After half an hour or so, the girl begins to squirm, and Helen sees that she has turned the paintbrush on herself, making hatch marks along her lower arm.
Helen stands, removes the brush from the girl’s hand. “Let’s go and see if your mother is home yet.”
There is still no car in the driveway, but they go next door anyway. Helen knocks, receives no answer. She and Avis stand on that concrete porch, looking at their own shadows on the door. Things like this happen, Helen knows. This is a country in which mothers sometimes don’t come home. Often they are innocuous episodes—a stalled car, a delayed appointment—but equally often they are something worse. Helen begins to imagine the scenarios. A traffic accident, the Toyota overturned at the side of a highway. Or, more terrible, the Toyota driving onward—heading west, or south—with a tankful of fuel.
They return to Helen’s house, remove their shoes again, come back inside. Gene and his crew are repairing a collapsed roof on Cannonfield Road today, and he will not be home until dinner.
“Are you tired?” Helen asks the girl.
She nods.
“Come upstairs, and we’ll give you a nice bed.”
Rufus’s room has been transformed into a respectable place for guests. The moment he moved out, Helen had peeled off the dreadful posters with their macabre images and inscrutable words: Ministry, Tool, Bauhaus. She scrubbed the room clean, took up the crusted carpet, the blotched bedspread. The new rug is plush white, the walls a buttercup yellow. A vestige of masculinity has been retained in the nautical duvet and navy drapes. On the bookshelf, Helen has arranged framed photographs of Rufus as a little boy. His first-grade photo, with his missing front tooth and shirt collar turned up. A snapshot from a farm trip, with an ice cream cone, shaggy bangs shading one eye.
There are fewer photographs of him as an adolescent, but Helen remembers vividly the pebbled forehead, the dyed black hair incongruously long on top and shaved beneath. She remembers the rotation of concert T-shirts emblazoned with profanities and revolting images. Nude women with their hair on fire.
Her son is now twenty-seven. It has been six years since he dropped out of college and moved into an apartment in the town to the south with chain-smoking roommates. Since then he has been fleetingly employed and released by concerns such as Gold Soundz Records, the Coffee Bean, and the Donut Hole. There has been at least one flunked drug test, a vague cross-country road trip, stretches of unexplained absence. From what Helen can glean, he is now working as a counter boy at the Sweet Spot, wearing a hairnet over his ponytail.
Helen helps Avis out of the grimy DIVA shirt and gives her Rufus’s old Block Island T-shirt, which comes down to her knees. She closes the drapes against the afternoon sun. The girl clambers into bed, nestles beneath the covers.
While Avis naps, Helen returns to her post at the kitchen table: her teacup, her window view of the flower garden and the house next door. What was previously a leisurely occupation now feels like a vigil. Still, Helen is caught off guard when the white Toyota turns into the neighbor’s driveway, and the girl’s mother—in a gauzy white top like a bandage—gets out and goes into the house. Helen sits unmoving, holding the handle of her cup for the few moments before the woman comes bursting back outside. The sound of the screen door banging shut makes Helen jump. She grips the handle of her teacup as she watches the woman walk across the grass, disappear around the far side of the house, and reappear in the driveway. Helen holds her teacup as the woman makes another circuit, calling her daughter’s name. Helen sits quietly, as if watching a film reel, and does not move from her chair, does not go to wake the girl. The woman has begun to run in erratic patterns over the grass. Helen watches her bend to look under a rhododendron and beneath the plastic slide. There is a new tremor in her calls, discernible even through the window glass. Helen listens. No sound comes from Rufus’s bedroom upstairs. She stands and goes to the stove, puts the teakettle on.
Later, Avis wakes, drowsy and rose-cheeked, and asks for her mother. Helen nearly replies that her mother is home now, that their little visit together is over, but the words do not come. Instead, she hears herself say soothingly, “Your mother called. She said she’ll be home soon, and that you should stay with me a little while longer.”