Wildlife

Chapter 4

In the morning my mother got up and dressed for work and left the house before I ever got out of bed. From my room, I could hear her moving around the house, her footsteps on the hard floor, and it seemed to me she was in a hurry, that maybe she did not want to see me. I stayed in bed listening until I heard the car start cold in the driveway, idle a few minutes while she came back in the house, then drive away down Eighth Street.

For a while after that I heard the furnace going on and off in the cellar, and the sound of cars passing in the street, and the sound of birds walking the eaves of our house, tapping and fluttering as distinctly as if they were in the room with me. Light was up, and the air outside my window looked clear and clean. But I felt tired. I could feel my lungs as if a weight was pressing on them, and I could hear myself breathe down in my chest and my skin felt tight. It was a sick feeling to have, and I wondered if it would go away in a day or if it was the beginning of some real illness.

For several minutes I thought I wouldn’t go to school that day, that I would stay at home and sleep, or go on a walk through town as I had other times, or go to my job early or go fishing in the river. Or I thought I could walk over to the Oldsmobile agency on Tenth Avenue and have a look. No one knew me. I could ask a question or several questions of someone — about Warren Miller, about what kind of man he was; was he married, did he have children, what were his holdings? I tried to remember the day when I had met him, a day with my father at the Wheatland Club. What had he said to me? What had I said to him, if anything? What my father had said, what the weather had been like. I tried to guess whether my mother had known him for a long time or a little. Not that it mattered — any of these facts — or would change anything. They would just fill in so that if suddenly my life changed I could have something to think about.

When I’d lain in bed a while, thinking things in this way, the phone rang in the kitchen. I thought it would be my mother telling me to go to school, and I almost didn’t answer it. But I did, still in my pajamas, and it was my father calling home from the fire.

‘Hello, Joe,’ he said to me in a loud voice. ‘What’s going on over there?’

‘I’m going to school,’ I said.

‘Where’s your mother? I’d like to talk to her.’ The connection began to be not very good.

‘She’s not here,’ I said. ‘She went to town.’

‘Is she mad at me?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s not.’

‘I hope she’s not,’ he said. Then he didn’t say anything for a few seconds and it sounded as though a truck was starting up behind him. I heard voices shouting, and I thought he must be calling from the restaurant where we’d been last night. ‘We don’t have any control over anything here now,’ my father said loudly over the noise. ‘We just watch everything burn. That’s all. It exhausts you. I’m stiff all over from it.’

‘Are you coming home,’ I asked.

‘I saw a bear that caught on fire, Joe,’ my father said, still loud. ‘You wouldn’t have believed it. It just blew up around him in one instant. A live bear in a hemlock tree. I swear. He hit the ground squalling. It was like balled lightning.’

I wanted to ask about something else he’d seen, or something that had happened to him or somebody else. I wanted to ask how dangerous it was. But I was afraid I’d say the wrong thing. So all I said was, ‘How do you feel?’ This was a question I had never asked my father in my life. That was not the way we’d ever talked.

‘I feel good,’ he said. ‘I feel like I’ve been here a year, but I’ve only been here a day.’ Then the truck noise stopped and the connection went dim. ‘Regular life doesn’t exist out here,’ he said. ‘You have to adapt.’

‘I understand,’ I said.

‘Is your mother already stepping out on me?’ my father said, and he was joking. I was sure of that. ‘I tried to call last night,’ he said, ‘but no one answered.’

‘We ate at a cafe,’ I said. ‘We had chicken.’

‘That’s good,’ my father said. ‘Good for you two. I hope you were the one who paid for it.’

‘She paid for us,’ I said. No one had told me not to say where we had been or where my mother was. But I felt like I had a responsibility not to. Flies were crawling on the kitchen window glass where I was looking into the back yard. And I thought that the weather might be turning, and it would get colder and snow, and the fire would be out before long.

‘Tell your mother that I haven’t lost my mind out here yet. Okay?’ There was more static on the line.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I will.’

I heard him laugh, then there was a click on the line, and I could hear my father say, ‘Hello? Hello? Joe, where are you? Oh shoot, now.’

‘Hello,’ I said, ‘I’m still here.’ But he couldn’t hear me. Something, I thought, might’ve burned through the line. And when I had listened a moment more to his voice, I said, ‘Good-bye. Yes. Good-bye,’ and said his name. And then I hung up the phone and went to dress myself for school.

That day at my school was an odd day. I remember it very clearly because I arrived late and did not have an excuse from my mother and felt tired and half in a dream, as if I hadn’t slept at all or was on my way to being sick. I missed a test in my English class because I hadn’t done homework from the night before. And in my civics class someone brought that day’s copy of the Tribune and read a story aloud from it, which said there was moisture in the air now, and soon it would both rain and snow, and the fire in Allen Creek would go out. After that we had a debate on whether the fire would actually go out — some said it would burn all winter — and if man would cause it or nature would. My teacher, who was a tall half-Indian man, asked us if any of our fathers were fighting the fire, and several people put up their hands. But I didn’t because I didn’t want it known and because it didn’t seem like a normal matter in my life then.

Sitting in my geometry class later, waiting for school to end, it seemed like a cold afternoon out of doors. I tried to think of what was between my mother and Warren Miller now, because something seemed to be. And not because of what they’d said to each other when I was present or said to me or might’ve said that I knew nothing about, but because of what they didn’t say but just presumed, the way you presumed moisture was in the air or that there were no more degrees in a circle than three hundred and sixty.

Though whatever it was, it had been worth a lie. My mother had lied to my father, and I had too. Maybe Warren Miller had lied to someone. And while I knew very well what a lie was, I didn’t know what difference it made when adults did it. Possibly it mattered less for them inasmuch as in their lives, what was and wasn’t so would finally be plain for everyone to see. Whereas for me, because I had done nothing in the world to represent me, it mattered more. And as I sat at my desk in the cool October afternoon, I tried to think of a happy life for myself and a happy and gay life for my parents when all this would be over, as my mother said everything would be. But all I could think of as I sat there was my father saying, ‘Hello? Hello? Joe, where are you?’ And of myself saying, ‘Good-bye.’

When school was over I walked to my job at the photographer’s studio, and then I walked home. The weather was changing and there was a breeze blowing, the kind of windy breeze that eventually turns icy in Montana and blows through your skin as if you were made of paper. I knew the same wind would be blowing that day where the fire was burning, and that it would have consequences there. And I wondered if it might snow in the mountains and thought that it would, and that with luck my father would come home sooner than anyone thought.

When I got in our house my mother was standing at the sink in the kitchen. She was looking out toward where the sun was setting. She had on a blue and white dress that looked like a navy dress. Her hair was tied up in back in what she called a French bun. It was a way she fixed herself that I liked. She had been looking at the newspaper, which was open on the countertop.

‘Winter, winter, go away,’ she said, staring out the window. She looked around at me and smiled. ‘You’re not dressed warmly enough. Next you’ll be sick. Then I’ll be sick.’ She looked back outside. ‘Did you have a very enjoyable day today at school?’

‘Not a very good one,’ I said. ‘I missed a test. I forgot.’

‘Well. Do better there, then,’ she said. ‘Harvard only has a few places available for boys from the ends of the earth. Somebody else from Great Falls probably expects to go to Harvard, too. And they won’t want to take both of you. I certainly wouldn’t.’

‘Where did you go so early?’ I said. ‘I was awake.’

‘Were you really?’ my mother said. ‘I could’ve driven you to school.’ She moved away from the window and began refolding the newspaper page by page. ‘Oh, I went outwards,’ she said. ‘I saw in this paper this morning a notice for a job teaching math to boys at the air base. Some of them can’t add out there, I guess. So I filled out an application to be industrious. I have an urge to do good all of a sudden.’ She finished folding the paper and pushed it neatly to the side and turned around toward me. I wanted to ask her about going to work for Warren Miller.

‘Dad called this morning,’ I said. ‘I talked to him.’

‘Where was he?’ my mother said. She did not look surprised, only interested.

‘I don’t know. I thought he was at the fire. He didn’t say where he was.’

‘Where did you say I was?’

‘I said you were gone to town. I thought that was right.’ I did not want to tell her he had asked if she was stepping out on him. I knew she wouldn’t like that.

‘You thought I was gone to work for Mr Miller. Is that right?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Well, I was. Or I did. I went there and did a few things. It’s just part-time. I still have a son to raise at home, I think.’

‘That’s okay,’ I said. I was glad to hear her say that even if she was only making a joke. ‘Is Miller married?’ I said. And these were words that just said themselves. I hadn’t planned to say them.

‘I already talked about that,’ my mother said. ‘He was.’ She walked to the refrigerator and took out an ice tray and carried that to the sink and ran water over it. ‘He lived in that house with his mother and his little wife. The three of them. For quite some time, I guess. Then the old lady died — his mother. And not long after that his wife, whose name was Marie LaRose or some such thing, ran off somewhere. To California or Colorado — one of those — with an oil wildcatter. Forty-six years old, and off she goes.’

My mother took a white coffee cup out of the cabinet, put one ice cube in it, then took a full bottle of Old Crow whiskey from under the sink, uncapped it, and poured some into the cup. She was talking while she did this and not looking at me. I wondered if she would tell this all to my father if he asked her, and I decided she probably wouldn’t.

‘Do you feel sorry for him,’ I asked.

‘For Warren Miller?’ my mother said, and she looked at me quickly, then back at her cup on the sink top where she was stirring the ice cube with her finger. ‘Indeed-ee-not. I don’t feel sorry for anybody. I don’t feel sorry for myself, so I don’t see why I should feel sorry for these other people. In particular those I don’t know very well.’ She looked at me again, quickly, then lifted the cup up and leaned forward to take a sip. ‘I made this too full,’ she said before she tasted the whiskey, then she drank some.

‘Dad said they can’t control the fire out there now,’ I said. ‘He said they just watch it.’

‘Well, then, he’s perfect for that. He likes golf.’ She held the cup under the faucet and let water trickle into it. ‘Your father has very pretty hands, have you ever noticed them? They’re like a girl’s. He’ll ruin them fighting forest fires. My father’s hands were like big lug nuts. That’s what he used to say.’

‘He said he hoped you weren’t still mad at him,’ I said.

‘He’s a sweet man,’ my mother said. ‘I’m not mad at him. Did you two have a nice chat about me? All my character flaws on parade? Did he talk about his Indian woman he has out there?’ She carried the ice tray back to the refrigerator. It was almost dark outside, and I snapped the light on in the kitchen. It was a dim light and only made the room seem small and dirty.

‘Turn that off,’ my mother said. She was annoyed at me for having talked about her, which I hadn’t done. She took her cup of whiskey and sat down at the kitchen table. ‘I went out and looked at an apartment today. I looked at those Helen Apartments over on Second. They have a two-bedroom that’s nice. It’s near the river and it’s close to your school, too.’

‘Why are we going to do that?’ I said.

‘Because,’ my mother said. She put her ring finger through the little cup handle and looked at the cup on the table. She spoke very clearly, and in my memory very slowly. ‘This fire could go on for a long time. Your father may want a new life. I don’t know. I have to be smart about things. I have to think about who pays bills. I have to think about the rent here. Things are different now in case you haven’t noticed. You can get drawn in over your head if you don’t look out. You can lose your peace of mind.’

‘I don’t think that’s true,’ I said, because I thought my father was gone working to put out a fire, and would soon be back. My mother was going too far. She was saying the wrong words and did not even believe them herself.

‘I don’t mind saying that,’ my mother said. ‘He’s not lacking. I told you that before.’ She kept her finger through the cup handle, but did not lift it. She looked tense and tired and unhappy sitting there, trapped in the way she saw the world and her life — a bad way. ‘Maybe we just shouldn’t have moved up here,’ she said. ‘Maybe we should’ve stayed in Lewiston. You can make so many adjustments you don’t know what’s what anymore.’ She wasn’t happy to be saying these words because she did not like to rearrange things, even in her thoughts. And as far as I knew, she hadn’t had to do that in her life. She raised the cup and took a drink of the whiskey. ‘I suppose you think I’m the horrible one now, don’t you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t.’

‘Well, that’s right,’ my mother said, ‘I’m not. It’d be nice if somebody was in the wrong for a change. It’d make everybody feel better.’

‘I wouldn’t feel better,’ I said.

‘Okay. Then not you,’ my mother said, and nodded. ‘Joe chooses for his only choice in the world to do the absolutely correct best thing. Good luck to him.’ She looked around at me and the expression on her face was an expression of dislike, one I hadn’t seen before but knew right away. Later I would see it turned toward other people. But the first time was looking at me and was because she believed she’d done all she could that was correct and the best thing, and it had only gotten her left with me. And I couldn’t do anything that mattered. Though if I could I would’ve had my father be there, or Warren Miller, or somebody who had the right words that would take the place of hers, anybody she could speak to without just hearing her own voice in a room and having to go to the trouble of pretending she did not feel absolutely alone.

At seven o’clock that night my mother and I drove across the river to Warren Miller’s house to eat dinner with him. My mother wore a bright green dress and high heels that were the same color, and she had taken her hair down out of the French bun and put on perfume.

‘This is my desperation dress,’ she said to me when I was waiting for her in the living room, and where I could see her through the bathroom door in front of the mirror. ‘Your father should see me wearing this,’ she said, brushing her hair back with her fingers. ‘He’d approve of it. Inasmuch as he paid for it.’

‘He’d like it,’ I said.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I’m sure he would too.’ She drank the last of her cup of whiskey and left it in the sink as we went out the back door.

In the car she was in a good humor, and I was, too, because of it. We drove through the middle of Great Falls, past the Masonic Temple where no lights were on, and past the Pheasant Lounge across Central, where the neon sign hung out dimly in the night. It was cold now, and my mother had not worn a coat and was cold herself, though she said she wanted to feel the air to get her bearings.

She drove us down to Gibson Park and along the river so that we passed the Helen Apartments, which was a long four-story redbrick building I had never seen before but where several windows were lighted and in one or two I could see someone sitting by a lamp reading a newspaper.

‘How do you feel,’ my mother asked, looking over at me. ‘Out of reach? I wouldn’t be surprised.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I feel fine.’ I was looking out at the Helen Apartments as we drove past them. They did not seem like bad places to me. Maybe our life would be better there.

‘Sometimes’—my mother straightened her bare arms toward the steering wheel and looked ahead toward Black Eagle, across the river—‘if you can just get a little distance on your fate, things seem okay. I like that. It’s a relief to me.’

‘I know it,’ I said, because I felt relieved just at that moment.

‘Keep your distance,’ she said. ‘Then everybody — girls included — will think you’re smart. And maybe you will be.’ She reached down to turn on the radio. ‘Let’s have some mood music,’ she said. I remember very distinctly there was a man’s voice speaking in a foreign language, which I guessed was French. He was speaking very fast, and seemed very far away. ‘Canada,’ my mother said. ‘We live near Canada now. My God.’ She clicked the radio off. ‘I can’t stand Canada tonight,’ she said. ‘Sorry. We’ll have Canada later.’ And we turned and drove on across the Fifteenth Street Bridge and up into Black Eagle.

Warren Miller’s house was the only one on his street with a porch light shining. And once we had stopped across the street from it, I could see that all the lights inside were burning, and the house — set up above the street — looked warm inside like a place where a party was going on or was ready to begin. Warren Miller’s pink Oldsmobile was parked halfway up the driveway, and farther down the street I could see the blue light of the Italian steakhouse. In front of Warren’s car, in the shadows beside the house, I saw there was a motorboat on a trailer, the smooth white hull pointed up.

‘It’s all lit up in there, isn’t it?’ my mother said. She seemed pleased by the lights. She turned the rearview mirror toward her and opened her eyes very wide, closed them and opened them again as if she’d been asleep. I wondered what she would say if I told her I didn’t want to go in Warren Miller’s house, and that I wanted to walk back home over the bridge. I thought she would make me go anyway, and this was something I had no choice in. ‘Well,’ she said, turning the mirror back in the dark. ‘Handsome is as handsome looks, too. Are you going inside with me? You don’t have to. You can go home.’

‘No.’ And I was surprised by that. ‘I’m hungry,’ I said.

‘Great,’ my mother said. She opened the car door onto the cold night’s air, and together we got out to go inside the house.

Warren Miller opened the front door before we were all the way up the front steps. He had a white dish towel tucked inside his belt front like an apron. He was wearing a white shirt, suit pants and cowboy boots, and he was smiling, not so much in a happy way as in a serious one. He seemed older to me and bigger than he had the day before, and his limp seemed worse. His eyeglasses were shining and his thin black hair was slicked back and gleaming. He was not handsome at all, and did not look like a man who read poetry or played golf or who had a lot of money or holdings. But I knew those things were all true.

‘You look like a beauty pageant queen, Jeanette,’ he said to my mother on the steps. He talked loudly, much louder than he had the day before. He was framed in the lighted doorway, and inside the house on a table by the door, I could see a glass he had been drinking out of.

‘I was — on one occasion,’ my mother answered. And she walked right by him through the door. ‘Where’s the heater in here? I’m frozen,’ I heard her say, then she disappeared inside.

‘You have to say the nice things to women,’ Warren Miller said to me, and he put his large hand on my shoulder again. We were in the doorway, and I could smell whatever he was drinking on his breath. ‘Do you always say them to your mother?’

‘Yes sir,’ I said. ‘I try to.’

‘Are you looking after her welfare?’ I could hear him breathe down in his chest. His eyes were watery blue behind his glasses.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do that.’

‘You can’t trust anybody.’ He gripped my shoulder hard. ‘You can’t even trust yourself. You’re no damn good, are you? I can tell. I’m part Indian.’ He laughed when he said that.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I guess I’m not.’ And I laughed, too. Then, holding my shoulder, he pushed me through the door and into the house.

Inside, the air was very warm and thick with cooking smells. Every light I could see was turned on, and the doors to all the rooms were open so that from the middle of the living room you could see into two bedrooms where there were double beds and, farther on, into a bathroom that had white tiles. Everything in the house was neat and clean, and everything seemed old-fashioned to me. The wallpaper had pale orange flowers in it. All the tables had white lace doilies under the lamps, and the pictures were all framed in heavy, dark-looking wood. It was nice furniture — I knew that — but it was old and curved, with fat legs. It seemed unusual for a man to live here. It was nothing like we had. Our furniture was not all the same. And the walls in our house were painted and did not have wallpaper.

Warren Miller limped through the living room back into the kitchen where he was cooking, but right away brought my mother a big drink of what he was drinking, which must’ve been gin. My mother stood over the floor furnace for a minute or two, holding her drink, then she smiled at me and began to walk around the house looking at pictures on top of the piano, and picking up and examining whatever was on the tables, while I sat on the stiff, wool-covered couch and did nothing but wait. Warren Miller had told us he was cooking Italian chicken, and I was ready to eat it.

Walking around Warren Miller’s house my mother looked pretty in her green dress and green shoes. I remember that very well. She had gotten warm standing over the furnace, and her face was pink. She was smiling as she looked around, touching things as if she liked everything that was there.

‘So,’ Warren Miller called out from the kitchen, ‘how’s your old man doing, Joe?’ He was talking loud, and we couldn’t see him, though we could hear him cooking, rattling pans and making noises. I wished I could’ve seen inside the kitchen, but I couldn’t.

‘He’s doing fine,’ I said.

‘Joe just talked to him on the telephone,’ my mother said loudly.

‘Did he say it was a tragedy out there? That’s what they usually say. Everything’s a tragedy when they can’t put it out.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He didn’t say it was.’

‘Did he say he was coming home soon?’ Warren Miller said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘He didn’t mention that.’ On the table beside me was a cold cigar butt in an ashtray, and under it the book my mother had lent to him.

‘Women are fighting this fire,’ my mother said. ‘I read that in the paper.’ She was standing, holding a framed photograph of a smiling woman with a dark upper lip. She had picked it up off the piano.

‘Women are better at it than men,’ Warren Miller said. He appeared limping out of the kitchen door, holding three stacked plates with silverware on top of them. He still had the towel stuffed in his pants. ‘They know what you’re supposed to run from.’

‘You can’t run away from everything,’ my mother said, and she turned the frame so Warren could see it as he put the plates down on the dining table, which had an expensive-looking white tablecloth over it and was on one side of the living room. ‘Who’s this pictured?’ my mother said.

‘That’s my wife,’ Warren said. ‘Formerly. She knew when to run.’

‘I’m sure she regrets it, too.’ My mother put the picture back down where it had been, and took a drink of her drink.

‘She hasn’t decided to call up to say so yet. But maybe she will. I’m not dead yet,’ Warren said. He looked at my mother and smiled the way he’d smiled at me out on the front steps, as if something wasn’t funny.

‘Life, life, life, life,’ my mother said. ‘Life’s long.’ She suddenly walked across to where Warren Miller was standing beside the dining room table, put her hands on his cheeks, still holding her glass, and kissed him right on the mouth. ‘You poor old thing,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s nice enough to you.’ She took another big drink of her gin, then looked at me on the couch. ‘You don’t mind it if I give Mr Miller an innocent kiss, do you, Joe?’ she said. She was drunk and she wasn’t acting the way she ordinarily would. She looked at Warren Miller again. He had a red smear of her lipstick on his mouth. ‘Is something waiting to begin or has it already happened?’ she said, because neither of us had said anything. We hadn’t moved.

‘Everything’s in front of us,’ Warren Miller said. He looked at me and grinned. ‘I’ve got a big dago dinner cooked up in there,’ he said, starting to limp toward the kitchen. ‘We have to get this boy fed, Jeanette, or he won’t be happy.’

‘Not that he’s happy now,’ my mother said, holding her empty glass. She looked at me again and touched both corners of her mouth with her tongue, then walked straight to the front window of the house where you could see out toward town, and toward our house, empty back on Eighth Street. I don’t know what she thought I was thinking. Dislike or surprise or shock at her, I would guess — for bringing me here or for being here herself, or for kissing Warren Miller in front of me, or for being drunk. But I was only aware at that moment that things felt out of control and I did not know how to bring them back, sitting in Warren Miller’s living room. We would need to go home to do that. And I guessed she was looking out at the dark toward our house because she wanted to be there. I was relieved, though, that my father didn’t know about all this because he wouldn’t have understood it even as well as I did. And I told myself, sitting there, that if I ever had the opportunity to tell him about all this, I wouldn’t do it. I would never do it as long as I lived, because I loved them.

In a little while Warren Miller brought out a big red bowl of what he called chicken cacciatore and a jug of wine in a basket, and we all three sat down at the table with the white tablecloth and ate. My mother was in an odd mood at first, but she became better, and as she ate she began to find her good spirits again. Warren Miller ate with his napkin tucked into his shirt collar, and my mother said that was the old-fashioned way to eat, and he must’ve learned it in the old West, but that she didn’t want to see me eating that way. Though after a while we all put our napkins in our collars and laughed about it. Nobody talked about the fire. Once Warren Miller looked across the table at me and told me he thought my father had a strong character, and that he fought the circumstances, and that he was a man somebody would be lucky to have working for him, and that when my father came back from the fire he — Warren — would find a job for him, one that had a bright future to it. He said a smart man could make money in the car business, and he and my father would discuss that when the time came.

My mother didn’t talk much, though she was having a good time, I thought. She was affected by Warren Miller, by something in him she liked, and she did not mind me seeing it. She smiled and leaned on the table and talked some about Boise, Idaho, where there was a hotel she liked with a good restaurant in it, and about Grand Coulee where she had been fishing with her father when she was a little girl, and where Warren Miller had been. She talked about once seeing the Great Salt Lake from the air, and what that was like, and about Lewiston. She said it was never cold there because of the special climate, and that she wasn’t looking forward to the winter coming in Great Falls, because the wind blew for weeks at a time and that after a while, she knew, constant wind would make you crazy. She did not mention the Helen Apartments or about teaching at the air base, or even about working at the grain elevator. All that seemed to have gone away, as if it was a dream she’d had, and the only real worlds were back in Idaho where she’d been happy, and in Warren Miller’s house where she was happy to be at that moment.

She asked Warren Miller how he had made his money, and whether he had gone to college to start, because she wanted me to go to college. And Warren, who had lit a big black cigar by then and taken his napkin out of his collar, sat back in his chair and said he had gone to Dartmouth College in the East, and had majored in history because his father had been a college professor of that in Bozeman and insisted, but that Montana was not a place where an education made any difference to anything. He’d learned everything that meant anything, he said, in the Army, in Burma in World War II, where he had been a major in the Signal Corps and where nobody knew how to do anything right.

‘Other people’s incompetency is what makes you rich,’ he said, and tapped the ash off his cigar into an ashtray. ‘Money begets money based on no other principle. It almost doesn’t matter what you do. I came back from Korea and I was a farmer, and then I got into the oil leasing business and went to Morocco with that, and then I came back here and bought those elevators and the car agency and the crop insurance business. I’m not very smart. Plenty of people are smarter than I am. I’m just progressive.’ Warren pushed his big hands back through his glistening hair and smiled across the table at my mother. ‘I’m fifty-five years young, but I’m that smart.’

‘You’re young for your age, though,’ my mother said, and smiled back at him. ‘You should probably write your personal memoirs someday.’ Warren Miller and my mother looked at each other from across the table and I thought they knew something I didn’t know.

‘Why don’t we listen to some music,’ Warren Miller said suddenly. ‘I bought a record today.’

My mother looked around then at the brightly lit room behind her. ‘I’d like to know where the restroom is.’ She smiled at me. ‘Do you know where it is, Joe?’

‘Go through the bedroom, Jenny,’ Warren Miller said. ‘All the lights are turned on.’

I had never heard anyone call her that before, and I must’ve looked at my mother in a way to let her know I thought there was something surprising about it.

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Joe, accuse me of something that matters,’ she said. She got up, and I could tell she had drunk too much because she kept her hand on the back rail of the chair and looked from me to Warren and back again, still standing, her eyes shining in the light. ‘Put some music on now,’ she said. ‘Some people might care to dance after while.’

‘We will,’ Warren Miller said. ‘That’s a good idea. When you come back we will.’ But he sat still in his chair, holding his cigar over the ashtray. My mother looked at both of us again as if she couldn’t see us clearly, then walked into the bedroom and closed the door behind her.

Warren Miller took a long puff on his cigar and blew the smoke up into the room, then held his cigar half onto the ashtray again. The big gold ring he had on his finger, the one I’d felt yesterday, had a square red stone on the top of it and a white diamond stone in the middle of that. It looked like a thing you would never forget you had on.

‘I own an airplane,’ Warren Miller said to me. ‘Have you ever been up in one of those?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I haven’t.’

‘You get a different perspective when you’re up there like that,’ he said. ‘The whole world’s different. Your town becomes just a little bitty town. I’ll take you up with me, and let you handle the controls. Would you like to do that?’

‘I’d like to go sometime,’ I said.

‘You can fly to Spokane and eat lunch and come back. We can take your mother. Would you like that?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. But I thought she would like it.

‘And are you going to go to college like she says,’ Warren Miller asked me.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I hope so.’

‘Where?’ he said. ‘Which one are you aiming at?’

‘Harvard,’ I said. And I wished I knew where Harvard was, and that I had a reason for saying I wanted to go there.

‘It’s a good one,’ Warren Miller said. He reached up and took the jug of red wine in one hand and poured some into his glass. ‘Once,’ he said, and he put the jug down, and he sat a second without saying anything. His hair was gleaming in the light, and he blinked his eyes several times behind his glasses. ‘Once, when I was flying, it was in the fall, like it is now. Only colder, and it wasn’t this dry. I was flying up to look at some poor man’s hailed-on wheat crop where I held a policy. And I could see all these geese flying down from Canada. They were all in their formations, you know. Big V’s.’ He drank half his glass of wine in one gulp and licked his lips. ‘I was up there among them. And do you know what I did?’ He looked at me and put his cigar back in his mouth and crossed his legs so I could see his brown cowboy boots, which were shiny and without any fancy design on them like other boots I’d seen men wear in Montana.

‘No,’ I said, though I thought it would be something I wouldn’t believe, or something impossible, or that no one would do. He was drunk, too, I thought.

‘I opened back my window,’ he said, ‘and I turned off the engine.’ Warren Miller stared at me. ‘Four thousand feet up. And I just listened. They were all right up there around me. And they were honking and honking, way up in the sky where no one ever heard them before except God himself. And I thought to myself, this is like seeing an angel. It’s a great privilege. It was the most wonderful thing I ever did in my life. Ever will do.’

‘Were you afraid?’ I said, because all I could think of was what I would’ve felt and what an airplane would do if its engine was turned off, and how long you could stay up in the air without crashing.

‘I was,’ Warren Miller said. ‘I was afraid. I certainly was. Because I didn’t think about anything. I was just up there. I could’ve been one of those geese, just for that minute. I’d lost all humanity, and I had all these people trusting me on the ground. I had my wife and my mother and four businesses. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about them. I just didn’t even think about them. And then when I did, that’s when it scared me. Do you understand what I’m talking about, Joe?’

‘Yes,’ I said, though I didn’t. I only understood that it meant a great deal to Warren Miller and was supposed to mean something to me.

He sat back in his chair. He had leaned forward when he was telling me about hearing the geese. He picked up his wine glass and drank the rest of what was in it. Far away, behind walls, I could hear water running in pipes. ‘Do you want a glass of wine?’ Warren Miller said.

‘Okay,’ I said.

He poured some wine for me and more for himself. ‘Here’s to the angels,’ he said, ‘and to your old man not getting burned up like a piece of bacon.’

‘Thank you,’ I said for some reason.

He pushed his wine glass toward mine, but they never actually touched before he pulled back and drank half of his again. I took a small drink of mine and I hated the taste, which seemed both sweet and vinegary at the same time, and I put my glass back down. And I felt, just for a moment, with the lights all on and Warren Miller in front of me, breathing a heavy breath that I could smell and that was like the wine and whatever Warren Miller himself smelled like, that I was in a dream, one that would go on and on, and maybe I would never wake up out of it. My life had suddenly become this, which wasn’t awful but wasn’t the way it had been. My mother was out of sight, I was alone, and in that brief instant I missed my father more than I ever missed him again or had before. I know I almost broke down and cried for all the things I didn’t have then and was afraid I wouldn’t have again.

‘Your mother has a nice frame,’ Warren Miller said. He held his glass in one hand and he touched his cold cigar with the other. He seemed very big to me. ‘I admire her very much. She puts herself forward nicely in the world.’

‘I think so, too,’ I said.

‘That’s what you should do.’ Warren Miller made a fist with his right hand and held it up so that his big gold ring with the red-ruby stone faced out at me. ‘What do you think this is?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

He pushed the fist closer to me then. ‘It’s the Scottish Rite,’ he said. ‘I’m a Thirty-third Degree Mason.’ His fist was wide and thick and packed-looking. It looked like a fist that had not ever hit anything, because everything would get out of its way if it could. ‘You can touch it,’ he said.

I put my finger on the ring, onto the smoothed red stone and then on the diamond that was embedded in it. On the gold were tiny carvings I couldn’t make out.

‘It’s the all-seeing eye,’ Warren Miller said, and kept his fist out as if he had detached it from his body. ‘Is your father a Mason?’

‘No,’ I said, though I didn’t know if he was or not. I didn’t know what Warren Miller was talking about, but I thought it was because he was drunk.

‘You aren’t Catholic, are you?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We don’t go to a church.’

‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said, peering at me from behind his glasses. ‘You should be in touch with a group of boys your own age. Would you like to do that? I’d be happy to arrange it.’

‘That would be fine.’ I heard a door open and close, heard more water running in the pipes.

‘Boys need a start into life,’ Warren Miller said. ‘It’s not always easy. Luck plays a part in it.’

‘Do you have any children,’ I asked.

He looked at me strangely. He must’ve believed I was thinking about what he’d been saying, but I wasn’t.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I never did. I don’t much like them.’

‘Why not?’ I said.

‘I never knew any, I guess,’ he said.

‘Where is your wife now,’ I asked. But he didn’t answer me because my mother opened the bedroom door, and he looked up at her and smiled as if she was the most important person in the world.

‘The pretty lady’s back,’ Warren Miller said. And he got up and went limping across the room away from me and toward the hi-fi set sitting on top of a big chest of drawers against the wall. I had not even noticed it, but it stood out from everything else once you saw it. ‘I forgot all about the music,’ he said. He opened one of the drawers and took out a record, still in its sleeve-case. ‘We’ll play something good,’ he said.

‘You keep everything very neat in here,’ my mother said. ‘You don’t need another wife. You’re enough of one yourself.’ She put both her palms to her face then and patted her cheeks as if she had washed her face in the bathroom and it was still damp. I had seen her do that before. She was looking around as if the room looked different to her now. Her voice sounded different. It sounded deeper, as if she was catching a cold or had just waked up. ‘It’s such a pretty little house, too,’ my mother said. She looked at me and smiled and hugged her arms.

‘I’ll die in it one of these days,’ Warren Miller said as he was bent over reading the record label.

‘That’s a happy thought,’ my mother said, and shook her head. ‘Maybe we should dance before that happens. If you’re already thinking that way.’

Warren Miller looked at my mother, and his glasses caught the reflection of the ceiling light. ‘We’ll dance,’ he said.

‘Is Warren going to get you into Dartmouth or whatever it is?’ my mother said to me. She was standing in the middle of the room, her lips pushed out some as if she was trying to decide something.

‘We haven’t discussed that subject,’ Warren Miller said. ‘I was getting him interested in the DeMolay.’

‘Oh, that,’ my mother said. ‘That’s just a lot of hooey, Joe. My father was in that. Warren needs to get you into Dartmouth. That’s better than Harvard, I’ve heard. Anybody can get in DeMolay. It’s like the Elks.’

‘It’s better,’ Warren said. ‘Catholics and Jews aren’t in. Not that I care about them.’

‘Are you a Democrat?’ my mother said.

‘When they run anybody good,’ Warren Miller said, ‘which is not the case now.’ He put the record down onto the hi-fi table.

‘My family favors the working man,’ my mother said. She picked up my glass of wine and took a drink of it.

‘Well, you should think that over again,’ Warren said, and then he set the needle arm down onto the record, and there was a lot of music all at once in the little living room.

My mother put the wine glass back on the table and started to dance all by herself then, her arms in the air and a look on her face that seemed like a determined look. ‘Cha-cha-cha-cha,’ is what she said, because it was that type of music, music you could get on the radio from Denver late at night and that I knew she listened to, music with drums and a trumpet and a whole band in the background.

‘Do you like this?’ Warren Miller said over the music. He was standing there smiling while my mother danced by herself.

‘I certainly do,’ she said, and she was snapping her fingers and saying ‘cha-cha-cha’, in time to the music. She grabbed my hands where I was sitting. ‘Come on, Joe, and dance with your mother,’ she said, and she tried to pull me out of the chair and up onto my feet. I remember her hands were very cold and felt small and thin. I stood up, though I certainly did not want to and couldn’t dance at all. My mother pulled me and pushed me back away, and said ‘cha-cha-cha’, and looked down at my feet, which were moving in confused ways, stepping up and back. Her arms were stiff, and mine were stiff too. It was a terrible thing to do — and to have to do — with your mother, in a strange house, in front of a man I didn’t know and didn’t like.

When I had stepped forward and back at least ten times I just quit altogether, and let my arms go rubber and stood still, so that my mother just stopped herself and looked at me with disgust.

‘You’re a terrible dancer, Joe,’ she said to me over the music. ‘You have anvils for feet. I’m ashamed of you.’ She let go of my hands and just stared up at the low ceiling, right into the light globe as if she hoped something or somebody would appear in my place when she looked back.

‘You have to dance with me, Warren,’ she said. ‘My son won’t dance with me, and there’s nobody else here.’ She turned around to Warren Miller and held out her bare arms toward him. ‘Come on, Warren,’ she said, ‘Joe wants me to dance with you. You’re the host. You have to do what the guests want. No matter how silly it is.’

‘I’ll try. All right,’ Warren Miller said. He came toward my mother, across the room. His big limp made him look like a man who could never dance and would never want to. He walked, in fact, as if he had a wooden leg.

My mother started dancing by herself again before he even started to try. She was saying ‘cha-cha-cha’, and when Warren Miller got in her arms’ reach, she took his big hands and started to push him backward and then pull him forward the way she’d done with me. And Warren Miller kept up. Every time he moved backward, he went down into his limp, and it looked like he was going to fall, but then my mother would pull his arms hard and he looked ready to stumble forward into her. My mother kept saying, ‘cha-cha, cha-cha-cha’, with the music, and going forward and back on her toes, and telling Warren not to watch his feet but just to move the way she did, and Warren was limping and ducking his head, but staying up, and after a few times, he was on his toes, too, and seemed light on his feet somehow, the way a big animal can move. He had a smile on his face, and he began to say ‘cha-cha-cha’ with my mother, and to look at her face and not at his feet, which were scuffing the floor in his boots. My mother let go of his hands after a minute and put hers on his shoulders, and he put his hands on her waist, and they danced like that, then, together — my mother on her toes and Warren with his limp.

‘Look at this, Joe,’ my mother said. ‘Isn’t this wonderful? My God, Warren’s a man who can dance. He’s one in a million.’ She threw her head back and let hair hang off her shoulders while she kept on dancing, letting her head sway from side to side with the drumbeats. And it seemed to me she probably did not want me to watch her. I felt, in fact, like I was doing something I shouldn’t be doing, so I got up and walked into the bedroom where my mother had gone, and closed the door.

Through the wall the music made a sound as if something was hitting the floor. I could hear their feet shuffling, and both of them laughing as if they were having a wonderful time.

I had nothing to do in the bedroom. All the lights were on. The windowpanes were shiny and through them I could see into the house next door. An old man and an older woman — older than Warren — were sitting side by side in chairs watching a television in the dark. I couldn’t see the screen, but both the man and the woman were laughing. I knew they could see me if they looked around, and maybe they could even feel me watching them, and would think I was a burglar and be afraid if they saw me, so that I stepped away from the window.

It was Warren Miller’s bedroom. The walls were pale blue and there was a large bed with a white cover and a curved headboard, and a matching bureau with a TV set on top. A lamp with a yellow globe, like the one in the front window, was on the bed table. A fat wallet and some change were on top of the bureau, beside a folded piece of paper that had my mother’s name and telephone number written on it. My father’s name was underlined below that, and below it was my own name — Joe — with a check beside it. There was nothing wrong with that, I thought. My mother worked for Warren Miller now. He wanted to give my father a job in the future and put me in the DeMolay club.

I walked into the bathroom, where the light was off. I knew my mother had turned it off, and I turned it on again. Over the music in the living room I heard my mother say out loud, ‘It’s passionate music, isn’t it?’ And then their feet scuffed on the floor some more.

The bathroom was all white with white towels and a white tub. I could see where my mother had dried her hands on a towel. I could see hairs that were hers on the white sink top, could smell her perfume in the warm air. Warren’s possessions were laid out in a straight row: a safety razor, a tube of shaving cream, a bottle of red hair tonic, a leather bottle of shaving lotion, a pair of silver tweezers, a long black comb and a brush with yellow bristles that had a strap across the top of it and the initials WBM on the leather. I was not looking for anything. I only wanted to be out of the living room where the music was going and Warren Miller and my mother were dancing. I opened the drawer under the sink and only a white washrag was there, folded and clean with a new bar of soap on top.

I closed the drawer and walked back into the bedroom and opened the closet. Warren’s suits were hanging in a row there and several large pairs of shoes — one a pair of brown golf shoes — were lined up under them. An Army uniform was hung at the end, and on the floor inside the door was a pair of women’s silver high heels.

Behind the suits on the closet wall were pictures and other things hung in frames. I pulled the light string and pushed the suits apart to see. It smelled like mothballs, and it was cool. Warren Miller’s discharge certificate from the Army and his graduation diploma from Dartmouth College were hanging side by side. There was a picture of two men in uniforms standing beside an old airplane at the edge of what looked like a jungle. There was also a framed picture of Warren Miller standing beside the woman whose picture was in the living room. They were both dressed in nice clothes, and the woman was smiling and holding some white flowers. They were squinting in the sun. The picture had been taken years before, but Warren looked familiar, big and heavy and tall, only with thicker, shorter hair. To the side of the pictures was a metal leg brace hung from a nail, a shiny steel device with pink straps and movable buckles and hinges that must’ve been what Warren wore on his leg, and that made him limp but also able to walk at all.

I closed the closet and walked back into the bedroom, which seemed warmer. A book was face-down on the lighted bed table. The cover had a painting of a cowboy riding a galloping white horse, holding a woman whose blouse was torn, and shooting at men who were chasing them on horses. Texas Trouble was the title.

I opened the bed table drawer and inside were some golf tees and a small worn Bible with a green bookmark in it. The drawer smelled like talcum powder. Two silver knives like the one he had given me, with BURMA-1943 engraved on them, were also in the drawer. And there was a gun, a small automatic with a short barrel and a black plastic handle. I had picked up guns before. My father kept one in the same place Warren Miller did. This one was a small calibre — a.32 or even less than that, something to scare people with or wound them but not necessarily kill them. I picked it up and it was heavier than I thought it would be, and seemed more dangerous than I’d thought at first. I took a good grip, put my finger around the trigger, pointed the gun at the closet door, and made a soft little popping sound with my lips. I thought about shooting someone, following them, aiming, holding my arm and hand steady, then pulling the trigger. I had no one in mind to shoot. Shooting someone was a thing I was sure I’d never do. There were those things, after all. And it was all right to know about them long before you had the opportunity or the desire.

I turned to put the gun back in the drawer, but I saw that there was a white handkerchief that had been lying underneath it. The handkerchief had the same initials that were on the brush — WBM — stitched on the corner in blue letters. And for some reason I pressed my hand on the handkerchief, which was folded into a square. And I felt something inside or underneath it. I turned the handkerchief back so I could see what I’d felt, and there was one prophylactic rubber in a red and gold tinfoil envelope. I had seen one before. In fact, I’d seen them plenty of times, though I had never used one. Boys at the school I’d gone to in Lewiston had them and showed them off. No one I knew in school in Great Falls had shown me one, though the boys talked about fucking girls there, and I believed they had them and knew about them. I had never known my father to have any, although I had thought about his having them, and had even looked for them in his drawers. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I’d found them, because what I thought about the subject was that it was his business, his and my mother’s. I wasn’t innocent about life, about what people did with each other when they were alone. I knew they did what they pleased.

It did not surprise me that Warren Miller had a rubber, though I could not think about him using it. When I tried I could only picture him sitting on the side of the bed where I was, wearing his underwear, holding the edge of the mattress, wearing socks and staring at nothing but the floor. A woman was not involved. But I thought it was his right to have a rubber if he wanted it. I picked it up off the white handkerchief. Murphy was the name of the company that made it, in Akron, Ohio. I squeezed the envelope between my fingers, felt the outline of it inside. I smelled it, and it smelled starchy from the handkerchief. I thought about the possibility of opening it. But I had nothing whatsoever that I could do with it.

I laid it back between the folds of the handkerchief and put the gun back on top. Though as I did that I thought about Warren’s wife, Marie LaRose or whatever her name was, and that she had gone out of this house, this very room, and didn’t intend to come back. And that Warren was alone here, with that to remember and think about. I closed the drawer, then walked back out to where Warren Miller and my mother were, where the music had stopped.

My mother was sitting on the piano bench, her legs pushed out in front of her. Her green shoes weren’t off, but her green dress was up above her knees and she was fanning herself with a sheet of music off the piano. She smiled at me as if she’d expected to see me come out of the room at that very moment. Warren Miller was sitting at the dinner table, where all the dishes and plates were. He was smoking his cigar again.

‘Did you look into all of Warren’s drawers in there?’ my mother said, smiling and fanning herself. Her voice was still deep. ‘You’ll find out his secrets. I’m sure he has a lot of them.’

‘None that I wouldn’t share with him,’ Warren said. He had unbuttoned his top shirt button and was sweating under his arms.

‘When Joe’s father and I first married,’ my mother said, ‘I rented a sailor costume and did a little cute tap dance when he got home from teaching golf. It was an anniversary present. He loved it. Something made me think of that just now.’

‘I bet he did. I bet that was nice.’ Warren took his glasses off and wiped them with his napkin, then dabbed his eyes with it. His face looked larger without his glasses and whiter. ‘Your mother’s a very passionate dancer, you know that, Joe?’

‘He means I’ll go till I drop,’ my mother said. ‘It’s hot as fire in this house, of course. Anybody’d drop dead.’ My mother looked at me as if she’d just noticed me for the first time since I came back into the room. ‘What would you like to do now, sweetheart?’ she said. ‘I’m sure we’re just boring you to death. At least I’m sure I am.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re not. I’m not bored.’

‘Do you know how Warren injured his leg,’ my mother asked. She pulled a strand of damp hair away from her forehead and fanned her face some more.

‘No,’ I said, and I sat down where I’d been sitting at the dinner table, beside Warren Miller.

‘Well, would you care to?’ she said.

‘I guess so,’ I said.

‘Well. He was hit from behind by a big roll of barbed wire when he was wading across the Smith River up to his rear end. Isn’t that right, Warren? It was underwater, and you didn’t see it coming. Is that what you said?’

‘That’s right,’ Warren Miller said. He looked a little uncomfortable at my mother’s telling this.

‘And the lesson is what?’ My mother smiled. ‘Warren seems to think we need to learn a lesson from everything. The world should keep it in mind.’

‘Something’s always up there that can take you away,’ Warren Miller said, seated at the dinner table, his big legs crossed in front of him.

‘Or not,’ my mother said.

‘Or not — that’s right, too,’ Warren said, and smiled at my mother. He liked her. I could tell that was true.

‘Joe and I have to go home now, Warren,’ my mother said, and she stood up. ‘I’m irritable all of a sudden and Joe’s bored.’

‘I had hopes you’d stay all night,’ Warren Miller said, his hands on his knees, smiling. ‘It’s gotten colder. And you’re drunk.’

‘I am drunk,’ my mother said. She looked at the old piano behind her, and set the music down on the little stand. ‘That’s not a crime yet, is it?’ She looked at me. ‘Did you know Warren could play the piano, sweetheart? He’s very talented. You should be like him.’

‘There’s another bedroom,’ Warren Miller said, and pointed to the other room, where the light was on and the foot of another bed was visible.

‘I never intended to stay here all night,’ my mother said. She looked around the little living room as if she was looking for a coat to wear outside. ‘Joe’s a very good driver. His father taught him.’

‘You have to put something on,’ Warren Miller said. He stood up and went limping off into the other bedroom, the one I hadn’t been in.

‘Warren’s going to give me one of his wife’s wraps, I believe,’ my mother said, and looked annoyed. ‘You don’t mind driving, do you? I’m sorry. I am drunk.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind.’

‘Combat experience,’ my mother said. ‘That’s what my mother used to call it when my father would get drunk and roar in and start making demands. You’ll get a big promotion someday. Which is to say, you’ll be grown up and can leave.’

Warren Miller limped back into the room, holding a man’s brown coat. ‘This’ll do a good job,’ he said. He came and held the coat while my mother put it on. She buttoned all three buttons, and when she did she looked like someone else — not a man, but like somebody I didn’t know.

‘Don’t you have one of your mother’s coats?’ my mother said.

‘I gave them away to the poor,’ Warren said.

‘Did you give your wife’s away, too?’ She smiled at him.

‘Maybe I’ll just throw them away,’ he said.

‘Don’t do that,’ my mother said. ‘She might be waiting upstream. You never know.’

‘I hope not,’ Warren said. And suddenly he took my mother’s shoulders, pulled her to him and kissed her on the mouth right in front of me. And I did not like that. My mother pulled away as if she hadn’t liked it either. She started toward the front door.

‘Come on, the fun’s over here, Joe,’ she said.

I followed her, though I glanced at Warren Miller, and he had a look on his face I didn’t like. He was angry, and I could see him breathing under his white shirt. He looked like somebody who could hurt you and who would if he lost his temper or had a reason. I didn’t like him, and in fact I never liked him again. What I wanted to do was get away from him, get out into the night with my mother, and go home.

It was cold in the car when we got inside. I sat behind the wheel and put my hands on it, waiting for my mother to find the keys, which were on the seat. The wheel was cold and hard to move. Down the street the blue light at the Italian place was still shining like a haze.

‘My heart’s just pounding away,’ my mother said. ‘Switch on the light in here.’ I turned on the inside light and she bent over looking for the keys and finally found them in the crack of the seat. ‘I drank too much,’ she said. ‘That makes your heart race.’ She handed me the keys. Then she said, ‘Stay here, Joe. I don’t want to wear this coat home.’

She opened the door, got out, and went back across the street and up the concrete steps to where the lights were still on in the window. I watched while she rang the bell, then waited. Warren Miller came to the door and she stepped inside already taking the coat off. I saw them walk past the window. He had hold of her arm, and they were talking. Then I couldn’t see them anymore.

I sat there in the cold car with the lights turned off and waited, watching down the street. I watched as a group of men came outside the Italian restaurant and walked into the empty street. They stood and talked to each other with their hands in their pockets, then one of the men hit another one in the arm as a joke, and then they all left in different directions. Car lights went on at the curb farther down the street, then the cars drove away. I sat still as one passed by me. In a minute a man and a woman came out together, dressed in heavy winter coats. They walked out into the street the way the others had, and stood talking. Then the man walked with the woman to a car and opened the door. He kissed her, then she got inside and started the engine and drove away. The man found his car farther down the street and drove away, too, in the opposite direction.

I looked up at Warren Miller’s house and tried to guess how long I’d waited and how long I would have to wait, and what my mother was saying about the coat and not wearing it. I didn’t see how it mattered, and what I believed she was saying to him was that she didn’t like being kissed, and especially not like that, in front of me, and that she would not stand for it again. I wondered what Warren Miller did with his boat, which I could see in the driveway nosed up, wondered what body of water he put it in and if I would ever get to go in it, or in his airplane — to Spokane — or if I would ever see him again. And for some reason it seemed to me that I wouldn’t, and for that reason I wished I’d put the silver knife he’d given me back in the drawer with the other two. I had no use for it now and I thought I would throw it away when I had the chance, throw it in the river when we drove back across on the way home. And something about that thought, about Warren Miller and the way he looked the last time I’d seen him, through the window of his house, with my mother in the living room, made me remember him — a large smiling man my father had taught to play golf, someone whose name I hadn’t remembered or hadn’t said anything to, only saw, maybe through a window or inside a car, or at a distance hitting a golf ball. I had only that part of a memory.

I wondered if there was some pattern or an order to things in your life — not one you knew but that worked on you and made events when they happened seem correct, or made you confident about them or willing to accept them even if they seemed like wrong things. Or was everything just happening all the time, in a whirl without anything to stop it or cause it — the way we think of ants, or molecules under the microscope, or the way others would think of us, not knowing our difficulties, watching us from another planet?

From down the hill I heard the eleven o’clock shift whistle. Men at the oil refinery were going home, and I was tired and wanted Warren Miller to be out of our life, since he didn’t seem to have a place in it.

I got out of the car into the cold street and looked at the house. I thought my mother would come out the door at any minute, but there was no movement there. The porch light was off, but the yellow light inside was still lit. I thought I heard music, boogie-woogie music — a piano and some horns — but I couldn’t be sure. It could’ve been from the Italian place. I waited a minute, just watching the house. I didn’t know how much time had gone by since my mother had gone inside. I heard a switch engine in the freight yards down the hill. Several more cars drove past me. Finally I walked across the street and up the steps, then stopped halfway and listened. The music was louder and coming from Warren Miller’s living room. I wanted to shout for my mother to come out, or to come to the window and give me a signal. But I didn’t want to shout out ‘Mother’ or ‘Jeanette’.

I walked up the front steps onto the porch, and instead of going to the door and knocking, I went to the front window, through which I could see inside the living room. I saw the table with our dishes still on it. I saw the door to the kitchen was open and the doors to both bedrooms, and beyond them the bathroom where I had been and where the light shone on the white tiles. And I saw my mother and Warren Miller. They were standing in the middle of the living room, right where they’d been when they were dancing. And I think I almost did not see them. If I’d gone back to the car then I wouldn’t have seen them at all, or would not have remembered it. The coat my mother had been wearing was lying on the floor, and she had her bare arms around Warren Miller’s neck and was kissing him and putting her hands in his hair, standing in the middle of the bright room. Warren Miller had pulled my mother’s green dress up from behind her so that you could see where her stockings were held by white elastic straps, and you could see her white underpants. And even though he had his cigar in his hand, held between his fingers, he was holding my mother outside her underwear, and pulling her toward him so hard that he picked her up off the floor and held her against him while he kissed her and she kissed him.

I stood at the window and watched what they did — which was no more than I have said — until my mother’s feet touched the floor again, and I thought they might stop kissing suddenly and both turn and look at me, where I was perfectly visible through the window glass. I did not even want to stop them, or make them do what they didn’t want to do. I just wanted to keep watching until whatever was supposed to happen did happen. Though when my mother’s feet touched the floor I moved to the side, and when I was away from the window I could not move back into it again. I was afraid they would see me. And I simply turned around and walked back down the steps and across the street to the car, got in the driver’s seat, and waited for my mother to finish what she was doing there and come out so we could go home.

In not very much time the front door of the house opened and my mother walked out, not wearing the coat, just in her green dress. She walked straight down the steps. I didn’t see Warren Miller. The door stayed open only for a moment, and then it closed. The porch light did not come on again, though I saw a light go off inside the house.

My mother hurried across the street and got into the car beside me and shivered when she closed the door. ‘He needs a nicer house,’ she said. She crossed her arms together in front of her and she shivered again and shook her head. I could smell the sweet greasy odor of the red hair tonic that was in Warren Miller’s bathroom. ‘Aren’t you cold?’ she said. ‘It’s getting colder. It’ll snow next, and then what?’

‘It’s not supposed to,’ I said. I hadn’t started the car yet. We were just sitting in the dark.

‘Good,’ she said and blew on the back of her hands. ‘I surprised myself. I had a good time. Did you have one, too?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I did,’ though that was a lie.

‘I didn’t want that old coat, though. I just didn’t.’ She put her hands to her face. ‘My cheeks are hot.’ She turned and looked into the back seat as if she expected to see someone there, then she looked at me in the dark. ‘Did you like him?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not too much.’

‘Are you sorry you came, then? Is that what you’re telling me?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I haven’t thought about that.’ I touched the key and turned it to start the car. The heater fan came on, blowing cold air.

‘Well, think about it,’ she said.

‘I will.’

‘What will you think about me after I’m dead?’ she said. ‘Maybe you haven’t thought about that yet, either.’

‘I’ve thought about that,’ I said, and I switched off the heater.

‘And? What’s my verdict? I can take it if it’s guilty.’

‘I’d miss you,’ I said, ‘I know that.’

‘Warren says he means it about taking you up in his airplane,’ she said. ‘He says you can learn all of Morse code in one afternoon’s lesson. I always wanted to know that. I could send secret messages to people in other places.’

‘Why did his wife leave him,’ I asked. It was all I could think of to say.

‘I don’t know about it,’ my mother said. ‘He isn’t handsome at all. Though of course men have more ways to be handsome. Unlike women. Do you think you’re handsome?’ When she said this she looked straight at me. We were just sitting in the car, in front of Warren Miller’s house, in the dark, talking. ‘You look like your dad. Do you think he’s handsome?’

‘I think he is,’ I said.

‘I think he is, too,’ my mother said. ‘I’ve always thought he was very handsome.’ She put the palm of her hand to the cold window glass beside her, then held it against her cheek. ‘It’s lonely up here, isn’t it? Do you think it’s lonely?’

‘Right now I do,’ I said.

‘It’s not so much a matter of being alone or wanting somebody who’s not there, is it? It’s being with people who aren’t appropriate enough. I think that’s right.’

‘May-be,’ I said.

‘And you’re with me.’ My mother smiled at me. ‘I guess I’m not very appropriate. It’s too bad. Too bad for me, I mean.’

‘I think you’re appropriate,’ I said. I looked up at Warren Miller’s house and saw that all the lights were turned off in the front room. A single light was burning from the side window. He was in his bedroom, and I could think of him bent over at the closet door, taking off his boots, his hand on the blue wallpaper for balance. Maybe, I thought, he was not to blame for kissing my mother and holding her dress up over her hips. Maybe that’s all he could do. Maybe no one was to blame for that, or for much of what happened to anyone.

‘Why don’t we drive away now?’ my mother said to me. ‘Do you feel all right?’

‘I feel fine,’ I said.

‘I know you drank some wine.’

‘I feel all right,’ I said. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Oh, well,’ my mother said. ‘How do I feel? I’m afraid of becoming somebody else now, I guess. Somebody very new and different. That’s probably how the world works. We just don’t know it until it happens. “Ha-ha,” I guess is what we should say. “Ha-ha.” ’ She smiled at me again.

Then I drove off down the street away from Warren Miller’s house, thinking that the world was becoming different for me, too, and in a hurry. I could feel it, like a buzz all around me, exactly like my father told me the world felt to him when it began to change.

When we walked into the house that night the telephone was ringing. It was eleven-thirty. My mother went straight back into the kitchen and answered it. It was my father calling from the forest fire.

‘Yes, Jerry. How are you?’ I heard my mother say. I could see her standing at the kitchen table. She was winding the phone cord around her finger and looking at me through the door as she talked to him. She looked taller than she had looked in Warren Miller’s house. Her face looked different, more businesslike, less ready to smile. I stood and watched her as if I was going to talk next, although I knew I wasn’t going to.

‘Well, that’s very good, honey,’ my mother said. ‘It is. I’m relieved to know that.’ She nodded, still watching me. I knew she wasn’t thinking about me, maybe wouldn’t even have known I was the person she was looking at. ‘Well, what a thing to see,’ she said. ‘My God.’ She looked around her and found the cup she had been drinking whiskey out of before we’d left earlier that evening, and stood holding it as she talked. ‘Well, is it possible to breathe at all?’ she said. ‘That’s what I’ve wanted to know. That seemed important.’

Then my father talked for a while. I could hear his voice buzzing in the receiver from all the way across the room.

‘Uh-huh,’ she said. ‘Uh-huh.’ She was just holding the empty cup. She even turned it up a last time and let the few drops drain into her mouth while she listened. Then she set it down beside her on the table. ‘Yes. You reach your limits. I know that. You have to adapt,’ she said. ‘How can it happen so fast? My God.’ My father talked again, and my mother looked out at me and pointed with her finger toward the hallway, and she mouthed the words, ‘Go to bed.’

I wasn’t going to get to talk to my father that night, though I wished I could’ve gotten on the line and told him that I missed him, that we both did, and we wished he’d come home tonight. But that was not what my mother wanted, and I did what she said because I didn’t want there to be an argument late at night with my father on the phone, and her drunk and in love with another man.

My mother didn’t talk to my father much longer. From my room I could hear a word she would say, then she would lower her voice and talk. I didn’t hear my name mentioned or Warren Miller’s or the air base job she had applied for that day. I heard the words ‘spontaneous’ and ‘lie’ and ‘private’ and ‘sweet’. That was all. And in a few minutes I heard the receiver put down, and a cabinet door open and the sound of glass touching glass.

I was already in bed when my mother came in my room. The ceiling light was still on, and I thought she would turn if off for me. She had another glass of whiskey with her. I had never seen her drink so much as she had on that day and that night. She had not been a drinker before.

‘Your father says hello to his only son,’ she said, and took a drink. ‘He said he saw a bear catch on fire. Isn’t that something?’ I was just listening to her. ‘He said it had climbed a tree to get away and the fire exploded in the branches all around it. The poor bear jumped out completely on fire and ran away. That’s a thing to remember, isn’t it?’

‘Did he say he was coming home,’ I asked. I was thinking, lying in my bed, that it might be snowing where he was, and that the fire would go out by itself.

‘He may stay on a while longer,’ my mother said. ‘I didn’t ask for the vital details. Are you proud of him? Are you coming to that conclusion?’

‘Yes. I am,’ I said.

‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘He’d like you to be. I wouldn’t talk you out of it.’

‘Are you proud of him?’ I asked.

‘Oh,’ my mother said. ‘Do you remember when we got very close to the fire when we went up there? And you got out and went over to it — I guess I wanted you to experience it. But when you came back, I told you that the whole fire was just a lot of little separate fires? And once in a while they blew up together and destroyed everything?’ She stuck her finger in her glass, then put her finger in her mouth. ‘Well, I guess I think nothing’s that important by itself,’ she said softly.

‘I believe that,’ I said, though I didn’t believe she had answered my question about my father.

‘It is right,’ my mother said, and was irritated. ‘I know what’s right, for God’s sake. I’ve just never thrown myself into anything like that before.’ She took a deep breath and let it out in a rush. She stared out my window into the night. ‘What would you think if I killed someone — would you be embarrassed?’ She looked at me, and I knew she wasn’t thinking of killing anyone.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I would. I wouldn’t like it.’

‘Well. All right, then,’ my mother said. ‘That’s out. I have to figure out something else. Something more interesting.’

‘Are you proud of Dad,’ I asked. ‘You didn’t answer that.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘No. Not much. You shouldn’t let that bother you, though — you know, sweetheart? It’s not very important who I’m proud of. Myself. I should just want to be proud of myself. That’s all. You have to put your trust into something else now.’ She smiled at me. ‘I was just wondering why I thought I had to take you with me tonight. We do strange things sometimes. I don’t know who I was showing to whom. You probably don’t even care about it. It’s just one thing, not a lot of things.’

‘I thought you wanted me to go with you,’ I said.

‘Well, that’s right. You’re right.’ She smiled at me again and pushed her fingers back through her hair.

‘Did Warren tell you his story about seeing the geese from the airplane?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Isn’t that a wonderful story?’ my mother said. ‘It’s baloney, of course. He just thinks things up and says them.’ She turned the light off. ‘It’s diverting, though,’ she said, and then she said good night and closed the door behind her.

And I lay in bed for just a little time, thinking before I went to sleep that Warren Miller didn’t seem like the kind of man to make a story up. He seemed like the kind of man things happened to, the way my mother had said, and who did the wrong things and tried to act as if he didn’t by acting better, a man my father might’ve said had bad character. I wondered what my father had said about me tonight, if he was mad at me, and if I’d done something wrong and was trying to act as if I hadn’t. As I slipped down into sleep I thought I could hear my mother dialing the telephone. I waited, and could feel myself alive while the ringing went on and someone answered somewhere — Warren Miller, I thought, no one else. I heard his voice, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes.’ Then it was silent and I went to sleep.

At two o’clock that night I came awake. Down the hall, I heard the toilet running, and I could hear someone jiggling the handle to make the running stop. I listened to the noise of the metal on the tank and the water running through the pipes, and I got out of bed and went to the door of my room and stepped out into the dark hall where I could not be seen. And I waited there until the bathroom door opened and the light cast onto the floor and Warren Miller came out, turned back and clicked off the bathroom light, and then walked in the direction of my mother’s room. He was naked. In the light I saw his legs and his chest which were covered with hair. I saw his penis, and when he turned I saw the scars on the back of his legs, where the barbed wire had hit him. It looked to me like skin that had been shot with a shotgun. He was wearing his glasses, and as he walked toward my mother’s room I saw how he limped, that one leg, his right one, would not straighten and for that reason made him dip to the side and made his other leg, his good one, throw out farther ahead in a way that made the limp be worse. His white body shone in the dark hallway as he went away from me, and I stood in my tee shirt and underpants as he opened the door to my mother’s room — where there was no light — and heard her soft voice from inside say, ‘Be quiet, now. Just be quiet.’ The door closed, then, and I heard her bed squeeze down under his weight. I heard my mother sigh, and I heard Warren Miller cough and clear his throat. I was cold there, my back to the hall closet door. My legs were cold and my feet and hands were. But I didn’t want to move from there because I wanted to know what else would go on and felt that something would.

In the room I heard my mother’s soft voice and Warren Miller’s. I heard the bed squeeze again and make a thumping noise. I heard my mother say, ‘Oh, now,’ not in an excited way, just in a way to not like something. The bed made more noise, and I knew I’d slept through other noises already, and that when I thought I’d heard my mother calling Warren Miller on the telephone that is what I had heard.

I heard his bare feet on the floor, then, limping and sliding. I heard the closet door open and the sound of a coat hanger skidding over metal. I could hear the sounds of clothes moving, and of breathing, and of a shoe-step on the floor in the bedroom. And then my mother’s door opened again, and she and Warren Miller came out together into the hall. He had on the white shirt and trousers he’d been wearing at his house earlier that night, and he was holding his boots. My mother only had on her bathrobe and a pair of shoes I could hear but not see in the darkness. They did not look in my direction; I knew they did not think of me or where I was. They simply walked across the hallway — they were holding hands one behind the other — and into the kitchen and across the floor to the back door. I heard the back door open, and for just a moment I thought my mother was showing him to the back door so he could leave. But then the back door shut quietly, and the screen door shut quietly outside. And the house was silent and empty except for me in the hallway alone and the sound of the water hissing in the tank where Warren had tried to make it stop but been unable to.

I walked to the back door and looked out. In the moonlight I could see nothing but the corner of the old garage at the back of the lot — a garage we did not use — and the shadow of the birch tree on the ground of the side yard. I could not see my mother and Warren Miller. They were gone.

I walked back into my own room and looked out the window toward the street. And I could see Warren Miller then, and my mother. They were on the sidewalk, walking side by side and no longer holding hands. He still had his boots under his arms, and they were hurrying away from the house, almost running, as if they were cold and wanted to get someplace warmer. Together they hurried out into the dark street. They didn’t look either way — my mother held her bathrobe up so she could take longer steps. They did not look back or seem to be saying anything to each other. But I could see from the window that they were hurrying toward a car parked by itself across the street. It was Warren Miller’s pink car sitting in the shadows and collected leaves, unnoticeable there if you were not expecting to see it.

When they got to the car my mother hurried around to the passenger’s side and got in. Warren Miller got in the driver’s side and closed the door after him. The red taillight went on immediately. I saw the interior light snap on, saw them both inside — my mother sitting far across the seat against her door and Warren behind the steering wheel. The motor suddenly came alive and white exhaust blew into the air behind the car. I saw my mother’s face turn toward Warren Miller, and I thought she said something about the light, because the interior light went off then, and the brake lights went out. But the car did not move. It just sat in the darkness across the street. I stood at my window and watched, waiting for it to drive away, for my mother and Warren Miller to go off toward wherever they were going — to his house, or a motel or another city, or to someplace where I would never see either of them again. But that is not what happened. The Oldsmobile stayed where it was with its motor running and its lights off, and my mother and him inside. I could not see them in the dark, and little by little the window glass became clouded from their being there inside together breathing.

I stayed at my window and watched the car for a few minutes more. And nothing happened, nothing that I could see, though I supposed I knew what was happening. Just the thing you would think, nothing surprising. One car came down Eighth Street and did not slow down or notice. Its headlights passed over the clouded windows and illuminated the engine exhaust. But I couldn’t see either my mother or Warren Miller inside. I wondered if they were in danger of suffocating because of the exhaust filtering back into the car. It was a thing you read about. And I decided that they were. But they knew about that and would have to worry about it themselves. If they died where they were and for the reasons they were there, it would be their fault, and I couldn’t help them. And after a few minutes of standing at the cold window, watching the car and its exhaust, I closed my curtain and walked back through the house where I was alone.

From my room I walked into the hall and down to the bathroom. Water was still running in the toilet, and I picked up the lid off the tank, stuck my bare arm down into the cold water until I could feel the slick rubber stopper at the bottom. I held it down until the water stopped running, and my arm felt hard and cold. I waited a minute, it must’ve been, with my hand in the water so that I was sure the stopper would hold, then I dried my arm and replaced the lid, and tried to think what I should do next — if I should get in bed again and go to sleep, or if I should go in the kitchen and read with the light on, or put on my clothes and walk out into the night away from where my mother was in Warren Miller’s car, and maybe not come back, or come back in two days, or call from someplace, or never call.

What I did was to go into the kitchen where my mother’s bottle of whiskey was still on the countertop in the dark, and got the flashlight from under the sink. I turned the flashlight on and went with it — shining back down the hall — and into my mother’s room where the curtains were drawn shut and the bed was tumbled all around, and a pillow and part of the sheet were on the floor. There was an odd smell in the air there — the smell of my mother’s perfume and some other smell also that was like hand lotion, and that wasn’t sweet but I thought I knew from someplace but couldn’t remember where. I shined the light around — at the clock turned toward the wall by the bed, at the closet door, which was open and my mother’s clothes pushed out, at her green dress and green shoes and stockings, which were lying on the one chair. There was nothing in particular I wanted to find, or anything I thought would be secret. It was just my mother’s room, with her belongings in it, and nothing she was doing now would make anything there be different or special.

There was no sign of my father in the room, I did notice that — as though he had never lived there. His golf bag was gone. The pictures that he had left on the bureau top were gone. The leather box where he kept his cuff links was put away someplace, some drawer, and the books he kept on the golf game and teaching golf were down off the top of the bureau where he’d had them standing and lined up. There was only a framed picture of him on the wall beside the window, almost hidden by the curtain. Maybe my mother had overlooked that. I shined my flashlight on its glass. In the picture my father was wearing a pair of light-colored pants and light-colored shoes and a white short-sleeved shirt. He was standing alone on some golf course, holding a driver, looking down the open fairway and smiling, ready to hit the ball that was at his feet. And he was young in the picture, his face looked young and his hair was short and his arms looked strong. He looked like a man who knew what he was doing. He could hit the ball out of sight any time he got ready, and was just making sure things were the way he wanted them to be. ‘That’s the way you play this game,’ he had said when he showed me the picture the first time, when I was ten or twelve. ‘Like you know what you’re doing every second. Clear your mind out. You don’t have a care in the world. Then everything you hit goes in the hole. It’s when you have a lot on your mind, Joe, that you leave everything short. There’s no mystery to it.’ It was my father’s favorite picture of himself, taken when he and my mother were first married and I was not even dreamed up. As I shined my flashlight on that picture then, onto my father’s clean smiling face without a care in the world, I was glad he wasn’t here now to know about any of this. I was glad he was where he was, and hoped it somehow could be all over and done with before he came home to find everything in his life and my life and my mother’s, too, out of all control and out of all sense.

I looked out my mother’s window, between the closed curtains, and into the yard. Maybe ten minutes had gone by since I saw her leave in her bathrobe with Warren Miller carrying his boots. There were no lights on in the houses on our street and no cars moving. I could just see the back of Warren Miller’s car, see the exhaust still coming out of it. I could hear, I thought, the low rumbles of the motor. I guessed that whatever they’d been doing in my mother’s room had all of a sudden been hard to do or had made too much noise, so that the car had seemed like a better place. Out in our little yard the grass was white with frost and moonlight. The weeping birch tree cast a wider, denser shadow toward the street. A magpie stood in the middle of things there, alone. It moved, a hop one way and another, picked into the grass, looked around, then moved again. I put my flashlight flat against the glass and clicked it on and shined a dim light out onto the bird where it stayed still and did not look up or at me, but stared straight ahead — so it seemed to me — at nothing. It did not know I was there. It could not feel the light that was on it, couldn’t see anything different occurring. It just sat as though it was waiting for something to start to happen that would give it a reason to move or fly or even look in one direction or the other. It wasn’t afraid simply because it knew nothing to be afraid of. I tapped the cold glass with my fingernail — not loud, just enough for the bird to hear. It turned its head so that its red eyes went right up into the light. And it opened its wings once as though it was stretching, then closed them, hopped once toward me, then flew suddenly straight up at the light and the glass and at me, as if it was about to hit the window or break it through. Only it didn’t touch anything, but flew up into the dark and out of my sight completely, leaving me there with my heart pounding, and my light shining onto the cold yard at nothing.

I heard a car door close. I switched off my light and stood by the side of the curtain so that I could still see out but not be seen. I did not hear anyone’s voice speak, but my mother appeared on the sidewalk then, hurrying the way she had before, her arms folded across her chest, her shoes tapping the concrete. She turned in the driveway and went out of my sight. And when she did, Warren Miller’s car moved away slowly in the dark without its lights. I could hear it, its big muffler making a deeper rumbling sound down the quite street. I saw its taillights snap on red, and then it disappeared.

I walked out of my mother’s room and back down the hall in the dark to the spot I had been in when she and Warren Miller had left the house fifteen minutes before, or maybe thirty minutes before. I had lost track of time, though with all of what was going on it didn’t seem to matter. I heard my mother open the back door. She opened it just the way she would any day — as if everything was normal. I heard her in the kitchen. The ceiling light went on. I heard her running water in the sink, filling a glass, and I knew she was standing, drinking water in her bathrobe — something anyone would do on any night. I heard her run more water, then wait, then put the glass away and go and lock the door. Then she walked straight out through the kitchen into the hall where I was waiting in the shadows as I had been before.

But she did not see me. She did not even look in the direction I was, toward my door. She passed across the hall and went into the bathroom. I had only a moment to see her. Her bathrobe was open and I could see her bare knees as she took her steps. Inside, she turned on the light but did not close the door. I could hear her use the toilet and then the flushing sound and water running in the sink and the sound of her washing her hands. I was waiting there, outside the light. I had nothing planned to say or to do. I must’ve believed I would say something when she came back out, or just wanted to say, ‘Hello,’ or ‘This is all right … I don’t mind.’ Or ‘What are you doing?’ But none of those words were in my mind. I was simply there, and it occurred to me that she didn’t know it yet. She did not know what I knew about this — about Warren Miller and her, about what I’d seen or thought of it. And until she knew it, until we talked about it — even if she assumed everything and I did, too — it had not exactly happened, and we did not exactly have to have it between us after tonight. It would just be a thing we could ignore and finally forget. And what I should do was go back inside my room, get into my bed and go to sleep, and when I woke up try to think about something else.

But my mother came out of the bathroom before I could move. Again she did not look in my direction. She turned toward her bedroom, where I had been five minutes before. But all at once she turned back because she’d left the light on in the bathroom, and I suppose wanted to turn it off. And that is when she saw me, standing in the shadows in my underwear, watching her like a burglar who’d broken in the house to steal something and been caught.

‘Oh God damn it,’ my mother said before I could say a word or even move. She came down the hall to where I was, and she slapped me in the face with her open hand. And then she slapped me again with her other hand. ‘I’m mad at you,’ she said.

‘I didn’t mean it,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’ I didn’t try to move or raise my hand or do anything. Her bathrobe was open in front, and she was naked underneath. I could see her stomach and all of that. I had seen my mother naked before but this was different and I wished that she had her clothes on.

‘I wish I was dead,’ she said, and she turned around and walked back down the hall to her room. She was not crying. And she did not try to close the front of her bathrobe. When she got into the light that came out of the bathroom, she turned around and looked at me. Her face was angry. Her mouth seemed large and her eyes wide open. Her hands were made into fists, and I thought she might be thinking of coming back down the hall and hitting me again. Nothing seemed impossible. ‘You probably want to leave, don’t you? Now, anyway,’ she said. ‘Go ahead. That’s the way everything always happens. People do things. There isn’t any plan. What’s next? Who knows?’ She raised her hands with her palms up in a way I’d seen people do before. ‘If you’ve got a plan for me, tell me. I’ll try to do it. Maybe it’ll be better than this.’

‘I don’t have one,’ I said. My face was beginning to throb where she’d hit me. It hadn’t hurt at first, but now it did. I wondered if the second time she hadn’t hit me with her fist — maybe by accident — because my eye hurt. ‘I don’t care,’ I said. I stood back against the wall and didn’t say anything else. I could feel myself breathe, feel my heart beat, feel my hands going cold. I must’ve been afraid but didn’t know it.

‘A man like him can be handsome,’ my mother said. ‘You don’t know about that. You don’t know anything but just this. I guess I should be more discreet. This house is too small.’ She turned around and walked down the hall and into her room. She did not turn the light on. I heard her shoes hit the floor, heard her bed squeeze down as she got into it, and the sound of her bedspread being moved to cover her up. She was going to sleep now. She must’ve thought that was all there was to do. Neither of us had a plan. ‘Your father wants to make things better,’ I heard her say out of the dark. ‘Maybe I’m not up to that. You can tell him all about this. What’s the difference?’

I wanted to say something back, even if she wasn’t talking to me but was just talking to herself or no one. I didn’t think I would tell my father about this, and I wanted to say so. But I didn’t want to be the last one to talk. Because if I spoke anything at all, my mother would stay quiet as if she hadn’t heard me, and I would have my own words — whatever they were — to live with, maybe forever. And there are words, significant words, you do not want to say, words that account for busted-up lives, words that try to fix something ruined that shouldn’t be ruined and no one wanted ruined, and that words can’t fix anyway. Telling my father about all I’d seen or telling my mother that she could rely on me to say nothing, were those kind of words — better off to be never said for simply being useless in the large scheme of things.

I walked back into my dark room and sat on the bed. I could still feel my heart beating. I was cold with just my underwear on, my feet cold on the floor, my hands cold from nervousness. Out the window it was still bright moonlight, and I knew the next day would be colder and that maybe winter would come on before it ever became true fall. And what I felt like was a spy — hollow and not forceful, not able to cause anything. And I wished for a moment that I was dead, too, that all three of us were. I thought about how small my mother seemed out in the hall with her body showing in the light, how she had not been strong or forceful, and that she must’ve felt that way herself, and that we felt the same way at that moment, saw the same future alone in our rooms, in our beds. I tried to imagine that this was a help but could not quite do it. Then a car went down our street, and as it came in front of our house it blew its horn — two honks and then a very long one. I jumped up to the window and looked out. I thought it would be Warren Miller — I didn’t think it would be anyone else. He wanted to come back, or he wanted her to come where he was, or he just wanted her to know he was out there, in his car, in the dark, riding around Great Falls thinking about her in a kind of panic. The horn changed sound as it got farther down the street, and I never saw the car — if it was Warren Miller’s Oldsmobile or someone else who did not know us. I saw its taillights and that was all, heard the horn stop. Then I got in bed and tried to be calm. I listened to the night in our house. I thought I heard my mother’s bare feet on the floor, moving, thought I heard her door shut down the hall. But I could not be sure of it. And then I went to sleep.