lead, and he will follow.”

“Don’t let him insist,” I said. “You need to be dominant.”

I rolled my eyes when they only fed him peeled grapes, wet salami, and pancakes while Sam happily ate whatever we gave him. Armed with my Happy-Go-Lucky son, I was full of advice. That was the first crack.

The final break came when Max came over one afternoon and decided that our baby son, Cal’s favorite doll, had scared him and needed to be thrown away. I refused. I told his moms.

And that was it.

I saw them a few times here and there. But by then, I had Cal—who had his own challenges, wholly different from Max’s but just as complex. I’ve been busy for 12 years, not following my own bad advice.

Recently, Max messaged me. “Let’s have lunch before I leave for college.”

We were still friends on Instagram, casually commenting on film, tech, and literature. He was going to Oregon State—the place where I grew up.

At lunch, I figured we’d talk about filmmaking and how he planned to work in software to fund his art—so much more practical than my twenty years of waitressing so I could write.

Max, now taller than me, his once-straight hair curling slightly around his face, sat across from me in the same kind of Greek diner his moms used to take him to when he was little. The deep brown of his eyes was the same, but his childhood’s sharp, rigid focus had softened into something more reflective—especially for a teenager. Even as a kid, he could analyze a moment from every angle, but now he could describe how he had changed, how his way of engaging with the world had shifted. At some point, he brought up The Conductor’s Daughter.

I laughed. “Not again.”

His resentment was long gone. He wasn’t interested in what happened, hanging onto regret like I was. He was interested in the story itself.

Max told me he had spent years struggling to feel his emotions—except for fear. He craved stories and hated them because they unnerved him.

Here, he was still turning over the story I had told him, wanting to make it his own.

“Can I take it?” he asked.

At first, I didn’t understand. I thought I had irredeemably fucked up as a friend with that story. But that’s the thing about kids. They take the stories we give them and make them their own.

And that’s where the redemption is—if the story is worthy.

In my version, the Conductor was my father, who ghosted his daughter. In Max’s version, I was the conductor—thundering down the tracks, telling stories that shook him. And once I told it, The Conductor’s Daughter was no longer mine to hold—it belonged to him.