Transcendent Read Free Page B

back around to the front of the house, picked up my bag, and knocked on the door.
             
    The front door was faded by the relentless sun, and in places the clapboards were peeling back, the nails rusting and coming loose. The place wasn’t in bad shape, however. The coat of Paint that John was busily applying was a silvery scraping over layers of creamy old gloss.
    My mother opened the screen door. “It’s you,” she said. She stepped back, holding the door to let me pass, with eyes averted to the floor. I stepped over rotting sandbags and dutifully delivered the kiss she expected; her skin was crumpled, leathery, warm as melted butter.
    She said she would make me a cup of tea, and she led me through the hall. We passed the old grandfather clock that had come with her from England. It still ticked away with imperial resolve, even though the world in which it had been manufactured had all but vanished.
    My mother was a stick-thin figure, upright and stiff and animated by a fragile sort of energy. She was still beautiful, if any ninety-year-old can be said to be beautiful. She had never dyed her hair, and it had slowly faded to white, but even now, tied back, her hair looked lustrous, soft and full of light.
    In the kitchen she had ingredients for fresh lemonade laid out over the working surfaces. She made me tea, hot and strong and laced with milk, English style, and she sat with me at the breakfast table. We sipped our tea in cautious silence. I enjoyed it, of course; it brought back my childhood.
    I hadn’t neglected my mother. But I’d mostly seen her when she’d made her occasional, loudly self-sacrificing pilgrimages to come visit me in my home with Morag, or later after Morag’s death in my small apartment in New Jersey, or at holiday times at John’s brownstone apartment behind the Manhattan seawalls. But those trips had got more rare as the years passed; Mother would say she wasn’t sure if it was her getting old, or the world, or both.
    She opened hostilities. “I suppose John called you in.”
    “He was concerned.”
    “You didn’t need to come here.” She sniffed. “Either of you. I’m ninety. But I’m not
old.
I’m not helpless. I’m not gaga. And I’m
not
moving out.”
    I pulled a face. “You always did get straight to the point, Mom.”
    She was neither annoyed nor flattered, and she wasn’t about to be deflected. “You can explain that to your brother. He’s just like your father. And there’s nothing wrong with this house.”
    “Needs a coat of Paint, though. You’ll be able to make back the cost by selling solar power to the microgrid. And you have to comply with the sentience laws; a house of this age needs a minimal IQ-equivalent of—”
    “I know the damn laws,” she snapped. “Just so we understand each other.
I’m not moving out.
”
    I spread my hands. “Fine by me.”
    She leaned forward and inspected me. I stared right back. Her face was hard, all nose and cheekbones and sunken mouth. It was as if everything else had melted away but this inner core, leaving nothing but her one dominant central characteristic.
    But what was that character? Energy, yes, determination, but all fueled by a kind of resentment, I thought. She’d come out of England, heavily resenting her own flawed family and whatever had happened to her there. She certainly resented my dad, and the way their marriage had broken down, and even the fact that he had died leaving her with various complications to sort out, not the least her two sons. She resented the slow drift of the climate, which had left her under pressure here in the family home in which she had always hoped to die. She was one against the world, in her head.
    Her eyes, though, her beautiful eyes belied the harshness of her expression. They were clear and still that startling pale gray. And they revealed a surprising vulnerability. My mother had built a kind of shell around herself all her life, but her eyes were a crack in