I had learned early on to be a decent cook, and since some of the best things on television came on soon after supper, I would make us a meal and she would bring dessert from the bakeshop. I invested in a couple of those folding tables and we would eat watching the news, then afterwards our programs. My mother had always insisted on our eating at the table because she thought that was the only way to be decent, but Oneida seemed to have no prohibitions in that regard.

It might be after ten when she left. She wouldn’t have minded walking, but I didn’t like the idea, so I would get out my car and drive her. She had never bought another car after getting rid of the one she used to drive her father in. She never minded being seen walking all over town, though people laughed about it. That was before the days of walking and exercising becoming fashionable.

We never went anywhere together. There were times when I didn’t see her, because she was going out of town, or maybe not going away but entertaining people who were outsiders here. I did not get to meet them.

No. That makes it seem as if I felt snubbed. I didn’t. Meeting new people was an ordeal for me, and she must have understood that. And the custom we had of eating together, spending the evenings in front of the television together—that was so easygoing and flexible that it seemed there could never be any difficulty. Many people must have known about it, but because it was me they took little notice. It was known that I did her income tax too, but why not? It was what I knew how to do, and nobody would expect her to know how.

I don’t know if it was known that she never paid me. I would have asked for a nominal sum just to make things proper, but the subject did not come up. Not that she was tightfisted. She just didn’t think of it.

If I had to mention her name for some reason, it sometimes slipped out as Ida. She would tease me a little if I did that to her face. She would point out how I always preferred to call people by their old school nicknames if I had the opportunity. I had not noticed this myself.

“Nobody minds,” she said. “It’s just you.”

This made me slightly huffy, though I did my best to conceal it. What right had she to be commenting about how people would feel about something concerning what I did or didn’t do? The implication was that I somehow preferred to hang on to my childhood, so that I wanted to stay there and make everybody else stay with me.

That made it too simple. All my school years had been spent, as I saw it, in getting used to what I was like—what my face was like—and what other people were like in regard to it. I suppose it was a triumph of a minor sort to have managed that, to know I could survive here and make my living and not continually be having to break new people in. But as for wanting to put us all back in grade four, no thank you.

And who was Oneida to have opinions? It didn’t seem to me that she was settled yet. Actually, now that the big house was gone, a good deal of her was gone with it. The town was changing, and her place in it was changing, and she hardly knew it. Of course there had always been changes, but in the time before the war it was the change of people moving out, looking for something better somewhere else. In the fifties and sixties and seventies it was changed by new kinds of people moving in. You would think Oneida would have acknowledged that when she went to live in the apartment building. But she hadn’t altogether caught on. There was still that strange hesitation and lightness about her, as if she were waiting for life to begin.

She went away on trips of course, and maybe she thought it would begin there. No such luck.

During those years when the new shopping mall was built on the south edge of town, and Krebs’s folded (no problem for me, I had enough to do without them), there seemed to be more and more people from town taking winter holidays, and that meant going to Mexico or the West Indies or someplace we never used to have anything to do with. The result, in my opinion, was to bring back diseases we never used to have anything to do with either. For a while, this happened. There would be Disease of the Year, with a special name on it. Maybe these are still going around, but nobody notices them so much anymore. Or it could be that people my age have got beyond noticing. You can be sure you’re not going to be carried off by anything dramatic, or it would have happened by now.

One evening I got up at the end of a television show to make us a cup of tea before Oneida was to go home. I walked towards the kitchen and suddenly I felt terrible. I stumbled and went down on my knees, then onto the floor. Oneida grabbed me and got me up into a chair and the blackout passed. I told her I sometimes had spells and not to worry. This was a lie, and I don’t know why I told it, but she didn’t believe me anyway. She got me into the downstairs room where I slept, and she took off my shoes. Then somehow together, and with a bit of protest on my part, we got me out of my clothes and into pajamas. I could only realize things by fits and starts. I told her to get a taxi and go home, but she didn’t pay any attention.

She slept that night on the living-room couch, and upon exploring the house the next day she settled into my mother’s bedroom. She must have gone back to her apartment in the daytime for such things as she needed, and maybe also to the mall for such groceries as she thought would round out my supplies. She also talked to the doctor and got a prescription from the drugstore that I swallowed whenever she held it to my lips.

I was in and out of consciousness and sick and feverish for the better part of a week. Occasionally I told her that I was feeling recovered, and that I could manage by myself, but this was nonsense. Mostly I just obeyed her and came to depend on her in the matter-of-fact way that you would on a nurse in a hospital. She was not as skilled at dealing with a fevered body as a nurse might be, and sometimes if I had the energy I would complain like a six-year-old. She would apologize then and not take offense. In between telling her I was better, and she should think about getting back to her own place, I was selfish enough to be calling her name for no reason but to reassure myself that she was there.

Then I was well enough to worry about her catching whatever it was that I had.

“You should have a mask on.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “If I was going to get it I think I’d have got it by now.”

When I first really felt better I was too lazy to acknowledge the fact that I had spells of feeling like a small child again.

But of course she was not my mother, and I had to wake up one morning and realize that. I had to think about all the things she had done for me, and that embarrassed me considerably. As it would any man, but me especially because of remembering how I looked. I had more or less forgotten that, and now it seemed to me that she had not been embarrassed, that she had been able to do things so matter-of-factly because I was a neuter to her, or an unfortunate child.

I was polite now, and worked in, between my expressions of gratitude, my by now very genuine wish that she would go home.

She got that message, she wasn’t offended. She must have been tired out from all the broken sleep and unaccustomed care. She did a last bit of shopping for what I’d need and took my temperature for the final time and went off, as I thought, in the satisfied mood of somebody who has finished a job well done. Just before doing that she had waited in the front room to see if I could get my clothes on without assistance and had been satisfied that I could. She was barely out of the house when I got some accounts out and set into doing the work I had been doing on the day I fell sick.