Union Atlantic Page 0,105

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.

"I should say ... about Peter. He's a good person. He's been good to me."

"Glad to hear it. Seems like you've done okay."

"What I have," she said, her voice careful and measured, "it's enough."

How often had he imagined her here, drunk and alone? How long had that vision turned at the back of his mind, a wheel never grasping the other gears, a ghost seeking its way back into the machine?

"I've been in Massachusetts