His mother nodded. And was crying now, silent, the tears running over her face. Her hands wrung before her, tugged and clenched and twisted in her apron. He stepped the two feet and reached and laid his hand flat on her forearm. The first time he’d touched her since arriving home. Then laid his other hand on her other arm. She looked up at him, her eyes great and wide and wet. She said, her voice husked, “You recall that old song, Norman? I used to sing it when you were a baby, me jolly and disbelieving.”

He looked down at her and shook his head. “I don’t recall you singing.”

And she held his eyes and her hands curled up over his arms and her voice low and pliant with her whisper sang,

“We’re gettin ready for the mother-in-law,
gettin ready for the fray.
When she puts her face inside this place
we’ll make the old girl feel quite gay.
There’s a little ell room on the third floor up
where the beetles up the wall do climb.
Mother, mother, mother,
Mother, mother, mother.
We’ll have a lively time.”

He wrapped his arms around her back and drew her against him, feeling her now as an old woman the same way he’d seen her the afternoon before. She came against him and laid her head sideways against his chest and he stood high craned over her, holding her and feeling as awkward and rough as if he’d been new split from some great tree, some man made from some material and propped up for all to see. He held his mother close against him, his breath warm against her shoulder coming back onto his face. He thought again of the woman waiting upstairs for him and of all she’d left behind and also brought with her to this place. It was her courage somehow that allowed him to hold his mother so close and long against him.