The Almost Moon Read Free Page B

Almost Moon
    admit it, was that the photos were like the historical documents of our town. They proved that long ago, there had been a more hopeful time. Her smile was easy then, not forced, and the fear that could turn to bitterness had not tainted her eyes.
    "He was the photographer's friend," she said. "He was having a big day in the city, and the suit was part of his friend's lie."
    I knew not to ask, "What lie, Mom?" Because that took her to a bad place where her marriage was just the long, arduous playing out of an afternoon con between schoolboy friends. Instead I asked, "Who was the shoot for? "
    "The original John Wanamaker's," she said. Her face glowed like an old-fashioned streetlamp lit from the inside. Everything else in the room disappeared as if into a dark fog. I did not realize then that there was no place in these memories for the company of a child.
    As my mother drifted into the past, where she was happiest, I appointed myself the past's faithful guardian. If her feet looked cold, I covered them. If the light left the room too dark, I quietly crept over and turned on a bookshelf lamp that would cast only a small circle of light—not too big—just enough to keep her voice from becoming a scary shapeless echo in the dark.
    Outside, in the street in front of our house, the workmen who had been hired to install the stained-glass windows in the new Greek Orthodox church—green because for some reason this color of glass was cheaper than most—might walk by and make a noise too loud to ignore. When this happened, I would meet the drowsy blank stare that came over my mother with ushering words meant to slip her back to the dream-past.
    "Five girls showed up, not eight," I'd say.
    Or "His last name, Knightly, was irresistible."
    When I look back, I think how silly I must have sounded, parroting the phrases of my mother's lovesick girlhood, but what was most precious about our house back then was that no matter
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    Alice Sebold
    how wrongheaded everything might be, inside it, we could distill ourselves to being a normal man, woman, and child. No one had to see my father put on an apron and do overtime work after he got home, or watch me cajole my mother, trying to get her to eat.
    "I didn't know he wasn't in the fashion industry until after he'd kissed me," she'd say.
    "But what about the kiss?"
    It was always here that she teetered. The kiss and the weeks immediately following it must have been wonderful, but she could not forgive my father once he'd brought her to Phoenixville.
    "New York City," she'd say, looking down dejectedly between her splayed feet on the floor. "I never even got there."
    It was my mother's disappointments that were enumerated in our household and that I saw before me every day as if they were posted on our fridge—a static list that my presence could not assuage.
    I must have petted my mother's head for a long time. Eventually I saw the blue light of a television go on across the street. When my parents had first moved to Phoenixville, this neighborhood had been a thriving one, full of young families. Now the squat 1940s houses on quarter-acre lots were often rented out to couples down on their luck. My mother said you could tell who the renters were because they let the houses rot, but in my mind it was these very people that kept the street from turning into a place where the isolated elderly were slowly dying.
    As darkness descended, so did the cold. I looked down at the length of my mother's body, wrapped in double blankets, and knew she would never feel the uncertainties that come with the fluctuation of air or light again.
    "Over now," I said to her. "It's over."
    And for the first time, the air was empty around me. For the
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    The Almost Moon

    first time, it was not full of hatchets and blame or unworthinessas-oxygen.
    As I breathed in this blank-space world—where my mother ended at the border of her own flesh—I heard the phone ring in the kitchen. I slipped off