“You’ll laugh. Big professor and all like you. Promise you won’t laugh, no matter how stupid it’s gonna sound to a tweedy Princeton snob like you.”

“I didn’t go to Princeton. Or have you forgotten? Their silver-polishing scholarships had all been taken. Look …” I grew abruptly enraged. I stood up from my kitchen stool. Bethany, behind me, touched my upper back—not knowing what’d happened, and yet knowing—stroking my neck in the way one cunning, controlled human will try to soothe some stupid, volatile, and surging larger animal. I mean: here I’d tracked my mother down after years of abandonment, and she wouldn’t even tell me …

“Okay okay …,” she relented. “Sheesh. You never did have all that hot of a sense of humor, ya know? I seem to remember your timing also left little something to be desired. But ready to copy? Thing’s named: More Trouble Than It’s Worth II.—You all right with that?”

And she laughed, hard. She laughed until she coughed the way Clyde used to, sliding from forgetful mirth to overmindful mortality. And finding even that funny. I listened to her croupy cackling. I waited for her breath’s ballast to right itself.

I snorted at the name, then asked, “May I be mirthful?”

“Thought you’d never ask,” she said. “Been wishing for a little lightness out of you for absolute ages. Glad to hear some now. Guess you were just born serious. Never knew where you got that from….”

“Well, if you don’t know, maybe a phone directory might come in handy….” From across the room my wife was giving me the football time-out signal.

“Whoosh …,” Grace said to me and her Florida audience, “fasten yer life preservers, boys, we’re in for a bumpy sail real soon. And, hey, Meadows, know what? I’m up for it. I don’t claim to’ve been yer average Apple Pie Mom. But sounds like you turned out okay. Not that I’m taking much of any credit, mind you. Still … Yeah, come on down with your girls and wife. Oh, I read the papers. I know you have them. And I’m ready for you. Always have been. It’s you weren’t ready for me.”

“Yeah, well, I was one of the few in town….”

Why was I blurting these things? It wasn’t really like me. My wife snatched the receiver. “Mrs. Delman? Well, ‘Grace’ then, thanks. We’re so excited, the girls and I are, about finally meeting you. Too much time has passed … and Meadows is beside himself with anticipation…. Right, but he’s a sweetie underneath. Sometimes way under. Soon, then … Great. Your boy’s a good man, a wonderful dad, if occasionally somewhat temperamental. You’ve no idea where he gets that, do you?”

As they chatted and chatted then laughed, I had to leave the house.

I told myself, “Look for the silver lining: you now have something worse to dread than Disney World.” I loathed the notion of flying south to some Magic Kingdom, paying its inflated monopolistic rates.