He didn’t hear her. He was already pulling out his “emergency sewing kit” to repair his tent’s torn mesh.
Max, however, was having a meltdown. He had pulled out his own ultralight tent—a complicated thing with collapsible carbon poles and clips that required a physics degree to understand. He had also decided that my mom’s tent site was “suboptimal.”
My mom, wise as always, reached over and handed him a marshmallow on a stick. “Max,” she said, “you don’t have to fix anything. You just have to be here. That’s the whole point of camping. And of friendship.” Camp With Mom And My Annoying Friend Who Wants ...
“The GPS says this road, but I mapped a shortcut,” he announced.
It was on the second night, as we sat around the rebuilt fire (my mom rebuilt it; Max was banned from touching wood), that something shifted. Max was quiet for once. He stared into the flames, his singed eyebrows finally growing back, and said, “I don’t know why I do this.” He didn’t hear her
Max spent the rest of the evening sulking by the “ruined” fire, while my mom and I sat on a log, eating warm hot dogs and watching the stars emerge. For a moment, it was just us—the way I had imagined. But then Max shuffled over with his portable espresso maker and asked if anyone wanted a “proper” decaf latte. No one did. He made one anyway, using our only pot of clean drinking water.
But Max couldn’t leave it alone. While my mom went to fill the water bottles, he took it upon himself to “improve” the fire. He dismantled the teepee, stacked the burning logs into a wobbly cabin shape, and then—because the flames were now too low—doused the whole thing with a third of a bottle of lighter fluid he had smuggled in his pack. He had pulled out his own ultralight tent—a
“Fix things. I just… I want to help. I want to be useful. But I end up making everything worse.”