Nope, I said, and kissed her temple. Not a bit. My ma got out of the hospital five days later. She walked with a limp for a little while, but that went away and a month later she was back at work again only half shifts at first but then full time, just as if nothing had happened. I returned to school and got a job at Pat’s Pizza in downtown Orono. The money wasn’t great, but it was enough to get my car fixed.
That was good; I’d lost what little taste for hitchhiking I’d ever had. My mother tried to quit smoking and for a little while she did. Then I came back from school for April vacation a day early, and the kitchen was just as smoky as it had ever been. She looked at me with eyes that were both ashamed and defiant. I can’t, she said. I’m sorry, Al I know you want me to and I know I should, but there’s such a hole in my life without it. Nothin fills it. The best I can do is wish I’d never started in the first place.
Two weeks after I graduated from college, my ma had another stroke just a little one. She tried to quit smoking again when the doctor scolded her, then put on fifty pounds and went back to the tobacco. As a dog returneth to its vomit, the Bible says; I’ve always liked that one. I got a pretty good job in Portland on my first try lucky, I guess, and started the work of convincing her to quit her own job. It was a tough sled at first.
I might have given up in disgust, but I had a certain memory that kept me digging away at her Yankee defenses.
You ought to be saving for your own life, not taking care of me, she said. You’ll want to get married someday, Al, and what you spend on me you won’t have for that. For your real life.
You’re my real life, I said, and kissed her. You can like it or lump it, but that’s just the way it is.
And finally she threw in the towel. We had some pretty good years after that seven of them in all. I didn’t live with her, but I visited her almost every day. We played a lot of gin rummy and watched a lot of movies on the video recorder I bought her. Had a bucketload of laughs, as she liked to say. I don’t know if I owe those years to George Staub or not, but they were good years. And my memory of the night I met Staub never faded and grew dreamlike, as I always expected it would; every incident, from the old man telling me to wish on the harvest moon to the fingers fumbling at my shirt as Staub passed his button on to me remained perfectly clear. And there came a day when I could no longer find that button. I knew I’d had it when I moved into my little apartment in Falmouth I kept it in the top drawer of my bedside table, along with a couple of combs, my two sets of cuff links, and an old political button that said
bill clinton, the safe sax president but then it came up missing. And when the telephone rang a day or two later, I knew why Mrs. McCurdy was crying. It was the bad news I’d never quite stopped expecting; fun is fun and done is done.
When the funeral was over, and the wake, and the seemingly endless line of mourners had finally come to its end, I went back to the little house in Harlow where my mother had spent her final few years, smoking and eating powdered doughnuts. It had been Jean and Alan Parker against the world; now it was just me.
I went through her personal effects, putting aside the few papers that would have to be dealt with later, boxing up the things I’d want to keep on one side of the room and the things I’d want to give away to the Goodwill on the other. Near the end of the job I got down on my knees and looked under her bed and there it was, what I’d been looking for all along without quite admitting it to myself: a dusty button reading