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.

This fact and others, I withhold.

But I fear I’m letting her down, even by informing my sheltered Mom that a boy thirty-four might be in worse health than poor Dad out there. “Mom? Look, now he’s pushing a shopping cart. What’s the cart for?”

“The cart, darling, is to hold Dick up.”

“Oh. Oooh, boy.”

“That it should be Robert seems particularly unfair,” she goes on. “I don’t know how to ask these things—Yours, it’s a world whose forms I … But, were you and Robert ever … ? Did you two think of yourselves … as more than … ?”

“Just friends. If that’s not a contradiction in terms these days. No, he never found me interesting, in that way.”