"That brown soun, she sho do get aroun," Larry said, deepening his voice to Bill Withers level and smiling.
"Just like that," she nodded. "When I was a girl, we thought Frank Sinatra was daring. Now they have this rap. Rap, they call it. Screaming, I call it." She looked at him grudgingly. "At least there's no screaming on your record."
"I get a royalty," he said. "A certain percent of every record sold. It breaks down to - "
"Oh, go on," she said, and made a shooing gesture with her hand. "I flunked all my maths. Have they paid you yet, or did you get that little car on credit?"
"They haven't paid me much," he said, skating up to the edge of the lie but not quite over it. "I made a down payment on the car. I'm financing the rest."
"Easy credit terms," she said balefully. "That's how your father ended up bankrupt. The doctor said he died of a heart attack, but it wasn't that. It was a broken heart. Your dad went to his grave on easy credit terms."
This was an old rap, and Larry just let it flow over him, nodding at the right places. His father had owned a haberdashery. A Robert Hall had opened not far away, and a year later his business had failed. He had turned to food for solace, putting on 110 pounds in three years. He had dropped dead in the corner luncheonette when Larry was nine, a half-finished meatball sandwich on his plate in front of him. At the wake, when her sister tried to comfort a woman who looked absolutely without need of comfort, Alice Underwood said it could have been worse. It could, she said, looking past her sister's shoulder and directly at her brother-in-law, have been drink.
Alice brought Larry the rest of the way up on her own, dominating his life with her proverbs and prejudices until he left home. Her last remark to him as he and Rudy Schwartz drove off in Rudy's old Ford was that they had poorhouses in California, too. Yessir, that's my mamma.
"Do you want to stay here, Larry?" she asked softly.
Startled, he countered, "Do you mind?"
"There's room. The rollaway's still in the back bedroom. I've been storing things back there, but you could move some of the boxes around."
"All right," he said slowly. "If you're sure you don't mind. I'm only in for a couple of weeks. I thought I'd look up some of the old guys. Mark... Galen... David... Chris... those guys."
She got up, went to the window, and tugged it up.
"You're welcome to stay as long as you like, Larry. I'm not so good at expressing myself, maybe, but I'm glad to see you. We didn't say goodbye very well. There were harsh words." She showed him her face, still harsh, but also full of a terrible, reluctant love. "For my part, I regret them. I only said them because I love you. I never knew how to say that just right, so I said it in other ways."
"That's all right," he said, looking down at the table. The flush was back. He could feel it. "Listen, I'll chip in for stuff."
"You can if you want. If you don't want to, you don't have to. I'm working. Thousands aren't. You're still my son."
He thought of the stiffening cat, half in and half out of the trash can, and of Dewey the Deck, smilingly filling the hospitality bowls, and he suddenly burst into tears. As his hands blurred double in the wash of them, he thought that this should be her bit, not his - nothing had gone the way he thought it would, nothing. She had changed after all. So had he, but not as he had suspected. An unnatural reversal had occurred; she had gotten bigger and he had somehow gotten smaller. He had not come home to her because he had to go somewhere. He had come home because he was afraid and he wanted his mother.