The Talisman

the saucer, then fish a cigarette from her bag, and realized with a sickening jolt that she was his mother. An instant later, the impression of age had disappeared.

But he could remember it—and it was as if he were seeing her through bifocals, seeing both Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer and that fragile old woman in the same body.

Jack gently opened the door, but still he set off the tinkle of the bell that he had known was above it. The blond woman at the register nodded, smiling. The waitress straightened up and smoothed the lap of her dress. His mother stared at him with what looked like genuine surprise, and then gave him an open smile.

“Well, Wandering Jack, you’re so tall that you looked just like your father when you came through that door,” she said. “Sometimes I forget you’re only twelve.”

3

“You called me ’Wandering Jack,’ ” he said, pulling a chair out and dropping himself into it.

Her face was very pale, and the smudges beneath her eyes looked almost like bruises.

“Didn’t your father call you that? I just happened to think of it—you’ve been on the move all morning.”

“He called me Wandering Jack?”

“Something like that . . . sure he did. When you were tiny. Travelling Jack,” she said firmly. “That was it. He used to call you Travelling Jack—you know, when we’d see you tearing down the lawn. It was funny, I guess. I left the door open, by the way. Didn’t know if you remembered to take your key with you.”

“I saw,” he said, still tingling with the new information she had so casually given him.

“Want any breakfast? I just couldn’t take the thought of eating another meal in that hotel.”

The waitress had appeared beside them. “Young man?” she asked, lifting her order pad.

“How did you know I’d find you here?”

“Where else is there to go?” his mother reasonably asked, and told the waitress, “Give him the three-star breakfast. He’s growing about an inch a day.”

Jack leaned against the back of his chair. How could he begin this?

His mother glanced at him curiously, and he began—he had to begin, now. “Mom, if I had to go away for a while, would you be all right?”

“What do you mean, all right? And what do you mean, go away for a while?”

“Would you be able—ah, would you have trouble from Uncle Morgan?”

“I can handle old Sloat,” she said, smiling tautly. “I can handle him for a while, anyhow. What’s this all about, Jacky? You’re not going anywhere.”

“I have to,” he said. “Honest.” Then he realized that he sounded like a child begging for a toy. Mercifully, the waitress arrived with toast in a rack and a stubby glass of tomato juice. He looked away for a moment, and when he looked back, his mother was spreading jam from one of the pots on the table over a triangular section of toast.

“I have to go,” he said. His mother handed him the toast; her face moved with a thought, but she said nothing.

“You might not see me for a while, Mom,” he said. “I’m going to try to help you. That’s why I have to go.”

“Help me?” she asked, and her cool incredulity, Jack reckoned, was about seventy-five percent genuine.

“I want to try to save your life,” he said.

“Is that all?”

“I can do it.”

“You can save my life. That’s very entertaining, Jacky-boy; it ought to make prime time someday. Ever think about going into network programming?” She had put down the red-smeared knife and was widening her eyes in mockery: but beneath the deliberate incomprehension he saw two things. A flare-up of her terror; a faint, almost unrecognized hope that he might after all be able to do something.

“Even if you say I can’t try, I’m going to do it anyhow. So you might as well give me your permission.”

“Oh, that’s a wonderful deal. Especially since I don’t have any idea of what you’re talking about.”

“I think you do, though—I think you do have some idea, Mom. Because Dad would have known exactly what I’m talking about.”

Her cheeks reddened; her mouth thinned into a line. “That’s so unfair it’s despicable, Jacky. You can’t use what Philip might have known as a weapon against me.”

“What he did know, not what he might have known.”

“You’re talking total horseshit, sonny boy.”

The waitress, setting a plate of scrambled eggs, home fries, and sausages before Jack, audibly inhaled.

After the waitress had paraded off, his mother shrugged. “I don’t seem able to find the right tone with the help around here. But horseshit is still horseshit is still horseshit, to quote Gertrude Stein.”

“I’m going to save your life, Mom,” he repeated. “And I have to go a long way away and bring something back to do it. And so that’s what I’m going to do.”

“I wish I knew what you were talking about.”

Just an ordinary conversation, Jack told himself: as ordinary as asking permission to spend a couple of nights at