He was silent, thinking about Webb, the memory of what had happened washing over him like icy water.

“Why, exactly, are we going to my house?” Brazil finally got around to asking that.

“You get too many hang-ups,” West replied. “You want to tell me how come?”

“Some pervert,” Brazil muttered.

“Who?” West didn’t like to hear this.

“How the hell do I know?” The subject bored and annoyed him.

“Some gay guy?”

“A woman, I think,” said Brazil. “I don’t know if she’s gay.”

“When did they begin?” West was getting angry.

“Don’t know.” His heart constricted as they pulled into the driveway of his mother’s home and parked behind the old Cadillac. “About the time I started at the paper,” he quietly said.

West looked at him, touched by the sadness in his eyes as he looked out at a dump he called home and tried not to think of the terrible truths it held.

“Andy,” West said, “what does your mother think right now? Does she know you’ve moved out?”

“I left a note,” he answered. “She wasn’t awake when I was packing.”

By now West had ascertained that awake was a code word for reasonably sober. “Have you talked to her since?”

He opened his door. West gathered the Caller I.D. system from the backseat and followed him inside the house. They found Mrs. Brazil in the kitchen, shakily spreading peanut butter on Ritz crackers. She had heard them drive up, and this had given her time to mobilize her defenses. Mrs. Brazil did not speak to either one of them.

“Hello,” West said.

“How ya doing, Mom?” Brazil tried to hug her, but his mother wanted none of it and waved him off with the knife.

Brazil noticed that the knob had been removed from his bedroom door, and he looked at West and smiled a little. “I forgot about you and your tools,” he said.

“I’m sorry. I should have put it back on.” She looked around as if there might be a screwdriver somewhere.

“Don’t worry about it.”

They walked inside his bedroom. She took off her raincoat, hesitating, looking around as if she had never been here before. She was disturbed by his presence in this intimate corner of his life, where he had been a boy, had turned into a man and dreamed. Another hot flash was coming on, her face turning red as she plugged the Caller I.D. system into his phone.

“Obviously, this won’t help when you get your new phone number at your apartment,” she explained. “But what’s more important is who’s been calling this number.” She straightened up, her work complete. “Does anybody besides your mother and me know you’ve moved?”

“No,” he replied, his eyes on her.

There had never been a woman in his room before, excluding his mother. Brazil glanced about, hoping there was nothing here that might embarrass him or reveal something to her that he did not want her to know. She was looking around, too, neither of them in a hurry to leave.