He had not seen Benedita show an interest or make decisions or be fully distracted from her grief in such a long time; he hadn’t seen her do anything physical in so long either. But here she was on her hands and knees in Professor Newman’s kitchen, cleaning the tile that she used to clean every week. You could say that cleaning someone else’s house was a shit job. That it was disgusting to be entangled in someone else’s habits and ways, finding nail clippings—finger and toe—and little fluffy hair nests and partly squeezed tubes of cortisone cream or even lube, all of it evidence of a life you really didn’t want to think about.
But you could also just say that it was work. And that work was admirable, even if it was hard or unappealing or undersung, or often maddeningly underpaid if you were female, as Greer used to remind him. His mother wasn’t above this work. She may not have liked it once, but she was relieved and revived by it now. Throughout the morning she showed him tricks: How to use white vinegar in a number of clever ways. How to fold a fitted sheet so it could go neatly on a shelf in a linen closet. They pushed up the windows of the house and let the air circulate.
“You are very good at this,” she remarked.
That was the day that his mother started to become well. He knew it at the time, and he knew it with more confidence later on, looking back. Work was a tonic for everyone, but a special vitamin drink for his mother. At the very least, because she had stopped being able to work after Alby died, work was now a measurement of her recovery. If you could work again, regardless of what kind of work it was, you were getting better.
She wanted to come with him the next time, and the next. Working quietly side by side, dusting Elaine Newman’s art history books and cleaning her floors with Bona wood cleaner, the artificial smells all over both of them, Cory watched as his mother climbed up out of a well. He didn’t want to rush her; he didn’t even ask her each week if she wanted to come with him. But soon she was simply waiting when it was time to go there, wearing the clothes she used to wear for cleaning houses: an old shirt and sweatpants and sneakers.
Cory came to like those trips with her—the peaceful car ride, and then the hours together in the Victorian house, turning on the high-end stereo and playing whatever was closest at hand. The Newmans favored Sondheim. He thought, when he heard the lines “Isn’t it rich / Are we a pair?” that yes, they were a pair, Cory and Benedita Pinto. The child of immigrants was meant to grow up and surpass his parents, but instead he was level with his mother: truly, a pair.
She got better and better, and became scrupulous about taking her medication. One day, when Cory was sitting in the car waiting for his mother to leave the office of her social worker, she came to the door and waved him in. Cory, surprised, went and sat down in the tiny home office of Lisa Henry, the large and patient person who had been taking care of Benedita over the years.
“Your mom and I thought today would be a good time to discuss something with you,” Lisa said. “We’ve been talking lately about what it might be like if she had more independence.”
Cory’s mother looked up nervously, nodding, and then she was silent. He realized that it was his turn to speak. “Okay,” he said. “That’s good. Independence is always good. What kind of independence did you mean?”
“Maybe,” said his mother, “I could live with Aunt Maria and Uncle Joe.”
“Over in Fall River?”
“They have room now, since Sab left.”
In a minor miracle, Cory’s cousin Sab had straightened himself out through the help of Narcotics Anonymous, and had been working as a sous-chef at the Embers in Deerfield. Those hands that had expertly cut and chopped heroin and cocaine were now involved with a serious chiffonade of basil, and a brunoise dice of carrot and celery and onion. Just the idea that Sab knew words like this, French words, was surprising. Sab had his own set of knives that he brought to work, an excellent Wüsthof and a prize Shun, keeping them locked at night in a cabinet at home, as if they were guns. A few months earlier he had married the Embers’ pastry chef, an older, divorced woman with two daughters. That era of heroin-dabbling and various-substance-selling had ended with the last vestiges of his adolescence. Like the sickliest of first mustaches, it had been deforested, and Sab had started over.
“Your aunt has been talking with your mom about this for a while,” said the social worker. “She knew that your mom had started helping you clean again for her former employer. And that her thoughts are more organized, and the medication is working, and she’s being more responsible for her own self-care. Everything seems to be on an upward swing.”
“I guess it does,” Cory said, lightly stunned. “So if this were to happen,” he asked, “what about the house?”
“We could sell it,” said Benedita. “It could command a decent price.”
He looked sharply at her. “Who taught you that phrase?”
“Your mother called Century 21,” the social worker explained.
“Also,” Benedita added shyly, “on Thursday nights at ten p.m. I watch Is There a Buyer in the House?”
Things were happening all around him, and under him. Sand was churning, moving; Cory remembered the way he had felt when he first snorted heroin with his cousin. The floor had turned soft and dropped, and that was happening again now.
What about me? he thought.
Lisa Henry knew what he was thinking. “Cory,” she said, “did you want to come back and see me another time and talk about logistics?”
He looked to his mother. “I don’t want to intrude here,” he said, but she waved this away. So the following week he returned alone to the office of Lisa Henry, LCSW, where logistics weren’t discussed but his own life was. Lisa Henry’s voice was so gentle that her tone itself nearly brought him to tears.
“Cory?” she said. “You want to tell me how you’re absorbing the news about your mother’s plans?”
He was immediately and startlingly angry with her for her softness, her kindness, which made him shaky and suddenly emotional. He didn’t know if she was a mother, if she had young children, or if as a therapist she’d just gotten used to talking to everyone this way—speaking to the children her clients once were. A giant of a man, twenty-six years old and sitting in a too-small chair, Cory was nearly wrecked by feeling.
“I’m okay.”
“I imagine you’re in a kind of overload. You readjusted your whole life after the accident, and now maybe you’re thinking you’ll have to readjust it all over again.”
It wasn’t even what she was saying that screwed tight his throat, but that she was taking the time and care to say it, her head tilted in concern. Calling him Cory like that. He heard her voice from a great distance. Cory, she kept saying. Cory? She was like someone calling his name from three backyards away. He felt suddenly nostalgic about his childhood, which lived like its own distant backyard deep inside him. But then he realized, as the therapist kept speaking to him, that what he missed wasn’t childhood, or being a child, but being close to a woman. That was what he no longer had.
He recalled the first time he had raked his hand through Greer’s hair when they were both seventeen. He had been astonished at its softness. It was like touching some airy, grassy substance. Girls’ hair must weigh less than boys’ did; there had to be a scientific distinction. Her breasts were supernaturally soft too. Not to mention her skin and mouth. But her softness wasn’t only tangible; there was also the softness of her voice. No matter how loud she spoke, he could speak louder. If they arm-wrestled he would always win, but she wasn’t weak. Girls weren’t weak. They had a softness sometimes, but not all the time. Whatever they had, it was a complement to what he had.