“Surely.”
She gave me a sympathetic nod on her way out.
Catledge stepped out and slid the bedroom door closed. Mom sat up against the headboard, her eyes closed. “Gussy,” she whispered.
I sat on the edge of the bed, took one of her hands in mine. “Mom, are you all right?”
She wore the button-down pajamas she wore every night from October through April, off-white flannels printed with floral designs so faded that you couldn’t tell the shapes were flowers anymore. I had bought the pajamas for her sixtieth birthday.
Mom shook her head. Her eyes were puffy and red. Wads of used tissue cluttered the nightstand. Her shoulders rose and fell with her breathing.
“She was my best friend,” she said.
“I know.”
“Is she going to be all right? She wasn’t… she wasn’t moving when they took her.”
“It’s not looking good, Mom.”
“What am I going to do?” I had no answer but to squeeze her hand. “From the day your father died, Phyllis has been my rock.”
A single tear dripped off her face onto her arm. I snatched a tissue from the box. Mom balled it up in her right hand and held it in her lap.
I thought of the two of them, Phyllis and Bea, sitting next to each other at the end of our dock, the sun golden on their backs, their hair tied back in twin ponytails, their feet dangling in the water. They wore one-piece bathing suits and drank lemonade from tall pink plastic cups.
They’d sit for hours, talking about what was in the paper that day, who gossiped what about whom at euchre night, how Mr. B had to go to the doctor about the lumbar pain that turned out to be cancer, which salads and Jell-O molds they would make for the town’s annual Labor Day picnic. About Darlene and me, and when we would both finally decide that we were made for each other and do something about it. When the late August sky blew chilly on their shoulders, they wrapped themselves together in a towel and kept talking.
Mom looked up. “Darlene,” she said. “Where is she?”
“On her way to the hospital with Mrs. B.”
“Oh, God.”
“You know Darlene. She’ll just funnel it all into finding out what happened.”
“That poor girl. She’ll be all alone.”
Mom dabbed at her eyes. I was all she had left now. The Damico family who had adopted her sixty-four years before were all dead but for a stepbrother in Oregon she hadn’t seen in years. She had plenty of friends, but none so close as Mrs. B.
“So what happened, Mom?”
She glanced at the bedroom door, leaned in close to me. “I don’t think Sheriff Aho is very happy with me. He kept asking questions: ‘Who was it? Did you see a face? Did you hear a voice? Was it someone you knew?’”
“Were you asleep?”
“Yes. Then I woke up, because I had to pee. I’d had an extra cup of tea.”
“And you found her.”
She swallowed a sob, her eyes welling again. “There was-there was so much blood.”
“Mom.”
“I was useless. Useless to my best friend.”
“Mom, it’s not your fault.”
She picked up her hands then and held them in front of her face. She stared at the palms, then turned her hands over and stared again.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
She let her hands fall. “If only she hadn’t been here.”
“Why didn’t you go to bingo?”
“She shouldn’t have been here. I am not her responsibility.”
No, I thought, Mom was my responsibility. That’s what I heard her saying, whether she meant it or not.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Do you want me to move back in? Maybe just till summer breaks?”
“I’ll be fine, son. They won’t come back.”
I wasn’t so sure. I heard the door slide open behind me.
“Gus,” Catledge said.
I gave Mom’s hand another squeeze. “I love you,” I said. “I’ll find out what happened.”
“You always do.”
Catledge took me through the dining room and outside.
I had sat at Mom’s dining room table that Sunday morning, with Mom and Mrs. B.
I’d come with a copy of Saturday’s Pilot. A few days before, a snowplow had flattened the blue plastic Pilot tube in front of Mom’s house, then dragged it halfway around the lake. Saturday’s delivery guy was probably too hungover to bother to stop his station wagon and carry Mom’s paper to her door. The Pilot came only twice a week, on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Mom hated to miss one.
When I walked in, Mom was talking in a low voice, almost a whisper.
“Shush,” Mrs. B said. “You’re imagining things, Beatrice.”
“Why aren’t they taking things?” Mom said. “Can you-” She cut herself off when she noticed me coming in.
“Maybe they are,” Mrs. B said, “and the police are just keeping it quiet.”
I set the fresh Pilot on the table where they sat on either side of a corner behind cups of tea.
“Good morning, Gussy,” Mom said. “Do you want some tea?”
“No thanks. Keeping what quiet?”
“You,” Mrs. B said, “until I get my hug.”
I smiled and went over and hugged her from above, smelling her hair spray mixed with perfume. She looked dressy in a silver necklace bedecked with peridots over a lavender turtleneck. She had been to nine o’clock Mass.
Mom had not. My mother had stopped going to church when I was a boy. She never said why and I hadn’t asked, because I didn’t like going anyway. I figured her adoptive family had worn the Catholic out of her, with years of grade school, weekday Masses, then years working at the church rectory. She didn’t talk much about any of it. Every few years, Mrs. B would drag her to Mass, and Mom would swear off it again.
Still, she liked the Epistles and Gospels and Psalms. Mrs. B stopped by every Sunday to fill Mom in on the readings over tea and coffee cake. “I’m happy to hear what God has to say,” I’d heard Mom declare a hundred times. “But I can do without the priests grubbing for money. I give them plenty at bingo anyway.”
On that Sunday morning, I helped myself to a slice of poppy-seed Danish and gazed out at the evergreens along Mom’s bluff. They threw blue-hued shadows on the untrampled backyard snow. I imagined how different they would look in summer, how they’d dapple the grass shimmering green in the sun. Mom and Mrs. B chattered away about a recipe for vegetable lasagna, which sounded terrible to me.
Mom had read somewhere, probably something ping-ponging around the Internet, that vegetables were good for people with memory issues. She’d been eating a lot of broccoli, carrots, and cauliflower, so I’d been eating a lot of broccoli, carrots, and cauliflower, because I made sure to visit Mom for dinner at least twice a week, less for the cooking, which wasn’t as good as it once was, than to check in.
“Are you making it tonight?” I said. “Maybe I’ll bring some Italian sausage to go with it.”
“Tonight is bingo at St. Val’s,” Mrs. B said, pushing her goggle-sized glasses up on her nose. “There’s a potluck before.”
Mom was frowning. “I don’t feel like cooking.”
“I have a nice pot of goulash already made, dear.”
“I’m not sure I’m feeling up to it.”
“Oh, boo, Beatrice. You have to get those old bones up from that chair and out of this stuffy house.” As Mom of late had found less energy for going out, Phyllis had happily become her scold, because she thought Mom needed to get out, needed to see people, needed to keep her mind working. She reached over and patted my mother’s
