Chapter 22: Mother

My mother came up in the elevator with a rolling suitcase and a casserole dish wrapped in foil.

She was five feet two, sixty-one years old, in a floral cardigan and white nursing shoes she had never retired.

She looked at me, in nothing but trousers and bed hair, and her mouth went thin.

"Mom," I said. "Hi."

"You have a wife."

"I do."

"You told a ballroom, and you told the television, and you did not tell the woman who changed your diapers."

"It was forty minutes from start to finish," I said. "There wasn't a lot of time to phone."

"Forty minutes." She breathed in through her nose. "Is that smoke?"

"A sweater."

"Who sets a sweater on fire?"

"I do," said Emerson.

She stood in the bedroom doorway in the swim team shirt.

Her bob was flattened on one side, and a pillow crease ran down her cheek.

I had never seen her look so completely caught.

My mother put down the casserole, crossed the kitchen and took Emerson's wrist between two fingers.

"Mom."

"Hush. I'm counting."

Emerson stood perfectly still, an executive who ran a company of three hundred and eighty, being taken by the pulse.

"Ninety," my mother said at last. "You're underslept and you've been laughing, which is a good sign. Are you eating?"

"I have a kettle," Emerson said faintly.

"A kettle." My mother let go and looked her up and down. "You're taller than he said."

"He talks about me?"

"He has not said a word to me about you, because he is a fool."

"But I'm a nurse. I looked."

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