A man walked up a snowy street, a duffel bag weighting his shoulder. Despite the snow, it wasn't particularly cold, and he wore no gloves. He wore a long navy blue coat, unbuttoned, that reached his calves, and on his feet a pair of light brown workingman's boots. He was young, good-looking — women had told him he looked something like Charlton Heston. He walked in the tracks automobiles had laid out in the snow, looking at each house he passed. When he found the number he was looking for he stepped out of the tire tracks into the deeper snow of the sidewalk and approached the gate in a picket fence.

In the yard a woman shoveled snow. She wore no coat and her back was to him. She had started at the gate, leaving it open behind her, and had cleared a narrow path about six feet towards the porch. She worked steadily, shoving the flat blue blade of the shovel under the snow, casting it to her left into the yard where it landed with a whump. The snow was wet and heavy, and some of clung to the shovel. She paused and stood straight to wipe it clean with a bare hand.

The man shifted the duffel on his back. "Excuse me, ma'am."

She snapped her head around. "Oh, you startled me," she laughed, and she turned fully to face him. She was older than he had taken her for from the back, her tightly curled black hair wisped with grey, the beginnings of a network of smooth-edged wrinkles creasing her face. She had on a light pink button-down sweater and a pair of jeans.

"I'm looking for the house where Mrs. Dickey used to live." He held up a crumpled bit of paper in one hand. "This house —."

"Yes," she said. "She lived here."

The man looked down at the piece of paper in his hand, took a breath before he looked up again at her. "I'm her son. I came for . . . she left some things here for me."

The woman stared at him for a long moment, and in that moment the smile that had been on her face faded away, as if it had never been. "That was three years ago," she said. "Margo died three years ago."

She turned abruptly from him and strode to the porch, stepping into the footprints she must have made when she came out to shovel. Dickey went through the gate after her — "Ma'am! Ma'am, please!" She was on the porch already, leaning the shovel against the wall and reaching for the screen door latch. In a moment, he feared, she would be inside the house, the door shut against him. "Ma'am, please!"

Something in his voice must have stopped her, because she turned to face him, her hand still on the latch. "Why did it take three years for you to come? Why didn't you come then, when she needed you? When she was dying? Why didn't you come to her funeral?" Each question came calmly, deliberately, but he heard her anger, saw glistening in the corners of her eyes.

"I —." He cut himself off before he could begin. She called his mother Margo, when he had only ever heard his father call her "Margaret" or "your mother." She had known her, been her friend. The litany of justification he had composed in the three years since his mother's death crumbled like a sand castle on an Oregon beach. It could not comfort him now; and she would hear it only as a recitation of excuses.

"I'm sorry," he said.

She stared at him steadily. "Yes, you look like him. I see it now." Her fingers slipped from the latch. "Harry." No one but his mother had ever called him Harry. Everyone else called him "Hank" or "Henry."

She pointed her chin at his duffel bag. "Did you come a long way?"

He let the bag slip from his shoulder to rest on the front porch step. "I took the bus from Pasco. I'm on my way to Seattle to catch my ship."

"Navy?"

"No, ma'am. Merchant Marine."

She nodded. "When must you be at your ship?"

"Next Monday."

"That's a few days," she observed. "You'll need a place to stay then, at least for tonight. There's no more buses going out today, I guess."

"No, ma'am."

"Well, come on then. You can stay here as long as you need, till it's time to go to Seattle, if you like." She crossed the porch and took up her duffel before he could protest. After carrying it the blocks from the bus station it seemed heavy to him, but she bore its weight with not trouble as she recrossed the porch in a step, this time opening the screen door and pushing the inner door open. "Well, come on then," she said, and entered the house.

It was so sudden. A few moments ago he'd have sworn he'd never see the inside of this house. He took the three steps and crossed the porch. As he reached for the door the white plastic handle of the snow shovel caught his eye. A moment's hesitation, then he took the shovel and, standing on the lowermost porch step, he began to clear the snow from in front of it.

He didn't see her poke her head out to see why he hadn't followed her. He shoveled a wide path, and when he reached where she had left off, he widened it to match his own. When he reached the gate, he went through it and cleared the sidewalk in front of her yard. When he was done, dusk had fallen and his mind was clear. He shut the gate behind him, walked to the porch, climbed its steps, and leaned the shovel against the wall. He stamped his feet on the mat and, without knocking, went in.

He was in the living room, or, rather, in what must have been a hallway between living and dining rooms before the walls had been knocked out to make the front of the house into one large, open space. Its history was distinguishable only by discontinuities in coloration and wear between the hardwood floor of the old hallway and those of the adjoining rooms. A staircase at the ghost hallway's end led steeply up. His duffel bay lay on its side next to the bottom step. His mother's friend was nowhere in sight.

Oval braided area rugs in blues and reds and golds were spaced throughout the two rooms. The living room wallpaper was a pattern of tiny red and gold flowers on a sky blue field, and two sofas, an overstuffed armchair, and a rocking chair, all upholstered in gold, faced each other in an intimate circle. He saw no television, but there was a bookshelf full mostly with hardbacks, with a few tattered pocketbooks, an upright piano with an assortment of framed photographs atop it, and on an end table fitted in the corner between the two sofas, an old-fashioned radio that he recognized, with a pang, as the radio he and his mother used to sit beside together, listening to war news and the president's chats. A lamp behind the radio spilled orange light into the otherwise dark room.

He approached the piano, switching on a small banker's light on top of it to look at the photographs. Most were meaningless to him — a youngish man in an army officer's uniform, several pictures of a pretty girl at various ages, the latest obviously a college graduation shot, other pictures that must be relatives of his mother's friend. There were three pictures of his mother.

In one she sat on one of the golden couches, an afghan over her lap. He remembered it — his grandmother had crocheted it one summer during the war when she stayed with them. This picture must have been taken during his mother's illness: her face was thin, almost gaunt, her beauty still present but distant, ethereal. His father had cabled him she was ill, but not that she was dying, not that she would be dead within a year. But he had known, part of him had known. He saw her eyes, sad, waiting for him. His eyes slid away.

He was with her in the second picture. He stood behind her where she sat at a picnic table, flourishing a pair of chicken legs over his mother's head like Gene Krupa poised with his sticks over a drum set. He smiled, remembering the occasion, a picnic at Sacajawea State Park, where the Snake River emptied itself into the Columbia. It was his twelfth birthday, and they were doubly joyful because they had just learned, almost a year after the war ended, that his father was being demobilized and would be home from Italy within the month. His smile faded. It wasn't as they'd expected, when his father returned. It was awkward, first, then tense, brimming over with anger, and one day his mother was suddenly gone.

His eyes teared. He heard footsteps descending the stairs and he moved quickly to wipe his eyes. The last picture showed his mother with her friend, looking much younger than now, with no wrinkles, no grey hair. The were in swimsuits sitting side-by-side on towels on the beach. His mother leaned against her friend, and their heads were turned toward the camera, laughing up at it, a out-of-focus wave curling over to strike the shoreline behind them. His mother had not been ill, then; she was as beautiful as ever he remembered her, her dark hair cascading down her shoulders, the dimple in her left cheek that never showed except when she laughed.

"We were at Oceanside," said her friend from beside him, "the summer before Margo got sick." She reached out to touch the picture, running her fingers lightly down the glass. "She was a wonderful woman, your mother. I still miss her very much." In the silence that followed he heard only her breathing.

"What —." He cleared his throat and started over. "What was she sick with, exactly?"

"Cancer. He didn't tell you?"

"He didn't talk much about her after she left us."

"No. I don't suppose he would have." She looked curiously at him. "How is he?" Her question had a hard edge.

"He died of a heart attack last year."

She seemed unsurprised.

"Did you know him?"

"I didn't much like him," she said succinctly.

"Everybody said the war changed him."

"Yes. He came back from it, at least." She pointed at the portrait of the army officer. "That was Cal, my husband. He was killed when they landed at Normandy." She touched his picture, too. "Margo used to write you letters twice a year, for your birthday and Christmas. She never got anything back. She used to wonder if he gave them to you, or if he just burned them every time they came."

He turned away. He faced the window, clenching and unclenching his fist deep in his coat pocket. Outside it was darker. "He gave them to me. I read them. I never answered because . . . she never told me why she left, you know? She never told me goodbye. Just one day — she was gone."

"Bastard!" she exclaimed. It took him a moment to understand the word was not intended for him. "He never told you a damn thing, did he? He said he'd explain it to you, but he didn't, did he? He wouldn't let Margo tell you — he said if she ever tried to tell you, he'd cut her off altogether. But he did that anyway, didn't he? He made you hate her, didn't he?"

He jerked around to face her. "What do you mean? He didn't make me hate her. She did that herself, when she left —" he choked back a cry — "when she left without even saying goodbye."

"She didn't leave you. He drove her away. He forced her to go. He told her he'd kill her if she so much as set foot in Pasco again. Or worse. He would have, too. He was that crazy."

"Is that true?" But he knew it must be.

"Listen. She never would have left you for the world. But he had a gun, and he was crazy, and he had all the cards on his side. He said he would explain to you. He told her she could write you letters twice a year, and he would give them to you. She believed him, for awhile. You were twelve, not that far from being an adult. She thought when you were on your own, you'd come, and she'd have you again. Until her very last moment . . . she thought you'd come."

Every word she spoke was true. He didn't remember much about his father before the war, but after the war, when he came home from Italy, he remembered his crazy eyes, his volatility. He settled down some after he'd been back a year, but by then she was gone. "But why?" he asked her. "Why did he drive her away?"

She looked away. "The war changed him. The war changed all of us." She paused. "I'm sorry I was so hard on you out there. It's just such a surprise, after all this time."

"It's okay, Mrs. —. I'm sorry. I don't know your name."

"You don't remember me? I was a volunteer with your mother at the hospital. Though I suppose I didn't come by your house very often. Still," she said. "I took that picture, you using Margo's head like a snare drum."

He looked at the picnic snapshot. "You're Becky?"

"You tried to call me that. I made you call me Mrs. Ammons."

He felt a flush creep up his neck. "I'm sorry, I didn't recognize you at all." He remembered now someone named Becky, someone his mother mentioned frequently after days at the hospital. She always called her Becky, never Mrs. Ammons, so when he finally met her he called her Becky, too. But he didn't remember her face. He hadn't met her often, and he hadn't known his mother had shared a house with her after she left Pasco. Another thing his father didn't tell him.

"It was fourteen years ago," Mrs. Ammons was saying, "I didn't recognize you at first either." She put her hand on his arm. "I was just preparing the guest room — let me show it to you."

The stairs were as steep as they'd appeared from the front door, the treads only half as deep as the risers were high. He felt like Santa Claus, the duffel bag on his back, climbing tiptoe — not for silence, however, but because the full length of his feet wouldn't fit on the steps. There was a small washroom upstairs, Mrs. Ammons explained to him, but the full bath was on the first floor, beneath the stairs, and there was a cupboard with fresh towels in it if he wanted to take a shower.

It was a one-and-a-half story house, rather than a full two stories, so the upstairs was small. Besides the cramped washroom there were two small bedrooms and one slightly larger. In the room Mrs. Ammons brought him to he could stand fully upright only near the wall by the door because of the roof slanting down. There was a dormer window beside the bed, so at least he could sit up on the bed without knocking his head. He was accustomed to a ship's tight quarters, so the room's size did not disturb him, and it had a good feel to it, clean and welcoming. The wallpaper here was green ivy on trellises and orange flowers on a white background. The colors of the furnishings — a double bed with bedspread on a low frame, the window shade, a dresser, side table, bedside lamp, and chair — all complemented the wallpaper. It was familiar to him. He had lived all his life, to the time he left home, in a house that had been decorated like this — not with ivy wallpaper, but with wallpaper and upholstery and lampshades and curtains that all matched or complemented each other. He had always taken it for granted, but now he realized it had been his mother's work, work she had done, perhaps, before his birth. Here it was now, outlasting her life.

Mrs. Ammons had left him, but now she returned with an orange shoebox, which she placed in the dresser. "This is what Margo left for you. I could have mailed it to you, but I didn't trust your father to pass it on to you." He accepted that silently. "It's 6:30 now; dinner will be at 7:00. My daughter gets home from work about then." She turned to go. "Oh, and I want to thank you for finishing the shoveling."

"Mrs. Ammons, was this my mother's room?"

She looked at him peculiarly. "No. She decorated it, she decorated most of the house. But this has always been the guest room."

He went to the washroom, and when he came back he took the orange shoebox to the bed with him. It mostly held pictures and letters, a few odd pieces of jewelry, coins and such. One bundle, held together with a brittle rubber band that broke when he unloosed it, consisted of carbon copies of the letters she had written him over the years. In a cover note in a shaky hand she had written, "Dear Harry, Your father hates me, and I'm afraid he burned my letters to you. I still hope to see you, but if I don't, maybe you'll at least see these copies one day, and will know I always loved you and never wished to be separated from you. Love, Mom." It was dated April 3, 1957 — a month before her death.

He threw the letters back in the box and pushed it aside. His throat was tight. What he'd told Mrs. Ammons was true, as far as it went, but he didn't tell her the whole truth. His father had given him all of her letters, as far as he knew, but he had never given him the envelopes they'd arrived in. "If you want to write her back," Dad said, "I have her address." There had been times Harry had wanted to write back, but he was afraid to ask. To do so would be to fail his father somehow. It was true he didn't talk much about her, but Harry knew somehow that, in his father's eyes, his mother had done something horribly, irrevocably wrong, something even more horrible than having abandoned him.

But Dad was dead now, and now Harry knew his dad had lied when he implied she'd gone of her own free will. So maybe it was a lie, too, when he implied she'd done something terrible. But why? Because he was crazy, crazy from whatever the war had done to him? He was so silent, so closemouthed about anything that mattered — about the war, about Mom. None of it made sense.

It was close to 7:00. He went back to the washroom and splashed water on his face, soaped up his hands and washed himself thoroughly. He descended the stairs awkwardly, balancing his heels on the shallow treads, and found the kitchen.

"Can I give you a hand, ma'am?"

"Why don't you call me Becky? It sounds younger. You can set the table — everything's in the cabinets in the dining room. The switch is to the right of the doorway."

They heard the front door open. "Mom!" A moment later the girl of the piano photographs burst into the kitchen. "Mom, I got a raise!" She saw Harry. "Well, hello," she said, her eyes glued to him. "Mom, you didn't tell me we were having dinner with Charlton Heston."

Mrs. Ammons stopped slicing meatloaf to look at him. "Yes, you do look a little like him. This is my daughter Liza. Honey, this is Harry, Margo's son."

Liza's face changed instantly. She extended her hand stiffly. "Pleased to meet you," she said formally.

He took her hand. She was a slight girl, but her grip was firm as a man's. "Pleased to meet you."

She took her hand away. She returned her attention to her mother, her voice bright and pleased as it had been when she first came in. "Mr. Findlay gave me a two-cent raise!"

"That's terrific! When is it effective?"

Disturbed by Liza's reaction, Harry left them to their good news. Their voices went down several notches as soon as he left the room. He felt a flush at his neck again. He took slow, scrupulous care in setting the table, following everything his high school girlfriend had taught him out of Ladies Home Journal about how to set up a dinner party, so that he wouldn't have to reenter the kitchen. Placemats, napkins, glasses for milk or water and wine — on second thought he removed the wine glasses — dinner plates, salad plates, silver, including both salad and dinner forks. He had forgotten Mrs. Ammons' mention of a daughter. Liza, too, had known his mother.

Then they emerged from the kitchen with the food. Whatever Mrs. Ammons had explained to Liza had an effect: she was not flirtatious, but neither was she as unfriendly — or, more accurately, hostile — as she had been when she offered her hand.

"Lord, thank you for these gifts we are about to receive, amen," said Mrs. Ammons, and they dished out meatloaf, peas, corn, mashed potatoes and gravy, Wonder bread, milk. Slowly the conversation built. He told them about his service in Japan and Korea on a Navy boat near the end of the Korean War, about his experiences on merchant ships; he heard about Liza's job — "just a secretary" — and college in Walla Walla, about Mrs. Ammons' transition from hospital volunteer to registered nurse.

Suddenly, over a dessert of home-made apple pie a la mode, Liza sidestepped the safe topics and boldly laid out the question: "Why all of a sudden did you decide to come here, finally?"

The question must have been burning inside her since she learned who he was. It had the brimstone feel of her earlier hostility. The simple answer was the answer he gave her. "My father died last year. It seemed like the time to find out the truth."

"What do you mean, the truth?"

He glanced at Mrs. Ammons, but she appeared unwilling to intervene. Liza, for her part, had been pretty in her pictures, but that adjective failed to suit her now. She had the determined look of a bull terrier. "The truth about why my mother left," Harry said. "Or, I guess, about why my dad drove her away."

"You really don't know?" She seemed genuinely surprised. "He really didn't tell you?"

"Tell me what?" Something broke loose in him. He threw his fork down. "No, he didn't tell me! She didn't tell me! Nobody told me! I came home from school one day, and she was gone. He said, She left, she won't be coming back. That's all. If you know why, I wish you'd tell me, because this has been killing me all my life." Every muscle in his body was taut, so taut he felt they would snap. He slammed his hands down on the table — the dishes and tableware jumped — and rose from the table so quickly his chair tumbled to the floor. He got far from the table, pacing hard, rubbing his chin so hard with his left hand his day's growth of whiskers burned it like sandpaper.

They sat frozen at the table, wide-eyed. "I'm sorry," he said tightly. "I'm sorry." He dropped his left arm, clenched and unclenched his fists, tried to slow his breathing. He saw out the window, the snow white under the streetlights — it was snowing again. He watched the flakes come down.

"You want to know why I came, really," he said. He watched the snowflakes; he couldn't look at the women. "It's stupid, it's stupid, it's stupid why." He stood in one place, rocking his body, clenching and unclenching his fists against his thighs. "People tell me — girls say, You look like Charlton Heston. It's stupid. It's stupid — the first girl told me that, I looked in the mirror. I tried to see it. I tried to see it. It wasn't all there. I tell you, it's stupid, but it wasn't all there, and I wanted it all to be there. You know? I wanted to be like him."

The snowflakes helped him. They fell slowly, and they slowed him down, slowed his rocking, his clenching fists. They helped clear his mind. "I never told anybody else this, you know? — because it's stupid — but this is why. I wanted to be like him because, not just because women liked him, and that was nice, that was good, but that wasn't all — it was because I admired him. I admired the characters he played. You know? They weren't like my dad — I loved him, but he was a — he was a — I can't say those words to you. They weren't like him.

"Then I saw 'The Ten Commandments,' you know? And he's Moses, and he's this powerful Egyptian nobleman, and then he finds out he's really a Jew, and he gives it all up so he can be with his people, so he can be with his mother and sister and brother who are slaves. And then last year I saw 'Ben-Hur,' and he's this Jew again who's a slave in the galleys, and he finally comes back to Jerusalem and wins the chariot race and gets his revenge, and then he finds out they're really alive, his mother and his sister, they're really alive, but they're lepers. And he goes to the leper colony, it's a terrible disease, but he goes there to be with them because it's his mother and his sister and he loves them."

He wasn't looking at snowflakes any more; at some point his hands had relaxed and his body stilled and he found he was facing them. "You see, it was all working inside of me. Then my dad died. And I thought, maybe it wasn't true. I mean, he never said anything about what she did, but his whole way of acting, she must have done something horrible, right? But maybe she didn't. And if she did, how horrible could it really be? Did she cheat on him when he was in the war? Was she a Jewish slave? Was she a leper?"

Their ice cream had melted into puddles on their plates. They sat there, saying nothing.

"You know, don't you? I wish you'd tell me. My mother's dead, and I wish she wasn't, I wish I'd come a long time ago. I'm sorry for all that. But I still want to know her."

Mrs. Ammons pushed her plate aside. "Okay, Harry. You told us something you've never told anyone before, so hope you appreciate how hard it is to tell you something no one, outside of Margo and me and Liza and, unfortunately, your father, ever knew. Your father forced your mother to leave because of me.

He took that in. It didn't make any sense. "I don't understand. He didn't like you?"

She sighed. "Could you come and sit down?" He retrieved his tumbled chair and complied. Liza was stirring her fork in her puddle of melted ice cream, concentrating as if there were a purpose to it. She was afraid, he thought suddenly. If Mrs. Ammons was afraid, she didn't show it. "Harry, I met your mother volunteering at the Pasco hospital twice a week. At first we were just acquaintances, but then I got word my husband was killed in action, and she helped me through my grief."

"She came over on days she wasn't at the hospital," Liza interjected, not looking up, "and she cooked and cleaned the house and fixed lunches for us."

"Liza was five," said Mrs. Ammons, "and I wasn't good for anything. Margo came over and took care of Liza and talked with me. She became my best friend. Eventually I was all right again, and I went back to the hospital and I started nursing school."

"But I don't understand what all this has to do —"

"Listen a minute and maybe you will," Liza hissed. Her eyes were still tightly focused on the small pieces of apple she was floating around in her ice cream.

"I fell in love with your mother," Mrs. Ammons said, looking directly into his eyes. "And she fell in love with me."

He stared at her a long time. He shifted in his seat. "Now, listen, I'm serious here, I don't know why you want to joke —"

"I am serious," said Mrs. Ammons.

He looked at her eyes, and it was undeniably so. "I don't understand. How can that happen?"

"I don't know. It just happened. I know it happens between men —"

"Queers!" He could feel his face was ugly. "But that is sick!"

Mrs. Ammons sighed again. "Maybe you can't understand. I fell in love with Margo, and she fell in love with me. But she had your father, so we didn't do anything about it. We were friends. Then he came back from the war, and he was strange. Something had happened to him, and he was confused and hard to deal with and angry all the time. He wasn't the same man Margo married. That confused her, and she came to me. He guessed, or he found out, and he threatened her. He threatened me, too. He threatened Liza."

"What do you mean, he found out? What did he find out?"

"That they loved each other!"

"Liza, stay out of it."

"What, did you have sex? Two women?"

"No. Not then. He believed we had, though, and that's all that mattered. He came with a gun, and he threatened to kill all of us unless we left Pasco. If we tried calling the police, he said he'd tell the whole town about us, and not only would Margo lose all contact with you, but I'd lose Liza, too, and any chance at earning a living as a nurse. He had everything on his side. We had to leave right away."

"But I saw her," he said. "That morning."

"She talked him into letting her go back and get some things and to see you one last time. He wouldn't let her say goodbye to you, though — he wanted to control what you were told, so he didn't let her alone with you."

He remembered: getting ready for school, eating breakfast around the kitchen table with them, the tension thick as lard — but that was nothing new, it had been like that for weeks — and his father watching everything. She hadn't kissed him goodbye because he was 12, that wasn't something he let her do anymore when all it was was going to school. It was in every way a typical morning, and the only reason he remembered it so vividly was that the afternoon and evening had been anything but typical. She wasn't home when he came home from school, and when his father came home he acted as though nothing were out of the ordinary. Except when he went into the kitchen and began frying hamburgers, Harry asked where she was. She left. She won't be coming back.

At first he thought it was just his father being strange again, but then he noticed things missing — his mother's luggage from the spare bedroom, the afghan his grandmother had made for her, her jewelry box and photo albums — and he asked his father again. I told you, she left. She's gone. She won't be back.

"I have to be alone for awhile, okay? I've got to be alone."

He left them at the table and climbed the stairs, barely aware this time of their steepness. Upstairs he splashed water on his face and dried it. He looked up from the towel into the mirror, trying to decide how much he still looked like Charlton Heston. Things made a little sense now, but they still made no sense.

He went to the room his mother had decorated with green ivy wallpapers and shuffled through the orange shoebox. He looked through a stack of photographs: his mother's and father's wedding, his own baby pictures, his father in uniform on the way to war, snapshots of his growing up years till he turned 12 and he disappeared from her. There was a copy of the chicken drumstick picture, the picture Mrs. Ammons had taken. Becky had taken. Becky, his mother's lover. Becky and Margo. Margo and Becky. He threw the stack down.

The other stack was of pictures after she left him. She had written a note in black pen on the back of each snapshot. Her hand was shaky: she was dying. She was trying to share her life with him while she still could. He couldn't look at them. He tossed the stack into the box.

At the bottom of the box he found two fat books he hadn't noticed before. He opened one; it had ruled pages, full of her smooth script, and dates. Diaries, or journals. The other book was the earlier. August 30, 1946, the first entry: Dearest Harry, Three days ago your father forced me to leave. At this point I don't know if I'll ever see you again, but I have decided to keep this diary, that you may one day read and, I hope, understand what I will try to tell you as truthfully as I can. . . . He shut the book. She was already trying to share her life with him, her hand wasn't even shaky yet. She must have started dying right away. He ruffled the last few pages of the second book. The handwriting there was shaky. He felt strangely reassured.

He put the books in the box and the box on the side table. He turned off the lamp and lay on the bed. A glow of streetlights reflected on snow came through the dormer window. It wasn't enough to clear his mind. The green ivy and brown trellises and orange flowers were black now. Downstairs was a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a bathroom beneath the stairs. He had excused himself from the table to use that bathroom, and had seen the only other room under there, a laundry room with a washer and drier and utility sink, a hamper of dirty laundry, and an ironing board leaning against the wall. There was nothing else downstairs, no bedrooms. That left the upstairs: a junk closet, a washroom, and three bedrooms. A room for Liza, a room for Mrs. Ammons, and a room for his mother. This room. Except this wasn't his mother's room. It was the guest room. Where did his mother sleep, then? In Mrs. Ammons' room. Were there two separate bed's there, or one? No, not then, Mrs. Ammons had said. He believed we had, though. No, not then. That meant later they did. One bed in Mrs. Ammons' room, where Margo and Becky had sex with each other.

A buddy on-ship had once shown him a dirty magazine with two women naked in bed together. In one picture they were having sex, and in the next a man was in bed with them. Now he saw his mother and Becky in the first picture, and for the first time in his life he understood his father.

Some time later he awoke, shivering in the dark. It was still dark out; he sat up and held his left hand in the window to read his wristwatch. Quarter to five. Mrs. Ammons and Liza must have gone to bed hours ago.

He hadn't unpacked anything, and his coat was on the coathook downstairs by the front door. He had only to carry his duffel bag down, which was awkward enough down those horrible stairs — it was a wonder his mother hadn't broken her neck years ago, long before the cancer even had a chance at her. He leaned his duffel against the door so he could put on his coat, and took the burden up again. He locked the door carefully behind him, walked down the path he had shoveled, leaving the first footprints in two inches of new snow, and went through the gate. He shut it carefully, too, took a last look at his mother's house, and turned up the walk. With each step on the snowy street his mind grew clearer and clearer.