By now West had ascertained that awake was a code word for reasonably sober.
“Have you talked to her since?”
He opened his door. West gathered the Caller ID system from the backseat and followed
him inside the house. They found Mrs. Brazil in the kitchen, shakily spreading peanut
butter on Ritz crackers. She had heard them drive up, and this had given her time to
mobilize her defenses. Mrs. Brazil did not speak to either one of them.
“Hello,” West said.
“How ya doing, Mom?” Brazil tried to hug her, but his mother wanted none of it, and
waved him off with the knife.
Brazil noticed that the knob had been removed from his bedroom door, and he looked at
West and smiled a little.
“I forgot about you and your tools,” he said.
“I’m sorry. I should have put it back on.” She looked around as if there might be a
screwdriver somewhere.
“Don’t worry about it.”
They walked inside his bedroom. She took off her raincoat, hesitating, looking around as
if she had never been here before. She was disturbed by his presence in this intimate
corner of his life, where he had been a boy and turned into a man, and where he had
dreamed. Another hot flash was coming on, her face turning red as she plugged the
Caller ID system into his phone.
“Obviously, this won’t help when you get your new phone number at your apartment,”
she explained.
“But what’s more important is who has been calling this number.” She straightened up, her work complete.
“Does anybody besides your mother and me know you’ve moved?”
“No,” he replied, his eyes on her.
There had never been a woman in his room before, excluding his mother.
Brazil glanced about, hoping there was nothing here that might embarrass him or reveal
something to her that he did not want her to know. She was looking around, too, neither
of them in a hurry to leave.
“You’ve got a lot of trophies,” she remarked.
Brazil shrugged, moving closer to look at crowded shelves he paid no mind to anymore.
He pointed out especially significant awards and explained what they were. He gave her
a few highlights of dramatic matches, and for a while they sat on his bed as he reminisced
about days from his youth that he had lived with no audience, really, but strangers. He
told her about his father, and she gave him her own vague recollection of Drew Brazil.
“I only knew who he was, that was about it,” she said.
“Back then I was pretty green, too, just a beat cop hoping to make sergeant. I remember all the women thought he was good-looking.” She smiled.
“There was a lot of talk about that, and that he seemed nice.”
“He was nice,” Brazil told her.
“I guess in some ways he was old-fashioned, but that was the time he lived in.” He
picked at his fingernails, his head bent.
“He was crazy about my mother. But she’s always been spoiled. She grew up that way.
I’ve always thought the biggest reason she couldn’t deal with his death is she lost the
person who doted on her the most and took care of her.”
“You don’t think she loved him?” West was curious, and she was very aware of how
close they were sitting on his bed. She was glad the door was partially open, the knob
off.
“My mother doesn’t know how to love anybody, including herself.”
Brazil was watching her. She could feel his eyes like heat. Thunder and lightning played
war outside the win dow as rain came down hard.
She looked at him, too, and wondered if life would ruin his sweetness as he got older.
She felt sure it would, and got up from the bed.
“What you’ve got to do is call the phone company first thing in the morning,” she advised him.
“Tell them you want Caller ID. This little box won’t do you a bit of good until they give
you that service, okay?”
He watched her, saying nothing at first. Then it occurred to him, “Is it expensive?”
“You can manage it. Who’s been hitting on you at work?” she wanted to know as she