A Home at the End of the World

next thousand, if they figure out how to replace your organs with plastic.”

My mother could hear us easily from the kitchen, which formed the lesser end of the L-shaped living-room- dining-area-kitchen. “Biological immortality is no longer in fashion,” she said. “It went out with monorails and vacations on Mars.”

She brought a platter of tortilla chips and salsa to the table. Since she and my father had retired to Arizona she’d stopped styling her hair. She wore it pulled back in a ponytail, and she had a leathery tan. My father, prone to skin cancers, was white as the moon. They looked like a settler and his Indian bride.

“It’s not really all that big a deal,” my father said. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”

I glanced at my mother, who shrugged away any stake in the conversation and returned to her chilis rellenos.

“Listen, Jonathan,” my father said. “If your mother and I both dropped over right now, if we clutched our hearts and dropped face down in the tortilla chips, what would you do with us?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’d have you sent back to Cleveland.”

“That’s exactly what I don’t want you to do,” he said. “You’ll never move back to Cleveland. What would be the point of having dead parents there?”

“We lived there for years,” I said. “I mean, it still seems like home.”

“We spent thirty years getting out of Cleveland,” he said. “That theater nearly killed me, and the weather just about killed your mother and me both. If you put me back there, I promise to come haunt you. I’ll wake you up early every Saturday for the rest of your life and tell you to help me trim the hedge.”

“Well, what about here?” I said. “You like it here, don’t you?”

“Here I can breathe the air, and your mother’s learning to make blue margaritas. That’s exactly how much Phoenix means to us.”

I could not picture him buried in Arizona. It would be like a joke on him, having a grave in the Western desert, with coyotes howling over his head.

“I don’t know if I can talk about this much more,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Okay,” my father said. “How would you like to be trounced again at Yahtzee?”

“I think I’d rather lie down for a while. Do you mind?”

“Of course I don’t mind. Are you sick?”

“No,” I said. “I just want to close my eyes for a minute.” I got up and went to the sofa, which had been newly purchased in Arizona, a copy of the Cleveland sofa, with knobbed maple armrests and a starched colonial skirt. This new one, which folded creakily out into a bed, had been bought especially to accommodate me on my visits, since my parents’ condominium had only one bedroom, as did all the others in the complex. It was a neighborhood of widows and widowers.

“Why don’t you fold it out and take a nap?” my father said.

“No, I’ll just lie on it like a sofa,” I said. I lay down, and propped a needlepoint pillow under my head. The sofa upholstery depicted cattails, rust-colored boats, and brown mallard ducks flying away in repeated series of three. A small Christmas tree gleamed on the end table, strung with ornaments I remembered choosing in a dime store as a child. After years of “decorator” trees—with red and silver balls, candy canes, and small white lights—my parents had returned, in miniature, to the gaudy chaotic tree of a household with children.

“I’m glad you came home for a while,” my father said. “You’re looking a little pale, if you want to know the truth.”

“Everybody in New York is pale this time of year,” I said. “Maybe I’ll move to Arizona.”

“Why would you want to move here?” my father said, rattling the Yahtzee dice in their cup. “There’s nothing for a young person to do.”

“What do you do here?”

“Nothing. There’s really nothing for anybody to do.” He rolled the dice. “Small straight,” he said. “Do you want another drink?”

“I don’t think so.”

As he went to the closet-sized bar to pour another for himself, I could hear the labor of his breathing. The bar, a narrow contrivance between the living room and the dinette, displayed its neat row of bottles on a mirrored shelf. A beige hand towel, never used, sat folded beside the miniature chrome sink.

My parents had brought their Cleveland sense of order to the desert with them. Here, where fine sand blew through the windows at night, where tumbleweed occasionally scratched at the door, the spices on the rack were kept in strict alphabetical order. Each houseplant shone with green, glossy life, and every morning my mother inspected them all, plucking dead leaves and dropping them into a plastic bag.

“As long as you’re having another drink, I guess I will, too,” I said. I heard the particular gurgle the bourbon made as it flowed out the spout of the quart bottle.

“Hope and Glory is showing at the mall,” my father said.

“We could go to the matinee tomorrow,” I said. “It’d keep us out of the sun.”

“Good.” He brought me my drink.

“I really don’t want to decide about, you know, funeral arrangements for you guys,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it so much. By the time we’re dead you’ll probably be settled down somewhere. Just bury us within commuting distance.”

“What if I don’t settle down, though?”

“You will. Believe me, it gets you sooner or later.”

“I think I’ll go see if Mom needs help in the kitchen,” I said.

“Okay.”

“It’s just that I have no idea where I’ll settle down,” I said. “I could end up anywhere. I could go to Sri Lanka.”

“Well, that’s fine. You should travel while you’re young.” My father rolled the dice again, and cursed his dearth of luck.

“I’m not that young anymore,” I said.

“Ha. That’s what you think.”

In the kitchen, my mother dried romaine lettuce with weary efficiency. She might have been diapering her tenth baby. I stood beside her at the sink. She had taken on a brittle smell, like dry leaves.

“Hey, Mom,” I said.

“Will you look at what they call lettuce here?” she said. “I went to three different stores for this, and it still looks like somebody beat it all the way to Phoenix with a stick.”

She delivered the complaint in a tone of skittish good cheer. Lately, on my visits home, first to Cleveland and now Phoenix, she alternated between fits of irony and folksy, high-strung friendliness.

“Pretty sad,” I said.

We stood quietly as my father lifted himself from his chair and walked upstairs to the bedroom. Once he was out of range my mother said, “So. How’s everything? How’s Bobby doing?”

“Okay. He’s fine. Things are pretty much okay.”

“Good,” she said, and nodded enthusiastically, as if the answer had been full and sufficient.

“Mom?” I said.

“Mm-hm?”

“To tell you the truth, I’ve been…oh, I don’t know. I sometimes feel so alone in New York.”

“Well, I can understand that,” she said. “It’s hard to avoid feeling lonely. Just about anywhere.”

She began cutting a cucumber into astonishingly thin, lucent slices. The knife blade seemed to impart illumination to the vegetable with every slice.

“You know what I’ve been wondering lately?” I said. “I’ve been wondering why you and Dad don’t have more friends. I mean, when I was a kid, I felt like we were marooned on another planet together. Like the family on the old TV show.”

“I don’t remember any show like that,” she said. “If you had a baby of your own, and a house and business to run, you’d know how much energy you’ve got left over for running around the neighborhood meeting people. And then your kids pack up and go after eighteen years.”

“Well, sure they do,” I said. “Of course they do. What else would you expect?”

She laughed. “They do if you’ve raised them right,” she said cheerfully. “Sweetheart, nobody wants you to