Chapter 24: Ours

My mother was standing on the porch in Bellmore with a dish towel over her shoulder when our rental car turned into the drive.

She had seen the finale, and she had seen it twice.

She came down the steps without her shoes.

She went straight past me and stopped in front of Keith, and for a moment she only looked at him.

"I hung up on you," she said.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Eleven years ago. I was told you left her, and I believed it."

"I'd have believed it too."

"Well, I hung up on the wrong boy."

She put both hands on his face.

"I'm going to apologize with a casserole. You'll sit and eat the whole thing."

Keith's eyes had gone bright.

"Yes, ma'am," he said again.

He ate the whole thing.

He ate it at the kitchen table where I had done my homework, under the clock that ran four minutes slow.

My mother watched him with her chin on her fist.

"You've gotten thin," she said. "Hollywood doesn't feed people."

"I've noticed."

"Mara hasn't been eating either."

"Mama."

"I'm only saying."

When the dishes were done she looked from him to me.

"The cabin at the lake is open," she said. "The neighbor rents it out. I called ahead."

"Mama!"

"I'm sixty-one, not blind."

Keith choked on his coffee.

The cabin sat at the end of a gravel road, one room, with a screen door and a porch that sagged toward the water.

It was the same lake as the wallpaper on the cracked phone.

Keith stood on the porch with his hands in his pockets and looked at it.

"I took this picture the week before you left," he said.

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