“Mom? I’m gonna chance sounding tactless here. We, uh, both do know where the Buick is, right? I mean, we’ve been sitting here going on what? Three hours? Maybe I’ve grown pushy from my years in overdrive in New York, and maybe I’m not respecting the terms of your agreement, yours and his … whatever. But how about I barge out there and lead him to it? Tactless, right? The car is on the other side of this place. True, he’s getting ‘warmer,’ but that asphalt’s heat might kill him first. Our car is due east, Mom. Dad’s due west.” I sing along with one carol, “‘We Three Kings DisOrient Are.’”

“On that, you’ll hear no argument from me. But, honey, you know how he gets. And, during your first visit in a whole year, how would that be for his self-esteem? You come and then you leave. I have to live with him. He’ll find it eventually, trial and error. Patience. That’s become my full-time job. Why, just last week …” And she wraps arms around herself, leans forward, shifting from the sight of him.

She’s about to offer something she feels is disloyal. I urge her on. “He won’t know. He’s quite a distance. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you, watching all this happen so fast. We’re going through it with Robert, but at least I have Angie and the others, though the others’re none too well. The worst is having nobody who’ll listen …”

Mom lowers her eyes; the toes of her good shoes draw even against the mall’s blue-gray terrazzo. “Last Thursday, the fourteenth”—(I sense a boastful mnemonic virtuosity in this flourish—forgivable, even adorable) “at three-ten p.m., he did this, too. Lost it. The car, I mean. And as usual, he took his new car-door-opener thingie, and was aiming it at anything even vaguely … Buick-like …”

(I grin, and know I am my mother’s son.)

“Finally, I carried take-out lemonade over where he’d got himself to. No judgment on my face, you know, no impatience, just happening to wander up with a cold drink. Then I see, see he’s …”

I sidle one inch closer. This familiar conspiracy between us started at least nine months before my birth.

“See, honey? Dick was using the remote, from our television set … Richard Hartley Mims the first, my hero, out in the heat trying to find our car by changing channels. Back at home!” She covers her mouth, takes a great fish gasp then makes a smile of it … “But, tell me about your friends, about our friend, our Robert.”

I wish I could rush her with good news. Of Robert, I mention only his loss of weight and widening of delusions. I do not tell her he now believes that a high school musical is about to go on, that its whole cast is still waiting to learn the show-stopping song he has yet to compose. The cast stands anxious around him. Cars are pulling into the school parking lot-parents, arriving, especially his. Robert seems to sit at the piano before reams of blank paper, the actors gather, sweating through their makeup and cowgirl costumes, eager to see if they can’t learn a whole song real darn quick. Nothing comes.