Ordinarily his monitoring of my comings and goings sets up my hackles, but tonight I was weary down to my bones. His concern was a comfort, giving back an illusion of childhood with a mother whose scolding conceals affection and the promise of protection. I agreed to stay put for the rest of the night, agreed to wrap myself in a blanket-an afghan-on the couch while he brought supper up to my place.

We ate spaghetti and meatballs with the dogs at our feet and watched the nine o’clock news on Channel 13 to see how the DuPage sheriff would spin the Whitby story. We had to sit through a report on terrorism first, this

time on some Egyptian immigrant who’d disappeared before the FBI could question him about his links to AlQaeda.

A reporter I didn’t recognize explained that the man was a seventeenyear-old dishwasher whose visa had expired.

“Benjamin Sadawi came to Chicago from Cairo two years ago to learn English and to try to find a better job than he could at home. He lived with his uncle’s family in Uptown, but, when his uncle died, his aunt moved back to Egypt with her children. Sadawi decided to stay here alone. The FBI says the job was a cover, that Sadawi was really here as a terrorist. Our Middle East correspondent spoke with his mother through an interpreter.”

“My son is a good boy.” A tired-looking woman sat cross-legged on a floor with a dozen people crowding around her. “Since my husband is dead, Benji works hard for me, for his sisters, washing dishes, sending money home to us. When would he have time for meeting terrorists? We only want to have him back safe with us. We worry all the time, but we cannot even come to America to look for him, we have only the money that he sends us to live on.”

The anchor switched to an assistant U.S. attorney, who explained that every terrorist had a plausible cover story, and most of them had doting mothers. The anchor thanked him, then said, “Just ahead, a grisly death in one of Chicago’s most exclusive suburbs.”

I muted the set as a group of frantic beer drinkers began jumping and dancing across the screen.

Mr. Contreras grunted. “Kid is probably hand in glove with those AlQaeda thugs. That’s why his ma won’t come here in person to look for him: she knows as soon as Immigration looks at her passport the cat’ll be out of the bag.”

“You don’t think she’s just worried about her son? Morrell did a story last month about reaction in Pakistan to a guy who died out in Coolis prison. He’d been held for eleven weeks without anyone in our government telling his family where he was.”

“All I’m saying, doll . . :’ Mr. Contreras began. We’d had the same disagreement a few dozen times, ever since the FBI and INS started rounding up Middle Easterners on suspicion of terrorism back in September.