The Almost Moon

FIVE

While my mother lay on the floor only a few feet away, I opened the old brown refrigerator and sat on the bottom step of the stairs with its light shining on me.

I grabbed blindly at the metal tins, not looking at the age-old and carefully punched-out labels. I ripped off their worn lids and sent them crashing to the concrete floor like spinning cymbals. Then, and only then, when faced with the used and reused wax paper, did I slow down and lift that first layer lightly away from what lay beneath. Here were brandy balls from my Tennessee grandmother’s recipe. Or pecan meringues that smelled of dark-brown sugar. Baking together was something we did until the end, even though, for the sake of my figure and my mother’s health, I routinely had to cycle through the freezer and dispose of what we’d made, pretending to my mother that I was giving the contents of the tins to the neighbors whom she still confusedly remembered living in the area.

I held a meringue and crumbled it in my hand. I watched the light-tan dust and minced nuts fall to the ground. Always the admonition to use a plate, not to gobble like a turkey, to measure the heft and weight and imagine it applied to my waist.

The first time I had made myself sick as a child-purposely sick-was the year I turned eight. My weapon of choice was fudge. I had gone into the kitchen and methodically, like a soldier taking bullets in the gut, eaten a whole baking sheet of butterscotch fudge. I was ill for two days, and she was furious, but it had made my father laugh. He had come home and hung up his jacket on the coatrack inside the door; placed his hat, on which he often changed the small clipped feather that was tucked inside the band, on the front table; and turned toward the dining room.

“What are you doing there all alone?” he asked.

I had been forced to sit at the table, though all I wanted to do was lie down and moan.

“She’s being punished,” my mother had said, as she walked briskly over to him and took his briefcase from his hand. “I made butterscotch fudge, and she ate it all.”

A particular intimacy of my father’s came when he removed his glasses. The metal-and-plastic frames bit into his nose on either side, and he would take them off when he walked in the house. For thirty minutes he was as blind as a bat, but he didn’t need accuracy, as this was the half hour before dinner reserved for a drink.

He had done this that day, as usual, but he had also laughed, as he usually did not, and it had come from someplace deep inside him. During this, he had grabbed my mother and kissed her hard on the cheek and then leaned down and kissed me on the forehead through my wispy bangs.

Working at the Pickering Water Treatment Plant, he measured water levels and analyzed the content of the local reservoirs. He traveled to surrounding cities and all the way to Erie to do the same.

“It’s a little like you sat down and decided to eat a baking sheet full of sediment,” he said. “Anyone would be ill from that.”

I had asked him to stay at the table with me, to talk about water, about how each droplet under a microscope differed from another. His eyes were unfocused without his glasses, and I wondered how blind he was and what he saw when he looked at me.

I walked up the basement stairs and into the kitchen, the braid swinging from my fist. I pulled open the drawer near the phone, which held refolded tinfoil and salvaged twist ties, and found a gallon-size Ziploc freezer bag. I tucked the braid inside, sealed it, and scanned the kitchen. My mother’s clothes lay balled up in moist clumps along the floor.

When I was three years old, I had come into the kitchen and found my mother sitting on the floor, with her legs jutting out in front of her. I could see her underwear, which I had never seen before. She was staring at a white spill of flour at her feet.

“Mom made a boo-boo,” I said.

She stood up and grabbed the five-pound sack of flour from the counter, hugging it to her chest. She scooped her hand into it and let the contents fall from her fingers like snow.

I shrieked in delight and ran to her. She responded by moving away just as I reached out for her. She threw more flour from the sack, this time in wide arcs across the kitchen. I chased her in spinning circles, around and around, shrieking louder and gulping back my own laughter.

The chase went on until I stumbled and fell. I looked up at her for a moment. She stood near my high chair, laughing. I noticed the flour on her forehead and chin, and how it coated the invisible hairs on her forearms. I wanted her to come to me to pick me up, and so I wailed at the top of my lungs.

My purse sat upright on the dining room table. I tucked the Ziploc bag, with its silver prize, inside the center compartment and, as if I might forget something, looked all around me, doing a 360-degree turn. I jumped when I saw Mr. Fletcher in a lit-up window, staring back at me, until I realized I had not turned on a light in the dining room and that he was staring not at me but at a computer terminal, which, as he searched the Internet or played the same Byzantine games that Emily’s husband liked, lit his face in flashes of blue and green.

When I reached my car and looked back up the brick path to the front door, the light dusting of white powder on my chest and legs-the sugar from the pecan meringues, the flour from the Mexican wedding wafers-was the only thing that marked me as having been in my mother’s basement.

I wanted to weep, but instead I thought of where I could go. I had to relax. No one knew except Jake. What felt like other people’s knowing-the call to Avery, the questioning from Mrs. Leverton, the whispering of my name by Mrs. Castle-wasn’t. And no one would go into the house without me there.

I sat in my ancient Saab with the windows rolled up and placed my purse on the passenger seat, resisting the impulse to strap it in like a child. I put the key in the ignition and started the car. Slowly I pulled away, hunching over the steering wheel as if the streets were dense with fog.

Mrs. Leverton’s house was dark except for the timer lights her son had installed. The clock on the dashboard read 8:17. Time for old women to be tucked in. But apparently not old men. As I drove by Mr. Forrest’s house, I could see him reading in his front room. All his lights were on. He had never believed in blinds. At least in the old days, he had always had dogs. There he is, I thought to myself, an old man vulnerable to bullies and thieves.

I was sixteen that day in Mr. Forrest’s house, when I’d first seen color plates of women in various states of undress.

“They call them muses, Helen,” he had said as he watched me turn the pages of an outsize book called simply The Female Nude. “They are women who inspire great things.” I had thought of the pictures that stood throughout our house. Pictures of my mother in outmoded support garments or diaphanous peekaboo gowns, smiling winsomely into the camera.

The thirty-minute drive between my mother’s house and my own had always been an excuse for talk. Some people talk to themselves in front of their mirrors at home, psyching themselves up to ask for a raise or undertake a self-improvement project. I had always talked to myself most inside the car on the back roads that led from Phoenixville to my suburban faux colonial in Frazer. The halfway point, mentally, if not physically, was Pickering Creek and the small one-lane bridge that crossed it.

The night I killed my mother, I sang to myself in a low hum in an effort to create a sort of white noise in between me and what I had done. Every so often I would say, “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay,” as I pressed more tightly on the wheel to feel the squeeze of blood that pulsed at the ends of my fingertips.

At Pickering, I waited on the Phoenixville side for a beaten-up Toyota to pass by, and as I crept over the bridge, my car lurched up briefly on the patched road. My headlights seemed to catch something moving in the limestone ruins on the other side. It looked like a man, lit up and dancing over the dark rock, and I shivered in my clothes.

On the other side of Pickering, the trees were thinner and denser, and struggled during the day to get any sun through the crowded canopy above. A decade ago, excavation crews became a common sight here, and I would drive by to see one hundred birch saplings having been mown to the ground. I hated to say that Natalie’s house, which was halfway between my mother’s and my own, was one of the McMansions that had been carved out of these woods. It shouted up out of the forest, with mock storybook turrets and a front door fifteen feet tall.

Natalie and the now thirty-year-old Hamish had lived inside this gingerbread palace for eight years, ever since Natalie successfully sued the manufacturer that supplied the tires to her husband’s truck. He had been idling on Pickering Bridge in a stare-down with another car and had revved his engine. His front tire exploded, breaking the axle and ejecting him through the windshield, and he hit his head on the old fieldstone bridge that had lain in ruins for more than a century. He died instantly.

Through the scrim of young white-barked trees that had grown back since the developers came and went, I saw Hamish lying in the driveway, one of his many cars ratcheted up, with a bright cage light hanging from the front fender. I slowed down and brought my car to a halt. Without a thought for what I would say when I saw her, I swung my car off the empty road and drove up the length of Natalie’s driveway. I seemed to be doing almost explicitly what Jake had told me not to, but I couldn’t stop myself.

As my headlights mingled with the glow from the broken car, Hamish rolled himself out on his mechanic’s dolly and motioned for me to switch them off.

I turned off the ignition and got out. My first steps were wobbly on the gravel drive.

Hamish ducked toward me, flipping his hair to the side of his face.

“Mom’s out,” he said.

I had never stopped thinking of Hamish as the boy who played with Emily in the sandbox in the community park at the end of my street. “Hamish is going nowhere-fast,” Natalie said in the years after Hamish Sr.’s death. She seemed happy about it. As if she’d lost one Hamish, but this Hamish was sure to stick around.

“Out where?”

“She’s on a date,” Hamish said, and smiled. His teeth were as white as stadium lights. Natalie had told me that he bleached them every six months.

I didn’t know which was stranger, that I found myself in the driveway of my oldest friend after killing my mother or that Natalie had gone on a date without telling me.

“I just remembered I wasn’t supposed to say anything,” he said. “Don’t tell her, Helen. I don’t want to get her mad at me.”

“No worries,” I said-two ridiculous words that I had picked up from an Australian-born administrator at Westmore. It applied to everything. “The kiln has exploded.” “No worries.” “I’m canceling Thursday’s Life Drawing class.” “No worries.” “I’ve murdered my mother, and she’s rotting as we speak.”

“Seriously, Hell,” Hamish said. He had picked up the nickname habit at Valley Forge Military Academy, where Hamish Sr. had forced him to go to develop moral fiber.

“I’m not feeling too well, Hamish,” I said. “I’m going to sit down.”

I opened up my car door again and positioned myself sideways with my feet on the gravel. I bent from the waist and propped my body up with my elbows on my knees.

Hamish squatted down beside me. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Should I call Mom?”

The light from the hanging lantern came beneath my open car door to illuminate what met the ground. I saw Hamish’s shoes in the dust and my own thoroughly filthy jazz flats. I edged them off with my toes while Hamish watched. I thought of the day in the basement when he had cupped my cheek.

“Will you lie on top of me?” I asked.

“What?”

I looked up at him, at his beautiful prematurely creased face, the freckles that peppered his nose and cheeks from too much time in the sun, his blazing white teeth.

“You trust me, right?” I said.

“Sure.”

I did not stop to wonder what I looked like. I stood up, and so did he. I opened the door to the back and crawled in across the bench seat.

“Get in,” I said.

I thought of my mother on the cold cement floor. I lay on my back with my feet hanging out over the drive. Hamish crawled in but sat on the edge of the seat with the open door behind him.

“I’m not sure what this is,” he said.

“I’m cold,” I said. “I just want to feel your body on top of me.”

I wanted to fuck him.

I closed my eyes and waited. A moment later, I could feel Hamish gingerly-too gingerly-place his body over me. He was bracing himself against the backseat and still resting most of his weight on the floor.

“I don’t know what you want,” he said.

“I want all of you on me,” I said, opening my eyes.

“Hell,” he said. “I’m…” He glanced down his body instead of finishing the sentence.

“Just put your full weight on me,” I said. “It’s fine.”

And then, within a moment, his body-all, what was it, 185, 190 pounds?-was laid out on top of me and pressing down. I felt his erection against me, the tops of my feet jostling the middle of his shins, his face to my right, his ear a seashell tunnel beside mine. I thought of the phone in my mother’s kitchen. How many times had it rung before stopping?

I brought my right hand up and ran it along his side until I found the edge of his T-shirt, then slipped my hand up under it and onto his bare skin. He grunted beside me, an animal waiting to be touched. Sarah had had a crush on Hamish, growing up.

“We can do anything,” I said.

It was as if I’d turned a key. He raised his head. His eyes looked dreamy and distant in a way I’d never seen the eyes of my best friend’s son.

“Sure, baby,” he whispered, and I tried not to hear the tone in his voice. A tone I was aware he adopted with the women I’d seen riding on the back of his motorcycle. They wore ludicrous shorts while wrapped around Hamish’s Kevlar-encased torso and legs. I tried to picture myself clinging on to him. He had more than once invited me to do so, but I had always declined. “He has the hots for you,” Natalie had said once, and the two of us had laughed together as we drove off to some sort of pitiless exercise class while Hamish peeled off in the opposite direction on his Japanese death machine.

His lips were pendulous, ridiculous, young. I reached my arm up and pulled his head down to kiss them. I was beginning to feel his weight, his bones against my bones. I would have wished it could be different than this, that I could have fucked my best friend’s son without having to be made aware of it. I tunneled into it, firmly now, as I realized thinking was not going to get me anywhere. Morality was just a security blanket that didn’t exist. All of it, what I had done and what I was doing, was not leading me perilously toward the edge of a cliff. I had already jumped.

I tugged upward at Hamish’s shirt, and taking his weight away from me for a moment, he peeled it off over his head. He was beautiful, his chest muscular and divoted, but his beauty was as much about youth and a life still ahead of him as anything else. I felt a stab of regret.

I turned my eyes away from his face and unbuttoned my pants. As he rushed to help, he bumped his head on the inside of the passenger-side door. It made a horrible hollow sound. I thought of Mrs. Leverton hitting the ground outside her house six months ago. How she had called through the bushes to my mother to get help. How the enemies had fleetingly bonded. They were desperate to be able to continue living on their own in their own houses.

Mrs. Leverton thought I was a degenerate, a failure as a wife who modeled nude for a living, but in one solid sense she was envious of my mother. Mrs. Leverton had a son who wanted to do everything for her, but “everything” was an assisted-living facility attached to a nursing home with a pricey hospice program. “Everything” was paving the road to her death with his money. He would line her way to the grave with gold when all she really wanted was to be allowed to die in her own home.

“Jesus,” Hamish said. He rubbed the back of his head and left my pants to fester around my ankles, the immediacy dangerously threatened once again.

I bit my lip. I writhed. “Fuck me,” I said, and hoped that no one’s God was watching.

This brought him back. He stared at me. “Wow,” he said. With a final tug, he threw my pants onto the gravel drive. I winced when he ripped off my underpants. They were not high waisted or gauzy or old like handmade paper, but his stripping me cut too closely to what I’d just done to my mother. I propelled myself up and grabbed for Hamish’s penis, which had poked above the waistband of his briefs.

As soon as I had my hand on it, I tugged him forward and down. He moaned in pleasure as I spread my legs and wrapped myself around him. “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck!” he wailed. I lay there in disbelief. He had ejaculated on my stomach. My fingers, sticky and enraged, squeezed. “Ow,” he said, and placed a hand on my wrist. “Let go.”

He moved around, flattening one of my knees painfully with his ass, until he was sitting on the seat behind my legs with his own legs bent up in a tent above them. I smelled the fetid smells of the backseat, where the crisp scent of my greenmarket groceries mingled with the danker smell of my ancient gym bag.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” he said. “This is intense.”

I lay there. Suddenly I was beside my mother in the basement. Mrs. Leverton was coming down the stairs with After Eight mints spread out in a decorative circle on an old enamel tray. The phone was ringing in the kitchen, and Manny was upstairs dropping condoms like so much rain.

“Will you take me to Limerick?” I said, as if I were asking to be voluntarily committed to an asylum just over the hill. I would not look at him. Did not want to see his face. Instead I looked at the square-cornered tear in the back of the passenger seat and tried to recall how it had gotten there.

Hamish was kind, even if motivated by an unnecessary shame. “Do you want to wash up?”

“I’ll stay here,” I said.

I could feel him wanting to say something but resisting. “I’ll bring you a towel,” he said, and I nodded my head at him, both to say yes to the towel and to make him, for the moment, go away.

I lay in the backseat and listened to the night noises surrounding me, thought of fucking Jake in Madison in the VW Bug. Avery would come and sit for the girls, and we would go to a dark spot at the edge of the U-Mad campus and leave the AM radio playing low while we made love.

I wanted to be looking up at the sky, but instead I was looking up at the waffled roof of my Saab. The cool night air rushed in the open door at my feet, and I shivered, drawing myself up and turning over to lie in a fetal position and stare at the back of the front passenger seat, where my mother’s braid lay tucked inside my purse.

I had once read one of Sarah’s true-crime books that she’d left at the house. It was a book about a serial killer named Arthur Shawcross, and the most vivid thing in it, for me, was the portrait of a woman whom he had obviously meant to kill but who was too smart for him. She was old for a prostitute and still doing speedballs and getting high. She’d gotten high for three days straight after Shawcross tried to strangle her while raping her in his car. He was a man who picked up a prostitute, drove to a deserted spot, and killed her after he was unable to perform. She had known how to talk to him, known how to brace herself so that his hands, enclosed around her neck, could not produce the leverage needed to crush her windpipe. And she had known that her survival was connected intimately with his ability to ejaculate. It had taken hours, or so she said, and it was arduous, but he was grateful enough that he didn’t kill her and instead drove her back to the spot where he’d picked her up.

“How can you read such things?” I asked Sarah over the phone, brandishing, as if she could see me, the consumed-in-one-night book.

“It’s real,” Sarah had said. “There’s no bullshit.”

Hamish returned, smelling of Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men, which it embarrassed me to know. He ducked in the backseat and held out a small blue hand towel. I looked at it in horror, but I did not reach for it.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m good.”

Again a quizzical look came across his face, but instead of asking me a question, he broke into a smile.

“You like having it on you,” he said.

“Hamish,” I said, sitting up and scrambling out of the car to find my pants and underwear, “your job is not to make me throw up.”

“Harsh,” he said.

“What I mean is that I’m still your mother’s friend, and your seduction lines are calibrated for women half my age.”

“If that,” he said.

“Touché,” I said, and zipped up my pants while slipping on my flats.

“You’ve got to admit this isn’t our usual way of relating.”

“We’ll take my car,” I said. “I’ll drive. You go around the side.”

“Sweet. Mom always makes me drive.”

I sat down behind the wheel and whisked my purse off the passenger seat, tucking it by my side. I pictured an eight-year-old Hamish running to my car with a wild smile on his face. He had been smitten with Emily from the first time they’d met when they were two. I looked out the window at the full-grown man whom I had almost just fucked and who was now walking around to the passenger door. I didn’t know who I was anymore or what I was capable of.

He swooped in and kissed me on the cheek.

“Buckle up,” I said, my spine stiff against the soft and mealy seat.

I backed out of the driveway, the gravel crunching under my tires. It was Leo’s baby carrier that had torn the hole in the back of the passenger seat. I had struggled to get it inside the car on the day my mother dropped him, trying to show Emily I could take care of it while she stood on the sidewalk, clasping Leo to her chest and shouting, “It doesn’t matter, Mother! Leave it! Leave it!” until I shoved the carrier in and slammed the door. Inside the car, I turned and saw a spot of blood seep through Leo’s blue baby bonnet. When I’d called to tell my parents I was pregnant for the second time, my mother had yawned extravagantly and said, “Aren’t you bored yet?”

“Who is Natalie out with?” I asked as I swung the car onto the road and started off.

“Shit,” Hamish said. “Don’t make me tell you.”

But I didn’t want to talk about what had happened between us. “Okay, can we talk about your father instead? Are you ever happy that he died?”

“Man, what’s with you? I’m sorry about back there, but chill out, okay? I want to make you happy.”

“Sorry, I just came from my mother’s house.”

“Oh.”

It was roundly known that my mother and I had problems with each other, that I attended her by duty, but now I had done something stupid, I knew. I had given Hamish knowledge of my previous whereabouts. I was a lousy criminal, and he was a lousy lay. We were perfect together.

“It’s good with my mom,” Hamish said. “We get along, and living together works for us. It was harder with Dad.”

“You don’t have to,” I said, feeling guilty now.

“I’ll tell you if you want.”

I remembered Hamish as a toddler then, how he would allow Emily to boss him around and how, over time, she took advantage of this in a way I didn’t like. He was that same boy now. He would tell me what I wanted to know in the same way he would endlessly give his toys to my small daughter or bring her, on demand, bucket after bucket of sand for building Barbie castles. Natalie and I had pretended only briefly that the two of them would grow up to be married. At a certain point we both realized that neither of us knew the first thing about what made a good marriage.

“You know your father and I didn’t get along,” I said.

We had driven out of the McMansions-set-in-birches section and were passing through the long no-man’s-land of one-story warehouses and shabby ’50s-era community halls.

“That’s not unusual for you,” Hamish said, looking straight ahead.

“What?”

“If you call ‘mostly ignoring me’ getting along,” he said.

“I’ve never ignored you,” I said.

“I know what you think of me.”

“Which is?”

“That I’m lazy. That I’m a drain on my mom. Stuff like that.”

I was silent. Everything he said was true. I pulled off Phoenixville Pike and onto Moorehall Road. I was taking the long way round.

“I’m a real bitch, huh?” I said.

Hamish laughed. “You know what? You kind of can be.”

I slowed the car down and scanned the lot of Mabry’s Grill for Natalie’s car.

“He picked her up in a Toyota four-by-four,” Hamish said.

I cleared my throat and put my turn indicator on for Yellow Springs.

“My dad was horrible in a lot of ways,” Hamish said. “I don’t miss the screaming between them and between me and him. He hated me.”

It was the moment to say “No, he didn’t” or “I’m sure that’s not true,” but I wouldn’t. Hamish may have needed a tantric-sex tutorial, but his sense of the truth was exact.

“My mom’s glad,” Hamish said. “Though she wouldn’t say it to me. His great dream was to move back to Scotland someday.”

“How can she stand to live so near the bridge?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” Hamish said. “I think it’s because she wants to be there in case his spirit rises out of Pickering Creek so she can bash it over the head.”

“That’s how I feel about my mother,” I said.

“I know,” Hamish said, and reached out to touch my hair.

How long would it take Jake to get to Pennsylvania? The flight was at least five hours, maybe more. He was coming from Santa Barbara, not Los Angeles or San Francisco. There was too much I didn’t know. I wanted to tell Hamish this: that the very same afternoon Jake had met my mother, he’d turned to me and said, “Why didn’t you tell me she was nuts?” And how it had been like a curtain parting for the first time onto a larger world, the beginning of the great divide between Jake’s and my mother’s love. The force that, if I had let it, would have ripped me apart.

“She met him on the Internet-Mom’s date,” Hamish said. “He’s a contractor from Downingtown.”

“What?”

“She was afraid you’d judge her. I think she wants to get married again.”

We passed the gravel yards and one or two low-lying buildings that, for as long as I’d lived in the valley, I’d never seen anyone enter or leave. These buildings sported two large Vs on their corrugated windowless outsides and were protected by electrified fencing.

“Remember?” I said, nodding toward the steel buildings.

“I just wanted to get in because they were keeping us out,” Hamish said. “I wasn’t going to steal anything.”

“A Toyota four-by-four, huh?”

“Helen, judge? Helen never judges. She loves everything!”

“Bitch?” I asked.

“Grade A.”

“Who would want less?” I said, laughing.

“That’s why Dad sent me to Valley Forge,” he said after a moment had passed. And my heart saw Hamish in his most difficult years. How he had tried to make his father happy and repeatedly failed, how when the three of them came to dinner at my house, he had made a point of sitting at the very edge of his chair, “like real soldiers do,” and how he’d beamed as he passed the lamb chops to Emily. “You’re not a real soldier,” his father had said, heaping mint jelly on his plate as an awkward silence descended on the table.

On the other side of Vanguard Industries was the remnant of a town established in the years before the Revolutionary War, with additions being made sporadically after that until the end of the 1800s. Only seven buildings remained, and these were all on one side of the road. Those on the opposite side had been washed away in the same storm that revealed the great mother lode of gravel that comprised Lapling Quarry.

Everything in the small town was closed as Hamish and I cruised past. The still-functioning general store, with an attached tavern that served only Schlitz, had shut down at eight p.m. Through the windows, I saw the low lights on over the bar, and Nick Stolfuz-my age and the only son of the owner-mopping up.

At the corner of the boarded-up Ironsmith Inn, I hung a sharp right with the skill that came from years of retracing the same near invisible shortcuts.

It was on a drive with Natalie that I discovered the view of the Limerick nuclear plant. It was during a long, humid afternoon in the early ’80s, when I was visiting my parents with Emily in tow. Sarah had stayed in Madison with Jake.

Every time I came home to Pennsylvania from Wisconsin, I would call Natalie, and we would go for long drives during which neither one of us would talk. It was our way of being alone without being alone, and it provided a justifiable excuse, to my mother, to Jake, to Natalie’s husband, to get away for a little while from the emotional hotbeds that were so benignly labeled “domesticity.”

We would purposely set off to get lost together. We would dead-end on old farm roads that hadn’t been used for years or find ourselves in isolated churchless graveyards, our feet sinking into the gaps of air left by the only frequent visitors-the moles. Once lost and outside the car, wandering, we would easily separate, trusting that we would find each other again. If I looked for her, I might come up behind a long-dead chestnut tree and hear her crying. In those moments, I would feel the cords of my upbringing pulling me back. I had not been raised to hug or to comfort or to become part of someone else’s family. I had been raised to keep a distance.

As I drove by the chicken coops and dark backyards and then hit the old keystone tunnel that separated the partial town from the rangy farmland and incipient suburban development on the other side, I noticed that Hamish had fallen asleep. His head nodded on the stem of his neck, and I saw no reason to disturb him. Judging Natalie as my mother had judged me was, I felt like telling her son, just my ass-backward way of showing love. I’d spent my life trying to translate that language, and now I realized I had come to speak it fluently. When was it that you realized the thread woven through your DNA carried the relationship deformities of your blood relatives as much as it did their diabetes or bone density?

Over the past ten years, Hamish had been brought in for various jobs around my mother’s house. After anything Hamish did, from installing a sprinkler system that kept the hedges and ivy watered along the curb to once wedging himself into the smallest crawl space to rescue a feral cat, my mother had rewarded him with food. I would arrive in the afternoon to see how things had gone and find him sitting at the dining table, surrounded by the tins of cookies that were my mother’s contraband.

Once, when my mother had gone back into the kitchen to, grudgingly, I felt, bring me a cup for tea, Hamish had seen the expression on my face.

“She told me you used to have problems with your weight.”

He held out the tin of fudge, which, as my mother aged and I assisted at the helm, had become grainy with sugar.

“No, thank you, Hamish,” I said.

“More for me!” He placed an entire square of fudge in his mouth, then winked at me.

I remembered taking the girls to various toddler parties held on the other side of the keystone tunnel. I would stand in the kitchen with the mothers, wondering what demonic communal mind created games like bouncing up and down on balloons until each child broke theirs, fell on the floor, and then ran to an appointed place to be showered with candy. Once, I had been beckoned in the middle of the night by the clipped voice of another mother. Emily had wet the bed at a slumber party. When I arrived to pick her up, she was sitting alone in the hallway on a rubber dog mat with jam in her hair. And while Emily pissed, Sarah hit. She kicked. She called the other children Fat Assholes, Big Babies, and her favorite, Jerk Bastards. The two of them reminded me of polarized Scottie magnets.

I looked over at Hamish and found myself wondering about a man who chose never to leave home. This choice seemed an unwise one to me, and yet, ultimately, it had been the one I too had made.

The car took the familiar loft of the final hill, and we rose up above the houses where Sarah had acquired a scar on her forehead from the deep digging nails of Peter Harper, and Emily had her first kiss on the brown plaid couch of a high-school saxophone player. I turned off the headlights and cruised, in the dark, over to the side of the road, then shut the engine off. Hamish’s head jerked back against the seat. His eyes flickered open, then closed again.

Since they were first built, the Limerick nuclear towers, lit up in the distance, had become an ominous presence. So much encased power. The large white udders cut off and opening out like craters.

I sat in the car with the sleeping Hamish and looked out over the rolling farmland and past the treetops backlit by the lights surrounding the towers. Natalie and I had talked of taking a field trip to the plant to see how close we could get, but the plan never came to anything. It seemed we had silently and mutually agreed that this distant image was best, that the reality of the thing could not help but be disappointing. We had always called this view the “future that was no future.”

When I’d found out I was pregnant with Emily, I had called my father at his office. I had been to the student health center in Madison and taken a blood test. The nurse who called with the results recommended that I sign up to receive counseling on birth control. I sat in a circle of other girls, some of whom were pregnant and others who had had a close call, and found myself the only one smiling. I wanted it-her, him, whoever was inside me who was one part Jake and one part me.

“Not everyone wants a child so young,” my father said. “I am happy, Helen. Is Jake?”

Jake sat at our rickety dining table, silently offering me support.

“Yes.”

“Girl or boy?” he had asked me. “Which would you prefer?”

“It doesn’t matter, Dad. I thought about it, but I don’t care either way.”

“Then I’ll selfishly say I’d love a granddaughter. It would be like having a little Helen to visit us.”

Next came the call to my mother. When I rang the house, I could hear KYW in the background. It was an all-news station she listened to throughout the day. Bulletins of murders and fires and peculiar deaths.

“Well, are you proud of yourself?” she asked.

“What?”

“You’re throwing your life away, you know that? Pissing it down your leg.”

I stared at Jake.

“Mom?”

“What?”

“I’m going to have a child.”

“There are no awards given out,” she said.

Something about the expression on my face made Jake stand and take the phone from my hand.

“Mrs. Knightly,” he said, “isn’t it wonderful news? I’m incredibly happy at the prospect of being a dad.”

I took his seat at the table and looked up at him, marveling. Though I had entered the confused state my mother often put me in, I sensed that if I watched his face and listened to his voice, I would come back to the new world that Jake and I had made. A world my mother didn’t rule.

Nearly eight years later, it had also been my father whom I sought out at the local Catholic church. I was in town, but I didn’t tell my mother this when I called. I didn’t want to see her until I’d spoken to him.

A man he worked with had told my father about the rising cost of maintenance at St. Paul ’s Parish, and my father had suggested the vestry consider keeping sheep. With all the ancient headstones jutting up and out in uneven rows, the sheep could keep the grass down better than any mower, and their munching was exact, my father said. “No clippers needed.” He had even volunteered, though he had no connection with the church, to come and tend them when he could.

The girls and I approached him from the parish parking lot. I carried Sarah in my arms, though in Madison I had told her that, at four, she had grown much too old for Mommy to carry her around. Emily, however, smiled for the first time since I’d packed the two of them and three suitcases in the Bug.

“Granddaddy!” she yelled. As we reached the churchyard wall, Sarah slid down my side to the ground. My father turned and dropped his rake at the sight of us. Emily scrambled over the wall by using the horse-mount steps while I lifted Sarah up and over to join her.

After they had been introduced to the sheep, Sally and Edith and Phyllis, and my father had shown them how he cared for them-cleaned out their wooden shelter, filled bowls with food and water-and talked to Emily about a bully she was frightened of, the girls were content to play among the graves.

My father and I walked.

“I see it in your face,” he said quietly as we crossed out of the churchyard and entered the newer section, where mowers, not sheep, were responsible for the maintenance of the flat markers.

“We’re getting a divorce,” I said.

Without speaking, the two of us sat down on a white marble bench donated by a family who had lost three of its members in a car crash.

We were silent for a moment, and I began to cry.

“I always think of how much life there is in the graveyard,” my father said. “Flowers and grass grow better here than they do anywhere else.”

I leaned my head into his shoulder. I had discovered a level of affection with Jake and knew I would miss it. I sensed my father’s discomfort almost immediately. He pivoted ever so slightly, and I sat straight up.

“Have you seen your mother?” he asked.

“I couldn’t bear to,” I said. “I called from a pay phone, and she told me where you were.”

“Will you move back home?”

“I’d like to be near you,” I said, “but I think the girls need…”

“Of course,” he said. “Of course.”

I could see his mind working as I had hoped it might. I thought of the small glass-backed clock that sat on his dresser, how as a child I had watched it in fascination to see the brass gears moving inside the four beveled panes.

“Mr. Forrest has a friend, a real estate agent,” he said. “There’s a new development in the area near where your mother and I once looked. Nice two-stories, not split-levels.”

“But…”

“It will be my gift.” He patted my hand.

I stood and straightened my skirt. The ride from Wisconsin had been long and hot. Guiltily I watched his back as he moved closer to the churchyard and his grandchildren. I did not want to be like my mother. I did not want to depend on him.