She was sitting in bed, painting her fingernails. She turned her head away to cough, and I saw the back of her hair, matted like you’d find in a shower drain. But her eyes were clear. She looked sober. The room was immaculate. Her desk was clear: no cats in coats or snowdrifts, no dolls made of Popsicle sticks. There was a suitcase on the floor.

Abe walked to her bed and bent to kiss her cheek. She cupped her palm around the smooth curve of his jaw. He’d shaved in a gas station. I knew what she’d be feeling: the holes of all those fresh pores, a coolness like his skin was breathing. Afterward, the underside of her palm would smell faintly like forest.

Abe sat on the edge of her bed and cleared his throat. He said he was sorry we hadn’t told her—about us, about all of it.

She wasn’t angry about our loving each other, she said, or whatever we’d done, only the secret. She wished we hadn’t kept it. She turned to me. She only wanted to hear about her son. What had he been to me?

There were true things I could think to say. He’d been kind and honest with a body I’d hurt so many times, for reasons I couldn’t quite explain—reasons that, after a while, were nothing more than the residue of reasons that had come before.

I looked at him. He chewed his lip, remembering, and gripped the bed with one big red hand. I said, “He took care of me.”

She reached for him, clasped his head in her hands and kissed the top of his hair. She whispered something into his scalp. It could have been: You learned it. Or maybe: You were it. She told us she was leaving.

I said, “You can’t.”

“I can.”

I said, “Where will you go?”

She didn’t know. She’d find a place.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “Tell me what to do.”

She shook her head. “Nothing at all.”

I went to bed alone and lay awake to the sounds of Harrison Street: the liquid hush-hush of the freeway, the Velcro meow of our neighbor’s cat, moans catching in her throat, and two bums arguing outside. I couldn’t sleep. I got up and dressed. I walked to my car. It was the middle of the night. It was strange to walk without the cloak of his huge streetlit shadow. I couldn’t have predicted it, but there it was: I was going south. I wanted to see my mother.

Years ago she and I had gone to see an exhibit of glass flowers. They were finely structured and proportional, tiger lilies and daffodils. Their blossoms reflected the sun like a professor’s spectacles. I marveled at their natural geometry. I sounded out their scientific names. My mother didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. The room was cold. Most rooms, to me, back then, were cold.