Stephen King - The Stand

“Hi, Mom,” he said.

She looked at him without saying anything, and a dread suddenly roosted in his heart like an evil bird coming back to an old nest. It was a fear that she might turn away from him, deny him, show him the back of her cheap coat, and simply go off to the subway around the corner, leaving him.

Then she sighed, the way a man will sigh before picking up a heavy bundle. And when she spoke, her voice was so natural and so mildly—rightly—pleased that he forgot his first impression.

“Hi, Larry,” she said. “Come on upstairs. I knew it was you when I looked out the window. I already called in sick at my building. I got sick time coming.”

She turned to lead him back up the steps, between the vanished stone dogs. He came three steps behind her, catching up, wincing at the pins and needles. “Mom?”

She turned back to him and he hugged her. For a moment an expression of fright crossed her features, as if she expected to be mugged rather than hugged. Then it passed and she accepted his embrace and gave back her own. The smell of her sachet slipped up his nose, evoking unexpected nostalgia, fierce, sweet, and bitter. For a moment he thought he was going to cry, and was smugly sure that she would; it was A Touching Moment. Over her sloped right shoulder he could see the dead cat, lying half in and half out of the garbage can. When she pulled away, her eyes were dry.

“Come on, I’ll make you some breakfast. Have you been driving all night?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice slightly hoarse with emotion.

“Well, come on. Elevator’s broken, but it’s only two floors. It’s worse for Mrs. Halsey with her arthritis. She’s on five. Don’t forget to wipe your feet. If you track in, Mr. Freeman will be on me like a shot. I swear Goshen he can smell dirt. Dirt’s his enemy, all right.” They were on the stairs now. “Can you eat three eggs? I’ll make toast, too, if you don’t mind pumpernickel. Come on.”

He followed her past the vanished stone dogs and looked a little wildly at where they had been, just to reassure himself that they were really gone; that he had not shrunk two feet, that the whole decade of the 1980s had not vanished back into time. She pushed the doors open and they went in. Even the dark brown shadows and the smells of cooking were the same.

Alice Underwood fixed him three eggs, bacon, toast, juice, coffee. When he had finished all but the coffee, he lit a cigarette and pushed back from the table. She flashed the cigarette a disapproving look but said nothing. That restored some of his confidence—some, but not much. She had always been good at biding her time.

She dropped the iron spider skillet into the gray dishwater and it hissed a little. She hadn’t changed much, Larry was thinking. A little older—she would be fifty-one now—a little grayer, but there was still plenty of black left in that sensibly netted head of hair. She was wearing a plain gray dress, probably the one she worked in. Her bosom was still the same large comber blooming out of the bodice of the dress—a little larger, if anything. Mom, tell me the truth, has your bosom gotten bigger? Is that the fundamental change?

He started to tap cigarette ashes into his coffee saucer; she jerked it away and replaced it with the ashtray she always kept in the cupboard. The saucer had been sloppy with coffee and it had seemed okay to tap in it. The ashtray was clean, reproachfully spotless, and he tapped into it with a slight pang. She could bide her time and she could keep springing small traps on you until your ankles were all bloody and you were ready to start gibbering.

“So you came back,” Alice said, taking a used Brill from a Table Talk pie dish and putting it to work on the skillet. “What brought you?”

Well, Ma, this friend of mine clued me in to the facts of life—the assholes travel in packs and this time they were after me. I don’t know if friend is the right word for him. He respects me musically about as much as I respect The 1910 Fruitgum Company. But he got me to put on my traveling shoes and wasn’t it Robert Frost who said home is a place that when you go there they have to take you in?

Aloud he said, “I guess I got to missing you, Mom.”

She snorted. “That’s why you wrote me often?”

“I’m not much of a letter-writer.” He pumped his cigarette slowly up and down. Smoke rings formed from the tip and drifted off.

“You can say that again.”

Smiling, he said: “I’m not much of a letter-writer.”

“But you’re still smart to your mother. That hasn’t changed.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “How have you been, Mom?”

She put the skillet in the drainer, pulled the sink stopper, and wiped the lace of soapsuds from her reddened hands. “Not so bad,” she said, coming over to the table and sitting down. “My back pains me some, but I got my pills. I make out all right.”

“You haven’t thrown it out of whack since I left?”

“Oh, once. But Dr. Holmes took care of it.”

“Mom, those Chiropractors are—” just frauds . He bit his tongue.

“Are what?”

He shrugged uncomfortably in the face of her hooked smile. “You’re free, white, and twenty-one. If he helps you, fine.”

She sighed and took a roll of wintergreen Life Savers from her dress pocket. “I’m a lot more than twenty-one. And I feel it. Want one?” He shook his head at the Life Saver she had thumbed up. She popped it into her own mouth instead.

“You’re just a girl yet,” he said with a touch of his old bantering flattery. She had always liked it, but now it brought only a ghost of a smile to her lips. “Any new men in your life?”

“Several,” she said. “How bout you?”

“No,” he said seriously. “No new men. Some girls, but no new men.”

He had hoped for laughter, but got only the ghost smile again. I’m troubling her, he thought. That’s what it is. She doesn’t know what I want here. She hasn’t been waiting for three years for me to show up after all. She only wanted me to stay lost.

“Same old Larry,” she said. “Never serious. You’re not engaged? Seeing anyone steadily?”

“I play the field, Mom.”

“You always did. At least you never came home to tell me you’d got some nice Catholic girl in a family way. I’ll give you that. You were either very careful, very lucky, or very polite.”

He strove to keep a poker face. It was the first time in his life that she had ever mentioned sex to him, directly or obliquely.

“Anyway, you’re gonna learn,” Alice said. “They say bachelors have all the fun. Not so. You just get old and full of sand, nasty, the way that Mr. Freeman is. He’s got that sidewalk-level apartment and he’s always standing there, in the window, hoping for a strong breeze.”

Larry grunted.

“I hear that song you got on the radio. I tell people, that’s my son. That’s Larry. Most of them don’t believe it.”

“You’ve heard it?” He wondered why she hadn’t mentioned that first, instead of going into all this piddling shit.

“Sure, all the time on that rock and roll station the young girls listen to. WROK.”

“Do you like it?”

“As well as I like any of that music.” She looked at him firmly. “I think some of it sounds suggestive. Lewd.”

He found himself shuffling his feet and forced himself to stop. “It’s just supposed to sound… passionate, Mom. That’s all.” His face suffused with blood. He had never expected to be sitting in his mother’s kitchen, discussing passion.

“The place for passion’s the bedroom,” she said curtly, closing off any aesthetic discussion of his hit record. “Also, you did something to your voice. You sound like a nigger.”