“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. “I should’ve come right back.”
“Darn right,” she said, her eyes going dull again. She stabbed the edge of a box with a fingernail, her hands shaking. “You better not have eaten the ones with the cherries in them.”
He opened the package and pulled one out to show her. She smiled and opened her mouth like a baby bird waiting to be fed. This was a new one. Two weeks ago, she opened the door naked. A few weeks before that, she lay cocooned in bed and made Emma sing her “You Are My Sunshine,” a song Ben used to sing to Emma when she was a child, the same song his father sang to Ben when he was a little boy. After a moment, Ben came to his senses and set the candy on her waiting tongue.
“Mmm,” she said, eyes closed, savoring it.
“It’s on, Grandma,” Emma called, and the two of them retired to the couch to watch Magnum, P.I.
Ben checked the pantry and the refrigerator, scribbled a grocery list while sitting at the kitchen counter. He’d hired an aide for Monday through Thursday and saved a little money by taking care of things himself Friday through Sunday.
“He reminds me of Warren,” his mother said, when Thomas Magnum stepped out of the Ferrari.
A gust of wind burst through the window and ruffled the edge of the paper. He stood to close the window, hooking the latch down tight.
“Mom,” Ben said. “I want you to keep this window closed, all right?”
His mother stared at the window, as though trying to remember what that rectangular hole in the wall was called, before turning back to Emma, a childlike excitement erasing the dullness in her eyes. “Have I told you about Warren?”
Emma glanced at Ben and then smiled at her grandmother.
“No,” Emma said, shaking her head. “Please tell me.”
“I was pretty then,” his mother began, leaning into Emma, “and Warren had good eyes.”
Ben retreated to his mother’s bedroom to strip the bed. In the last few months, she had been telling this story every time they visited, a memory loop snatched from her blankening mind. Margaret had been sixteen, on a family outing to Laguna Beach, posed on a cotton blanket, trying to look like Ava Gardner in her pinup red-and-white polka-dot bathing suit, when Warren clomped by on a horse, hoofing up sand.
“Get that goddamned horse away from my daughter,” Margaret’s father had said.
Warren stopped the horse directly in front of Margaret, casting a cool shadow across her body. As far as Warren was concerned, these people had no business burning themselves on the beach, sitting on blankets and eating sun-heated watermelon. This stretch of beach was part of the old ranch, though the company had sold it years before and the town of Laguna had built hotels along the “California Riviera” for the hordes of people who wanted to gaze at the endless blue.
“Your daughter?” Warren had said, staring at her, not even bothering to hide it from her father, taking in her painted nails and her sand-speckled legs, the polka dots cut in half at the fold of her waist, her green eyes watching him watching her. “Seems she got her looks from her mother.”
Margaret’s mother, who had been pinching a cherry tomato between forefinger and thumb, blushed bright pink in the sun.
That did it for Margaret. She never asked for her father’s permission to take the diesel bus from the traffic circle in Orange down the coast highway to sit on a blanket on the beach and wait for the cowboy to return. She never asked his permission to meet Warren in the rock cave where the tide pools were alive with sea anemone and starfish. She never asked his permission to meet Warren’s family and she never asked his permission to marry, which sent her father into such a rage that he broke a wooden chair against the kitchen doorframe, but still he couldn’t stop her.
“It’s hot in here,” Ben heard his mother say now. Then the scrape of the window sliding open in its frame.
“It’s a good story, Grandma,” Emma said when Ben came back into the room.
He closed the window again, this time closing the blinds, too. Out of sight, out of mind.
“My funny valentine,” Margaret said.
“Mom, I need you to keep this window shut.”
She glanced at Ben, her eyes wet and lost-looking, then turned back to Emma. “That’s what he calls me when we’re in bed. My funny valentine.”
Emma raised her eyebrows at Ben.
For years his mother rarely mentioned Ben’s father, just brief recollections guiltily offered when Will Voorhees, his stepfather, wasn’t around. Then it had made Ben feel as though he was part of some shameful past, like some bastard son born of a mistaken affair. Now, though, his mother’s voice quickened with excitement, and it was comforting to Ben to know that when all else was erased from the mind, there was still the memory of love.
Magnum, P.I. was back, and Ben assembled the bowl of vitamins he had to make his mother take with a glass of water. He had to wait until a commercial break to give her the pills, though, and he stood behind the couch, watching his daughter and his mother gape at Magnum hopping into a helicopter that zoomed him down an impossibly green coastline.
“Where’s that woman you married?” his mother said, when the commercial break came and he handed her the first pill.
“Rachel,” he said, dabbing a drop of water from her chin with a paper towel.
“That’s what I said. That woman you married.”
“She’s moved out, Mom,” he said. “We divorced. You know this.”
Two more pills and a slurp of water, his mother’s clouded eyes staring at him. The vitamins were supposed to enrich the brain, open up the vascular walls and flood the synapses with oxygen.
“I know what I know,” she said. “How did you mess that up? You always mess things up.”
Emma glanced at him—a look of sympathy, he thought.
“I didn’t buy her enough chocolate,” he said.
Emma laughed, and his mother studied the two of them, trying to figure out if the joke was on her.
“Oh,” Margaret said finally, sighing, “you were always a difficult child.”
But then Thomas Magnum was back, diving from the hovering helicopter into the water to swim down a murderer, whom he dragged back to shore. Thomas Magnum had unraveled a murder with a connection to a drug ring run by an old Vietnam buddy, who was bringing the stuff in from Southeast Asia. He had fallen in love (again) with a beautiful, vulnerable woman, raced around Oahu in a red Ferrari, and tossed off a moral soliloquy at the end with his wet shirt clinging to his carpeted chest.
“Eye candy,” his mother said, popping another chocolate into her mouth.
“Got a nice car,” Ben said. “I’ll give him that.”
A half hour later Ben was backing his truck into the street, while Emma was fastening her seatbelt. The blinds flashed open on his mother’s living room window. There she was, the wispy shadow of her body backlit through her nightgown, her thin hands yanking the window open to the wind again.