This Side of Brightness

chapter 8. 1950–55

Walker has timed it perfectly. Just before the sun rises over the roofs of 131st Street and shines through the window, his arm is raised and it shades his eyes. It is good exercise; his muscles beginning to give even more to rheumatism, the disease of tunnel men. He keeps his arm up until the sun hits the crossbeam in the window, and then he is given relief for two and a half minutes exactly.

A shadow supplied, a shadow lost, and the forearm is lifted as the sun rises further.

Walker likes the sofa, even though he’s confined to it two hours a day, by pain, not desire. It has shaped itself to the contours of his body, and it gives him a view of a street maddened in recent years by motorcars. He perches on a history of coins dropped beneath the cushions, and sometimes, when he wants chewing tobacco, he reaches in under the cushion, grabs a few dimes, and drops them down to his children, who, when not at school, sit on the steps below. The coins land noisily and his children scramble, then make their way down to the store.

The stylus of the record player tumbles across an old jazz record: Louis Armstrong. The pulse of the man. The gorgeous rhythm. The syncopated slide. Walker moves his head to the beat, and the silver cross sways gently against his neck. When the record finishes he stands up from the sofa to break the cramp in his knees and stretches wide, bending the pain from his fingers. Carefully he places the needle in a groove just beyond a scratch in the vinyl. Last week the needle began to skip, but the jabs were so terrible in his knees that he just let it sound over and over and over again at the point of a shrill trumpet note — it got to the stage where he didn’t even hear it anymore, he was back underneath the river, he was digging, his friends were around him, it was the compressor sounding out — until Eleanor came home and repositioned the needle.

She wants to buy a new copy of the record, but money is tight these days. He is long finished in the tunnels; there is no more need for diggers. Most of the family’s money comes from her job in a clothing factory — the wages are low, the hours are long. Walker has begun to do some of the housework, and the room is bright and tidy, partitioned by a curtain that hangs from the ceiling. Walker’s shovel hangs above the fireplace. On the mantelpiece, a row of photographs. By the kitchen, five chairs are ranged around a small table. There are three beds: a double for themselves, a double for the two girls, a single for Clarence. Walker made the single bed himself, strung the rope between poles, frapped and crisscrossed until taut and strong.

On the days when his fingers don’t give up the ghost, Walker makes furniture to sell at a street stall: chairs, shelves, bedside tables. He gives credit to those who can’t pay up front. Days and days are spent on each intricately carved piece. Afterward he has to immerse his numb hands in warm water for relief.

Walker lets the music roam in him and shuffles to the stove to put on the kettle. Eleanor has taught him the art of making tea, the necessity of warming the pot first, drying it out, carefully apportioning the leaves, letting them stew for a minute or two. He uses a tea cosy, a foreign thing, inherited from Maura O’Leary. Walker has even acquired a taste for milk in his tea. He lingers over the saucepan, then puts a plate on it so the water boils faster. He has had to learn these little tricks of middle-aged domesticity. Like making the beds and folding the sheets back over the blankets. Or hailing the milk wagon with a high whistle from the window. Or adding a touch of vinegar to the mop water. There is no refrigerator, but Walker bought a plastic icebox from a World War Two veteran who claimed it would work as well as anything.

Bending down, he takes out the milk but it has already begun to thicken, so he shakes it with violence and pain shoots through his arm and shoulder. He is generous with the milk. It won’t last much longer. He watches the way it whirls through the dark tea.

As he sips at the drink, he prepares for Eleanor’s return, laying the cosy over the pot, putting a cube of sugar on a spoon, arranging it neatly on the counter so that all she will have to do is pour and stir. The slowness of these days. It’s almost as if he doesn’t inhabit his body but hovers somewhere beyond it, a wheel of energy watching himself beginning to break down. He likes to remain perfectly still sometimes, just standing in the kitchen with his body bent in such a way that he can no longer feel any pain. The doctor has said it will only get worse. It will gnaw at his elbows, slip into his hips. Walker was given medicine but it ran out after a month, cost too much, and the drugstore won’t give him credit.

He tries to recall his mother in Georgia. There was a plant she used to counter the rheumatism, but Walker can’t remember the name of it.

Standing by the stove, again removed, again hovering, Walker watches himself as a boy, guiding a canoe through the black swamps, alongside cypress trees stumped by lightning. He imitates the remembered swerve of the paddle, then shuffles across the room, through the whirling motes of dust in the sunlight, to the record player.

He hates to stop the great Daniel Louis Armstrong in mid-flight, but it’s better than continually rising from the couch. His hands tremble when he lifts the lid of the record player and positions the needle at the beginning. On the couch, he stretches out his feet and extends his neck to see down the street, but there is little to see, just the slide of women out from the Laundromat, a pawnshop sign flickering, and a few young men gathered around a fire hydrant, holding cigarettes, exhaling to the sky, the smoke curling out flaccidly above their heads. Three prostitutes in tight pants totter back and forth around the corner, trading insults with the men.

Walker lies back gently and blows on his tea, even though it’s already cool. The afternoon withers away.

Fastened to the skipping music, he falls asleep, and when he wakes his three teenage children are standing in front of him, home from school, laughing, having tilted the tea cosy comically upon his head.

* * *

Below them, in a room thick with marijuana smoke, Hoofer McAuliffe, a car mechanic, can be heard at all hours of the night. A tough man, his face is mutilated — one of his nostrils was bitten away in a fight, leaving his nose ruined and scabbed. McAuliffe brings whores to his room late in the evening. He guides them gently by the arm. The smell of reefer drifts up the stairs. Great gollops of laughter rise up through the floorboards. Loud slaps are heard and then the lowest of whimpers. The women slink from the room, shy and high and beaten.

One morning, as Walker accompanies his daughters downstairs on their way to school — past the rich graffiti on the stairwell wall — Hoofer McAuliffe lets a long lecherous tongue hang out from the gap in his half-open door. Walker pushes the door open and stands in front of him.

“I wouldn’t touch it anyways,” says McAuliffe. “Mixed pussy’s bad for a man.”

Walker slams McAuliffe up against the wall, shoves his knee into his crotch, presses his fingers in his throat, and watches McAuliffe slide to the floor beneath him, gasping for breath, eyes wide and white, his one nostril flaring. The morning sun concentrates the smoke in the room, makes it glide through the air. Walker counts to ten and then squeezes McAuliffe’s neck one last time and whispers, “Don’t ever look at my girls that way, hear me? Don’t ever even turn a head to them. You listening to me? You listening?”

McAuliffe nods and wriggles his head free, stumbles across the room, opens his window, and gulps down air. Walker turns around to find Clarence in the doorway, staring at him, schoolbooks in his hand.

“Y’all go to school right now and forget your eyes,” says Walker. “Forget everything y’ever saw.”

His son nods and leaves, going down the staircase slowly, books tucked under his arm.

Walker spends the rest of the day in his apartment, nursing his aching hands in ice.

* * *

On better days he rides the subway trains and looks at the curves of the tunnel walls. He stands in the front car next to the driver and stares through the window, face propped close to the glass. He shades the top of his head with newspaper to reduce the glare.

The tunnels greet him with magnificent speed. He can spot the mistakes: the too-sudden curve where an engineer miscalculated, an area likely to be flooded in the rains, a switch placed in the wrong part of the tracks. He wishes to be back down underneath, digging. To feel again the fluidity of his shovel. One, two, three, strike, return. He even made an application to become a sniffer — to walk through the subway tunnels and check for gas leaks or fires or dead animals — but the application was turned down, like all the other job applications he makes.

Still, he loves the tunnels, moving from the darkness into the bright yellow light of the stations, the slow roll into blackness once more, the screech of steel on steel, the workers shining flashlights, the elation of being slammed along on a mid-morning express, commuters shuffling their feet on platforms as he whizzes by.

On weekends he takes Clarence with him and is greeted with stares from passengers looking at the curious paler skin of his teenage child. Clarence is tall enough to have to bend at the window to see along the tunnels. He has the beginnings of a mustache around his lips but is still too embarrassed to start shaving. He stands in silence, looking out the window, his father’s hand on his shoulder.

Sometimes Walker rides all the way downtown and meets up with Vannucci and Power on the Manhattan side of the water.

The men race their pigeons back and forth across the East River. Vannucci has taken on new colors for his birds: red and white and green. In a moment of drunkenness, Power has drawn fifty tiny blue stars on one of his favorite pigeons. The men sit at the waterside and share bottles — Kentucky bourbon and grappa — palming them around in sweat-wrinkled brown bags.

As they wait for the pigeons to return, the men remember themselves when young, diving down into the alcohol with happiness and regret.

“Pass me the slop!” shouts Power. “Gotta keep on sloppin’. Sloppin’ till the end of time.”

“’Member the time me and El dunked them pigeons?” says Walker.

“I shoulda kicked your ugly black ass.”

“Those were the days, huh?” says Walker.

“Weren’t they just? How’s that fortune-teller of yours, Nathan?”

“She says y’all’ll be sloppin’ till the end of time.”

“Fine by me, buddy.” Power claps his hands. “I bet that woman could suck the chrome off my fender.”

“Excepting you don’t have a car!”

“That’s exactly right.”

“What is the meaning, the chrome?” asks Vannucci.

“Ask your wife, Ruby. And Ruby—”

“What?”

“Don’t forget to ask her about the custard.”

“I do not understand.”

“Pass me the bottle and I’ll show ya!”

One afternoon they take the subway under the East River. They sit in the front carriage and ask the driver to stop the train for a moment. The driver curls his upper lip and shakes his head. “No.” “Come on, bud.” “No.” “A dollar?” “No.” “Dollar and a half?” “No.” “A thick jaw?” “Come on, you guys, quit kiddin’, I said no.”

And then Power flashes his union card, along with a pair of dollar bills. The driver nods and the train comes to a halt. They crowd into the driver’s cabin and spread open the sports page of the newspaper. Power leans out the window and reads Con O’Leary the baseball reports: It is June 1950 and the Brooklyn Dodgers have just gone into first place in the National League by beating the Cincinnati Reds 8–2 at Ebbets Field, Gil Hodges landing a grand slam homer in the upper deck in the third inning. “Yessir, Mister Big Gil himself,” says Power. And then Walker leans over the top of his colleague and says, “And ol’ Jackie Robinson got a double, buddyblue.”

The driver grows nervous and mashes his hands together as the men shout other scores at the ceiling of the tunnel.

The afternoon surrenders control to the bottles. They switch trains back and forth between the two stations, and they grow loud and raucous until they are kicked off a train and Power shouts, “You can’t kick us off, we’re the Resurrection Men!”

* * *

Eleanor stands in the doorway and leans her head against the frame. Halfway across the room toward her, Walker sees that she is weeping. And then he realizes that Eleanor doesn’t want to cross the threshold, as if something has pinned her there.

* * *

“I was sitting in the warehouse, Nathan. Sewing the hem on a pair of trousers. We all sit in a big long line, the Singer machines in front of us. I don’t know what happened to me, Nathan. It was terrible. He was coming from school. He had his report card. He got himself an A in science. I guess he just wanted to tell me that. I guess he just wanted to tell his momma that he was doing good in school. And the other women, Nathan, they don’t know a thing about me. All they know is that I live uptown. They don’t even know where uptown. They don’t know anything about you or the kids. It’s just that — well, it’s just — I don’t know what it is. I’m not ashamed. It ain’t that. I suppose I just didn’t want them to know about me. Just to keep us all safe, you know?”

“Take it easy, El.”

“’Member I told you that the boss’s name is O’Leary? Well, I told him — when I first got the job — I told him my maiden name is O’Leary too. I didn’t say nothing about being a Walker. And, seeing how I’m an O’Leary, he’s nice to me, doesn’t shout at me if I spend too long at coffee break and all, seeing how I’m Irish. He likes me — not in that way — but he likes me. Anyway, I’m sewing the hem on those trousers when I look up and there’s our Clarence up at the door of the warehouse. He’s pointing at me. I put my head down, Nathan, I don’t know why. I was trembling. I pretended I was concentrating on the hem, being very careful with it. I could hear the footsteps. They’re the loudest footsteps I ever heard. And when I looked up again, they were both standing in front of me.”

“Don’t cry, hon.”

“And O’Leary says to me, ‘This here boy says that he wants to see his momma.’”

“Oh, no.”

“I don’t know what happened to me. All of a sudden I let go of the trousers and the hem zigzagged across. You wouldn’t believe how quiet that place was. Everyone was looking at me, all the other seamstresses, silent as could be. I just said, ‘Pardon me?’ And the boss he says, ‘This here boy says that he wants to see his mother.’ Real insistent, the boss, he’s real insistent. And I just let out this nervous giggle, Nathan, I’m just sitting there giving a nervous giggle. And I said, ‘Oh, that’s just a term of speech, I know his momma very well.’”

“Oh, El. You didn’t? You couldn’t have.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, Eleanor.”

“And O’Leary was staring at me and his eyes all wide. And Clarence he’s just staring too. Clarence has got this report card in his hand. I looked at the boss and I said it again, ‘It’s just a term of speech, you know how people talk.’ And Clarence, he’s got this look on his face like the whole world has just tumbled in on him. Like something went in and just collapsed his face right down. He says to me, ‘Momma.’ I think I’m gonna hear that word forever, the way he said it. Momma. Momma. Momma. Like it’s just the most important thing he ever said. But I just looked around the warehouse and everybody was staring at me. ‘His momma is a friend of mine, his momma lives local to me’—that’s what I said. And O’Leary, he takes Clarence by the scruff of the neck. ‘What’re you wasting this lady’s time for?’ he says. And Clarence says, ‘I just wanted to tell her that I got an A in science.’ And O’Leary he swells up real big like and he coughs and he looks around the warehouse. ‘An A in science!’ he shouts. ‘It musta been in evolution!’”

“The sonofabitch.”

“And Clarence was there and he was crying.”

“I can’t believe it, El.”

“He’s got these big tears coming down his face. And he says to me again, ‘Momma.’ And I didn’t say a word to him. I just didn’t say a word. I didn’t even say well done. Well done for the A in science. I was just dumbstruck and I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean to be that way; it just happened to me, Nathan, I swear I didn’t mean it; oh, God in heaven, believe me that I never meant to ignore him like that. I just sat there and watched O’Leary drag Clarence out of the warehouse, and I’ve never felt a sorrier thing ever in my life. I turned and looked at the other seamstresses and — oh, God, Nathan, I just got up and I pushed my way past O’Leary and grabbed my coat and ran and went to look for Clarence. But he was nowhere around. I looked and looked but he was gone. I know I’ve lost my job, but I don’t care. I just ran and ran but I couldn’t find him.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Enough crying, woman.”

“Can you go find him for me, Nathan? Please? Can you explain it to him? For me?”

“I don’t reckon, El, I can explain a thing like that.”

“I never meant to ignore him.”

“I’ll say this one thing and I’ll say it one time — it’s the ugliest goddamn thing I ever heard in my life.”

“Oh, please.”

“It’s ugly, El. Pure goddamn ugly.”

“I swear to God I’ll never ever ever do a thing like that again in my life. It’s just sometimes, sometimes, sometimes things happen to us and we don’t know why. Just say that to him. Please. Say I don’t know what happened to me. Say that I could never be sorrier than what I am. Tell him I love him. Tell him it’s the truth. It’s the truth, I swear it.”

“Well, I’d say that’s your job, El.”

“Nathan.”

“No.”

“Please. Just explain it to him for me.”

“No! When you quit crying you can explain it to him your own self. I’ll go find him and you can explain it. That’s your cross to carry. It’s mine too, I suppose, but you’re the one gotta do the mending.”

* * *

Clarence says nothing as Eleanor puts her arms around him. The young man leaves his head on his mother’s shoulder, all the time staring beyond her into some unfathomable distance.

And, that evening, Walker too turns his face away from her as they lie in bed. She isolates her grief by shoving it in a pillow. But as the weeks go by, she moves toward him and puts her knees into the crook of his, her chest against his spine, breathes warm and frightened on his neck. She remains — spooned against him — until Walker gathers the courage to turn and awkwardly touch her hair.

* * *

In the weeks before Clarence leaves for army training camp in Virginia, his godfather, Rhubarb Vannucci, teaches him about dynamite, how and where to strap it, how deep to go with bore holes, where to put the charges if you want to get rid of evidence: a body, a horse, a tree trunk. The classes are held on Vannucci’s rooftop. The old Italian is meticulous in his instruction, kneeling down on a piece of cardboard, using his finger to carve out imaginary maps on the ground.

Vannucci keeps having to take Clarence’s face in his hands to stop the young man’s eyes from straying to the colored pigeons and the feathers arrayed on the ground.

“Ascoltami!” he says.

“Sir?”

“Listen me!”

All the important words are given in his own language: carica, explosivo, spoletta detonante, una valvola. He traces out diagrams — how to dig a proper tunnel, defuse a booby trap, deal with the spoons that hold the springs back in a grenade. He tells Clarence to always carry an extra boot lace, that they come in handy. Look carefully for the dummy fuse. Teach your brow not to ooze sweat. Never let your fingers tremble, even when you’re not working. Learn to hum a single tune while defusing, it’ll keep your mind from wandering.

At the end of one lesson he says, “And tell your father I gotta the custard.”

Clarence comes home and relays the message. “Rhubarb said he got the custard, whatever the hell that means.”

Walker, by the stove, slaps his thigh in delight. He goes across the room and whispers to his wife, and she berates him with a gentle slap on the wrist.

Clarence rolls his eyes to heaven. Embarrassed by his parents being in the same room, Clarence sleeps huddled outside on the fire escape. At night he hears them move toward each other, tentatively, when they think everyone else is sleeping, a movement in the bedsheets, curious muffles, a rustling together of their bodies, and there is nothing Clarence hates more than that sound.

* * *

He wants to be part of a bomb disposal unit, but they sign him up as a cook instead. He is seventeen. A photograph is taken of him; the hair, no longer tinged with red, doesn’t clash with his military uniform. The freckles have faded from his cheeks. He is white-toothed and grinning, but despite the grin, the eyes are deep and brown and serious, like two very carefully blown-out holes in his head.

* * *

Eleanor takes the photograph to the store and tells Ration Rollins that if he doesn’t put it up she’ll give her custom to another store down the street. Ration tapes the photograph up on his cash register, along with the pictures of all the other local men who have gone to Korea to fight. Their faces obscure the numbers that rise up on the glass window of the register. One dollar fifty-six cents. Five dollars thirty-four. Sixteen cents. The edge of Clarence’s face covers the square where the pennies roll.

Each night Walker and his wife make their way down to the grocery store to watch the television news. Eleanor remains silent at the back, by a freezer full of ice cream, fidgeting with a special prayer card encased in plastic. Walker stands beside her, but they still don’t touch in public. From the television set, Eisenhower looks down at them sternly. They search for their son’s face in the rows of tired men walking along hot dusty roads. They imagine helicopters flapping in over the paddy fields of the dead, row upon row of men and rice.

Back in their apartment, Eleanor writes long letters. The writing is neat and minuscule:

How are you over there? We hope you are well and keeping your handsome head down. We are all doing fine. We miss you sorely. I especially miss you sorely. Your father is making plenty of furniture. The girls are growing up you wouldn’t believe how much. Deirdre met a musician and he tuned our piano. It sounds good. Maxine sang a Mary Lou Williams song. One night we went to the Metropole and heard Henry Red Allen blowing his brass in his suit and tie. Whamp! Whamp! He’s the funniest thing. Everybody is asking for you especially some pretty girls who saw your photo down in Ration Rollins’s place. You wouldn’t believe it, but Ration has been very nice to us these days. He asks about you every day, and he even gave us some free tea. Imagine that. We were in the store and heard someone say they eat dogs over there in Korea. That’s not true is it? Your sister Maxine says Woof Woof! And your father says stay away from the hind end. Just use some barbecue sauce he says!

She uses a sharpener to keep the lead tip of the pencil alert. The shavings fall down around Walker’s outstretched feet.

The sad news from these parts is that your father’s old friend Sean Power passed away. At least he had a good number of years to him. Cirrhosis of the liver is what took him. Rhubarb put a bottle of bourbon in his coffin for the journey. We all of us got to go sometime, but it was sad. Your father said a prayer at the service. Everyone got drunk and singing at the wake. Someone asked your father if he was a waiter. They said go get a glass of whiskey for me, boy. And then they was all saying things about him. Boy this. Boy that. There was nearly a fight, but there wasn’t. Rhubarb told them all to shut up. I told your father he has got to keep his mouth zipped, but you know him. At the end of the evening your father and Rhubarb sat around in the corner and talked about old times.

I can’t tell you how much I think of old times, Clarence. Old times are on my mind ever since you left.

One thing I got to say, Clarence, and I have to say this again — it has been on my heart and it is so heavy I can hardly bear it — I never meant it that day when you got the A in science. I just don’t know what happened. I’ll carry it to my own grave I suppose. I’ve never felt more ashamed and I want you to know that. I carry it in me like the world’s heaviest thing. I’m not asking for forgiveness. I just want you to understand. I think understanding is more important than forgiveness. So please understand. Sometimes it just weighs the whole of me to the ground so much I feel like I’m bending over when I walk.

Eleanor always uses the same line at the end of each letter:

Like we said, you keep your handsome head down, Clarence, and come back to us in one piece and don’t go making us spill the river with tears.

On the evening that the war officially ends in stalemate, they receive a letter from Clarence to say that he will remain on in the demilitarized zone. He should be home shortly. He hints that he has met a girl at the army base: she is a nurse’s aide and she has painted a bowl of grits on the front of his cook’s helmet. The letters arrive monthly — one of them even comes when Clarence is on R&R in Japan. Eleanor keeps the stamps in a special envelope.

And then one afternoon, in the late summer, they receive another letter. They open it with their heads hung penitently. They already know from a two-week-old telegram that Clarence has been injured. A knife rolls slowly through the top lip of the envelope. Walker feels a bead of sweat roll down his spine. He uncurls the sheet of paper very slowly and hands it to Eleanor to read.

She throws her arms around him in simultaneous relief and grief when she reads the letter. The letter has been dictated by Clarence to the nurse’s aide. It takes a moment for Eleanor’s eyes to adjust to the handwriting.

Dear Mom and Pa,

I am alive and well. I was hit by a mine when I went out walking. We had just clocked off from the canteen, a buddy and me. We were south of Pusan, just going for a walk in the forest at the bottom of the mountain. It must have been a trip wire. I should have listened more carefully to Rhubarb. My buddy, he lost both his legs. Some of the shrapnel hit me in the eyeball and I lost my eye. I’m sitting here trying to be brave about it, but hell. Anyway, the nurses here have been looking after me good, especially that girl Louisa I told you about. She’s right here, scribbling down every word I say. Well, almost every word! She’s from Chippewa country out West. She’s been treating me special. She even went found me a gramophone and some 45s of old Rex Stewart so I can listen to him blow that horn. The radio stations here aren’t so good — all you get is Nat King Cole and all. But I get to listen to old Rex. Just lie here in bed and let him play. My injury doesn’t hurt much. Sometimes it’s hard looking only through one eye, but I reckon I’ll get used to it. Don’t let that river spill over because I’m as good as can be expected. You know that bowl of grits that I told you about — Louisa painted it for me — well, I think that’s about the funniest thing in the world. I’m looking forward to you-all meeting Louisa. We are good friends. Well, more than good friends to tell you the truth. And you know what? I understand that day, now, I understand that day, Mom, in the warehouse when you said you didn’t know me. In the Army you learn not to know yourself at all. And I got to thinking. And I know what you’re saying. So I understand and I forgive you, Mom. Well now, I don’t want you to get getting weepy, so I’m going to sign off. One thing is, though, we been thinking about getting a discharge, going back to New York, Louisa and me, start a little business, I don’t know what. Maybe even get married, how about that! Something so we can all go get a big apartment and live together and be happy and no more spilling of rivers for any of us.

The letter is signed: Clarence W. and Louisa Turiver.

Beneath that, a P.S.: I have a feeling that something will grow in the forest where my eyeball is. And beneath that another P.S.: No jokes about the eyepatch please!

* * *

Eighteen months later, in 1955, Walker and Eleanor peep around the curtain separating them from their daughters, slip outside into the corridor — noise of thumping fists coming up the stairs from Hoofer McAuliffe’s place — and walk along, floorboards creaking under their feet, to the shared bathroom. Eleanor puts a finger to Walker’s lips to stop him from laughing. The walls are yellow and smudged with handprints. The tiles on the floor are black and cracked. Eleanor scrubs the basin and wipes the side of it with toilet paper, making the sink immaculate, so that when she shunts up and sits up on the porcelain and lifts her nightdress to take him inside, she feels clean and young, although she’s thirty-eight years along and her body has begun perambulating downward.

“How’re your knees?” she asks when Walker stands on his toes and his back arches.

A vagabond breeze comes through the small open window, leaving the bathroom cool. She undoes the clips at the back of her hair, reaches to touch his hip.

“How’re your knees, honey?” Eleanor asks again.

“Still there, Grandma,” says Walker, rocking on the balls of his toes, biting his lower lip with his teeth to block out the laughter.

She jabs him in the chest. “Don’t Grandma me. I’m not a grandma just yet.”

They remain there, making love, and Walker will remember this forever: the clean sink, the yellow walls, the handprints, the lifted nightdress, the portent of a moth careening wildly below the bare lightbulb.