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his mother went to Mass and again on Wednesdays, and though he hated it from an early age, mostly for the pity shown him by the adults and the pity shown his mother, before he even knew why, he followed obediently along until thirteen or so when he told his mother he didn't believe in God or the Church and didn't care what she thought about it. She'd lost most of her bargaining power to the drink by then and didn't much resist. Daytime was a raw period for her, a time to be endured, after which the relief of the first glass of wine came, a routine that left little margin for argument or delay. He was taller than her well before he reached high school and there weren't many places in the apartment for her to hide her bottles. Early on he'd learned he could cut her off more or less at will, and after that he never needed to; the threat alone sufficed to win whatever concession he needed from her.
Never a talkative woman, she said even less when she'd drunk three or four glasses.
After the first bottle, her silence deepened into something more profound, her daily withholding of words buoyed up into a principle of sorts, an almost enjoyable one it seemed, a queenly disregard for the commonplace of chatter or conversation, as if he were a man in whose presence she was determined to remain permanently coy. Conspicuous in her withdrawal. She had her television and her magazines, and as long as he was there to watch her getting along without him then indeed she could. And when she fell asleep on the couch at the end of the night Doug would carry her to her bed and turn out the light.
Once he'd gotten his license he had taken control of the car and begun to drive her to work. Heading down the state route you always knew exactly where Alden stopped and Finden began because the strip ended. After the muffler shop and the liquor store strategically placed on the town line to serve the residents of the dry community next door, you came to a traffic light. Beyond that it was as if time had stood still. Just the fluted gray railing running up the side of the highway and behind it, on either side, woods. It continued like that all the way east, seven miles or more toward Boston, until you reached the next town, where another liquor store stood just over the line and the malls and burger chains and car dealerships started up again.
All his mother's work was in Finden. Over the years, she cleaned for different families in the mornings but as long as he could remember, she'd always worked afternoons at the Gammonds', where he would come to pick her up in the afternoons. They lived at the end of a white gravel drive in a large brick house with green shutters and flowers in the window boxes.
In spring and fall, Mrs. Gammond would often be working in the garden. She had white hair and fine mottled skin and Doug had always remembered her necklace of jade with its large stones of sea green and imperial purple, separated by rings of silver, resting across her chest like the jewels of some northern queen.
She would ask him how school was going and which subjects interested him and comment on the weather as they waited for his mother to emerge from the house.
"Such a handsome son you have," he could remember her saying.
People had always liked him for his looks. As a child, he'd got lost in the supermarket and all the other mothers had crowded around, saying how adorable he was. As a teenager, he'd begun jacking off naked in front of the mirror on the back of his closet door, goading himself on, his looks beginning to handle like his first real weapon, his first experience of control.
"She says I'm the best cleaning lady she's ever employed," his mother said once on the ride back to Alden, a wry smile on her face, as she smoked her first cigarette in hours, asking Doug to conspire with her for just a little while, to take her slender joke, to be with her for a few moments, on her side. "Maybe one day she'll give me a medal. A shiny medal."
The only man who ever visited their apartment was Father Griffin, in his horn-rimmed glasses and black raincoat. His narrow