“Well,” said the voice peevishly, and it seemed to me the voice was familiar to me, very much so, perhaps the most familiar voice of all. “Is there something you want to say? He won’t like it, you know, if all evening you only stand around like a mute.”

“Who…” I managed to say. “Who is coming?”

The voice clucked her tongue peevishly.

“Is that supposed to be funny? You know perfectly well it’s your father.”

My father, I thought, with sudden sharpness.

“My father?” I asked, in a voice as dry as sticks, as the wind rustling through dead grass. “How do you know my father?”

The woman in the bath was silent, and it seemed to me she was growing more and more like someone I knew by the second.

“Come over here,” she said, her voice calm. “Come over here and I’ll show you.”

Does this make sense? I asked myself for the second time, as I crossed the room toward the bath and the woman in it. It seemed as though I were crossing the room for eons, as though I had to cross the whole horizon to get there. When I reached the edge of the bath, I realized that the lights in the room must have restored themselves at some point, because I could see the woman clearly, though I tried not to stare down at her naked body: the flat breasts with their dark nipples, the thatch of hair that sprang between her legs.

“Kneel on the floor,” she said, and when I hesitated, she said, “Go on.”

Don’t, I told myself, lose the thread—but already it was spooling away from me, I sank to my knees beside the edge of the bathtub and found myself looking into my mother’s eyes.

I did not see her lift her hand—did I ever? Only a bright blackness that stung me on the temple.

“Now,” she said.

How changeable this woman is, I thought. Nothing is fixed.

“What was that question you asked? Do you need to ask that question again?”

“No,” I whispered.

“No is right,” she said. “Now come and rub your mother’s head.”

Thoughts small and large flooded my brain. Stick to one thing, I told myself, as I knelt behind the woman in the bath and began to stroke her thin brown hair. I drew one thumb across her forehead and then the other. Two fingers, I thought, and the thought ballooned in me and then vanished.

“You know,” said my mother in a dreamy voice, her eyes closed. “It is really a shame that he won’t come and stay longer. Wouldn’t you like that? To have a real father, like all your little friends?”

I nodded, though I knew she couldn’t see me.

“I know I would like that,” she said. “Of course, you don’t know how exhausting it is, raising a child on your own.