Adam Haslett - Union Atlantic

Christmas decorations already littered the front yards of the ranch houses along Howard, the glowing Santas and plastic reindeer arranged like inflated toys on outsize playroom floors. As he reached Eames Street, the rain softened to a drizzle and then stopped. Up ahead he could see low traveling clouds, their yellow underbellies lit by the strip that lay just on the other side of the creek and the fences. Single-family homes petered out toward the end of the block where he noticed Phil’s Pizza had been replaced by a Brazilian restaurant still serving at this late hour.

The triple-deckers began on the other side of Miller, big clapboard rectangles with three front porches, stacked one atop the other, the angles on most of them no longer right, their posts sagging into the worn corners of the decking. Trash cans were lined up along the chain-link fences that fronted most lots beside the gated parking spaces. There were Christmas decorations here as well, string lights flashing slowly on and off in windows with the shades pulled and farther up Mrs. Cronin’s old wooden crèche, its figures two feet high and illuminated in front by a row of bulbs sheltered under a weathered strip of plywood.

He pulled to the curb and cut the engine. Up on the third floor of number 38 the lights in his mother’s apartment were still on. He pictured her as he had a thousand times: she would be into her second bottle by now, watching the evening dramas while whatever she’d managed to make herself for dinner lay half eaten on the table in front of her.

To climb those stairs, he thought. To take a seat in the chair opposite and let her pour him a drink.

She had done that sometimes the year before he left, because she’d wanted to keep him in the room with her, he being the only audience for her silence, the only person who might ask her to break it. Which he never had, having learned the power of reticence from her.

Whenever he’d been tempted over the years to get in touch with her he would recall what it felt like on those summer nights in the apartment when he’d sit shirtless across from her, his chest moist with sweat, able to clock almost exactly how long it would take before she would let slip some half-muttered remark about how fit he’d become, his baby fat all gone. Her son, the only romance she’d ever had, all grown up. And then he would remind himself that she had a phone if she wanted to call.

And yet here he was, drawn back by something, by the residue, perhaps, of all his dreams of her.

He drank a few of the beers he’d brought with him in the car, gazing into the street where he used to play hockey at dusk with his cousin Michael and the Fischer boys and Dave Cutty from up the road until his mother came out onto the front porch to call him inside.

THE DOOR TO the building had never been kept locked and wasn’t locked now. A new rug carpeted the stairs but the steps still creaked beneath his weight as he climbed them. On the third-floor landing, the same worn cable rug lay in front of his mother’s door, the same black umbrella stand there beside it.

He’d expected to have to wait a few minutes after knocking, his mother needing the time to rouse herself. But the door came open almost right away and he was confronted with a bearded man in his early sixties with a thatch of dark hair and a nose veined at the tip. He looked out at Doug through large, owl eyes that were clearly long since done being impressed. An ex-hippie, Doug thought, or an old biker.

“Is there some kind of problem?” the man asked, when Doug offered no greeting.

“It’s just someone I knew — she used to live here.”

“You talking about Cathy?”

“Catherine. Catherine Fanning.”

“Yeah. She lives here. What do you need with her?”

“I want to see her.”

“She’s out. You some kind of salesman? We’re not interested if you are.”

“No,” he said. “I’m her son.”

The man cocked his head back, eyeing Doug skeptically. “You don’t say? You’re with that bank, aren’t you? We saw something about that on the news.”

Doug nodded. Somewhat reluctantly, the man stepped aside to let him enter.

As if in a waking dream, Doug followed him down the hall, entering a living room he hardly recognized. The old corduroy couch and chair were gone, replaced by a dark-green upholstered living-room set and a glass-top coffee table. The carpeting had been torn up and the wood floors refinished. Walls whose paper had once been stained by the steam leaked from the heating pipes were now painted a clean off-white. There were no stacks of old newspapers. No piles of magazines. In fact, there was barely any clutter at all.

“You live here?”

“I do,” the man said, leaning against the kitchen doorjamb, his arms crossed over his chest. “I’ve lived here ten years.”

“Ten years?” But how could this be? Ten years?

“Where is she?” Doug asked.

“At a meeting,” the man said, the slight, righteous emphasis on the last word leaving little doubt as to the kind of gathering he meant. “You want coffee?”

“No.”

Turning to look behind him, Doug saw that the wall to his old bedroom had been torn out. A dining table now filled the space where his bed and bureau used to sit.

“She must be getting on better with the landlord than she used to,” he said. “He hated us.”

“She bought the place. Awhile back. Before I got here.”

Doug couldn’t help laughing. “Bought it? With what?”

“She keeps books for a construction firm. She’s done all right.”

“So what are you?” Doug said. “The dry-drunk freeloader?”

The visible portion of the man’s heavily bearded face squinched, as if he were swallowing something tart.

“I figured you were probably an asshole,” he said. “Personally, I don’t give a shit what kind of mess you’re in. But you should know something: your mother’s got fourteen years sober. She’s doing just fine. You coming here like this — that’s the kind of thing that can screw a person up. So if you’re here to cause some kind of trouble, you might want to think about leaving.”

He was about to make himself clear to the man, when he heard the front door open and then his mother’s footsteps coming down the hall. Standing where he was, all the way into the living room, she didn’t notice him at first. And so for just a few seconds he was able to watch her as she put down her suede handbag and removed her gloves, the indelible oval of her face aged and yet no different, a face too familiar to ever actually see anymore than you could see your own.

And then her eyes followed the man’s to Doug. She stood motionless.

“Douglas.”

“Hi there, Mom.”

“Cath—” the man began, but she interrupted him.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Why don’t you go out.”

“I can stay right—”

“It’s all right,” she said. “Go.”

He lifted his leather jacket off the back of one of the dining-room chairs and before disappearing up the hall, paused to place a hand on her shoulder, leaning in to kiss her above the ear.

After the sound of the door latch closing, his mother slowly unbuttoned her coat and turned to hang it on a mirrored rack that stood where Doug’s bedroom bookcase once had. She straightened the front of her blouse and tucked her hair behind her ears. At last, she looked straight at him. Under the blaze of her unvanquished eyes, he heard a ringing in his ears and felt his whole body go suddenly weightless, as if he’d lost sensation in everything but his head.

“You look well,” she said.

“So do you.”

“Will you sit down?”

“I’m okay,” he said.

How was it, he wanted to know, that after nearly twenty years she could seem younger than the day he left? Her black hair was silver and black now, the skin about her eyes had grown looser, the backs of her hands mottled. But to look into her face, to meet the green eyes that she had given him, sharper than he’d ever seen them, to see the color in her cheeks, was to witness an uncanny thing, as if in his absence she’d shed not gained the weight of time, a younger spirit living now in the older body.