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more time passed and the more she thought of the two of them in there, the angrier she got. Not merely on her own behalf, but on behalf of the girl. It was so ugly and pointless what the boy was doing, so soulless. She tried to go to sleep again and forget it all but she couldn’t help placing herself in the girl’s shoes. She might be thinking of the boy right now, and of the countries they’d visit together. And tomorrow when they went out again, the boy would tell her nothing of what he’d done with the hostess, nor would he seem different.
    She wouldn’t abide this. Not in her house, and not with a woman she’d come to blows with, no matter whose fault it had been. She walked to the study and threw the doors open.
    â€œI want you to get the fuck out of here,” she said.
    But there was no one in the room except the boy. He was alone watching TV. There was a bowl of ice cream before him and a can of 7UP.
    He seemed not angry then but frightened, the way one might feel while watching a spouse put her hand through a glass door panel, which her husband had watched her do. It happened in the period when she’d thought he’d been screwing around. He hadn’t, though he admitted he’d come close once. The boy never knew anything of this.
    Now he was walking toward the mother. She was crying soundlessly, and she felt as though she might never stop.
    â€œMy God, Mom, what’s going on? What’s this about?”
    On the TV the woman, Barbara Stanwyck, was running her fingers through Henry Fonda’s hair. The mother had seen the movie a half-dozen times, but she’d managed not to recognize the dialogue.
    â€œI thought . . .”
    â€œI know . . . I know,” he said. He said it as one might say it to a child who’d thought she heard a ghost.
    She didn’t have to explain anything, she realized; he knew her better than she did right then and maybe he had for a while. Her son. It was as though her irrational behavior had promoted him to the role of the wise and clement adult. And while she felt significant pride in this, she feared now that he’d plan to spend his coming vacations in Seattle, or Europe, or Colorado. He was unlikely to spend another Christmas in New York with her.
    â€œCome on,” he said, as though reading her thoughts. “Let’s watch the rest of this.”
    â€œAll right,” she said, and she let him fill her in on what she’d missed.
    Before the end of the movie, he fell asleep. She turned the TV off and threw a blanket over him.
    It was four now, one o’clock in Seattle. There was an off chance he could still be up, but of course there was no guarantee he would be alone. She imagined calling him, and him consoling her with his new girlfriend in bed next to him, and afterward, he’d say, “She’s still having a rough time of it.” And it would even score points with the woman who would see how gracious and tolerant he was. She thought then about the hostess, because it was she who had started all this. What was it the mother had hated so much? She was no criminal, and she hadn’t treated the boy badly as far as the mother knew.
    She had simply seemed too desperate, too lonely, too hungry. Her needs were too naked. The mother could imagine someone like that consuming her boy, swallowing him up, before he had the chance to see the world and become the person she knew he could be. He snored softly now, with the beginnings of a cold, she knew, because when he was a child it would begin that way: a mild sawing sound, a sniffle the next morning, and a temperature the following night. She would douse it with soups and juices, and she would secretly enjoy the days he was too sick to go to school and had to stay home with her. It was in the time they’d first moved to the Village, in that odd little apartment on Tenth Street with the stained-glass window and the false fireplace they