I could almost hear that sniveling Born Again National Sales Manager licking this asshole’s balls, appeasing him with promises of discounts.

“Well, perhaps if it wouldn’t be inconvenient we could-”

He cut me dead.

“It would be very inconvenient.”

The thought of facing the Born Again National Sales Manager made me cringe. This wasn’t just some shopkeeper I’d alienated or a sale I’d lost. I’d managed to anger a Walking Endorsement, the author of a best-selling manual on grill techniques and a monthly column on cookware and utensils for the largest-circulation food and wine magazine. A man with an audience. A man with sufficient connections and influence to snare a design magazine spread on the expansion of his destination-point store. An article which would have prominently featured Shelton/Murray fixtures. In a nutshell, I’d fucked up.

But not fatally.

At least not this time.

The National Sales Manager forced himself to practice a little Born Again forgiveness.

But, going forward, he insisted I confirm every appointment by telephone twenty-four hours in advance.

Or else.

Finally, it was Saturday night. I met Steve at a cheap Italian restaurant near the hospital. I ordered a carafe of the house red and he asked the waitress for a Coke. No vino for me tonight, he announced. He’d picked up a night shift starting at eleven. I was dumbstruck. He was able to make a last-minute switch with a friend and patched together his three-day weekend. He’d scored a great airfare on the Internet and was flying to Pompano Beach to spend Easter with his family. I couldn’t even offer to drive him to the airport; it was all arranged. He was really looking forward to the break. He needed to decompress. Shit, the last month had been stressful, he sighed. (My fault? I wondered.) I pushed the spaghetti around my plate, choking at the sight of it.

He kissed me in the parking lot, seeming surprised when I didn’t kiss him back. He shrugged it off, his mind already back at the hospital, already on its way to Florida. By the way, he said, there’s a new movie he really wants to see. Maybe we could go together when he gets back if he doesn’t catch it while he’s in Florida.

“Happy Easter,” I said as we parted.

“But I’ll talk to you before Easter,” he said.

“But I won’t see you before Easter,” I answered.

He shrugged and turned away, his backpack jiggling on his shoulder.

Driving home, I stared beyond the road and into the horizon, past the warm starlight and into the frigid black of the Cosmic Dark Age. Only the clinically depressed despair over the infinity of eternity. Well, wasn’t I clinically depressed? Hadn’t I been diagnosed? Was I not suitably medicated? Don’t I have a right to chronic melancholy? My mother, the only human connection I have left, is dying. I will be even more alone than I am right now. How could she do this to me, abandon me at the time I need her most? I felt my heart racing, panic gripping me at the thought of her dying before I can thank her for her fierce and passionate loyalty, the gift of unconditional love my counselor assures me is rare and precious. But we’re not talkers, she and I, not really. It’s never been necessary. And just like it’s always been enough for me to know she is there, ready to attack or defend as necessity demanded, now it’s my physical presence, a somnambulant blob snoring and farting in the bedroom down the hallway, that reassures her during the long sleepless, painful nights. We don’t need words, the two of us.

I swerved to miss a rabbit. The car buckled, smearing the poor bunny across the asphalt.

My mother. I’d barely thought of her since I met him. Even when I was listening to her complaints, answering her questions, playacting at having a conversation, my thoughts were in a bed-sitter on a pull-out mattress under an itchy blanket. I loved him and he was trying to escape without confrontation, without any ugly scenes. Why should he bother with those? It wasn’t as if he loved me. I was a diversion, a release. The hospital was more important. So, of course, were his parents. His young and healthy parents who weren’t even dying. Me. I would snap to attention when wanted and keep at a safe distance when not.

I made the decision quickly and dialed his machine before I could change my mind. I knew how I wanted to sound. Sad, but not hurt. Fond, but not in love. Not paternal, but maybe a bit avuncular.

Hi. Look. I understand how you feel. You didn’t have to make up an excuse about having to work tonight. You could have just told me it’s over. It would have been all right. I’ll make this easy for you so you can enjoy your trip and not have to dread coming home to face me. I don’t want to see you anymore. You can call if you like. So I’ll talk to you if I talk to you.

I didn’t know how to end the message. I couldn’t find the right words to compel him to call. Words that would make him pick up the phone to tell me I had it all wrong. I checked my voice mail every hour for the next two days. It’s Friday night, almost a week later, and I’ve accepted he’ll never call. His silence means either his feelings for me were small and easily abandoned or deep enough to need protecting. I’ll never know. Someday I will see him at the bar. It will be awkward. Maybe we will speak. Maybe I’ll see him at the hospital during my mother’s next inevitable admission.

“I’m shaping up,” I swear to Matt. “No more missed appointments. I promise. My sales are good, better than good, great.”

“You look like hell,” he says. “Let’s try this,” Matt says, interrupting my patter to write me a script. “I’ve seen some good, relatively quick results with this medication.”

I’ve got a better idea. Let’s build a time machine and set the clock back ten, twelve, months ago. I don’t need drugs. I need another chance. An opportunity to do things right this time. The days are getting longer, but the sky is growing darker all the time. Look ahead. Nasty-looking clouds are hovering on the horizon. The forecast is calling for storms.

Robert

Smelling your mother’s farts feels uncomfortably close to incest. Disease does many ugly things, but this is the worst, this stripping away of dignity. She controls the things she can, observing the rituals, big and small, that mark her days. Sunday Mass at ten. Tuesday bridge nights. Friday mornings devoted to Forrest, who whips her new chemo wig into a facsimile of her old familiar hair. She accepts the things she can’t control, like flatulence and the other rude outbursts of a body in revolt. She and I have learned to ignore them. She doesn’t beg my pardon and I don’t crinkle my nose and crack the car window. We sit tight, waiting for the not-altogether-unpleasant smell to atomize and disappear.

It’s too cold to open the window anyway. Spring is in full bloom in the Piedmont, but winter still clings to these ancient hills. Columns of gray smoke rise from the bonfires of last season’s field debris burning in the valleys below. The towns on the distant ridges all look the same, a dozen or so low-pitched tar-paper roofs clustered around the steeple of a white wood-frame church. Most of these buildings are older than my mother. There’s no new construction in these hamlets. Their citizens are all dying off. Only the valiant still force a living out of the exhausted fields.

My mother, the youngest of ten, escaped over forty years ago after being orphaned at sixteen. My grandfather went first, losing a slow, ugly battle with colon cancer. My grandmother followed eight months later, quickly, from a heart attack, leaving my mother, only a high school girl, to keep house for the two bachelor sons who’d stayed behind to run the farm. The other boys had fled Watauga County for the machine shops of Johnson City and Knoxville; Buster, my mother’s favorite brother, made it all the way to occupied Japan, courtesy of the United States Army. Her sisters had left the farm when they’d married, following their husbands to Cleveland and Detroit, where union jobs in steel and construction paid good money. The house where she was born seemed strange, unwelcoming, after her parents died. She felt she was a burden on her brothers even though she washed their clothes and cooked their meals.