Angelina could not stop staring at her, her mother who sat very still, looking out at the water. And then Angelina saw her mother suddenly rise and walk into the street. An old man was crossing, he was weaving—not with drunkenness, it seemed, but with some malady of age. It was surprising to Angelina how quickly her mother moved to him; in the light from the streetlamp Angelina saw the old man’s face, and it was not just the way he smiled up at her mother, it was the humanness of his expression, the warmth and depth of his appreciation, and as her mother helped him across the street, Angelina saw then her mother’s face briefly in the light as well. Perhaps it was the angle of the light, but her mother’s face had a momentary brilliance upon it—as Angelina saw her mother take the man’s hand, saw her mother help this man across the street; and when they got to the other side they appeared to speak briefly to each other, and then her mother waved as the man went down the sidewalk. Angelina thought, Now she will come back upstairs.
But her mother sat down once again on the bench; she put her earbuds back in, and her head began moving up and down to whatever she was listening to on her phone, it would have to be an Elvis song. She was facing the sea, and seemed to be gazing out at the boats with their lights on.
—
Her mother had read to Angelina all the books about the little girl on the prairie, and when there was a television show about it she would watch the show with Angelina, the two of them curled up on the couch together. Her mother had told Angelina about how they killed the Indians, took their land. Her father had said they deserved it; her mother had told her they did not deserve it, but that is what happened. People always kept moving, her mother had said, it’s the American way. Moving west, moving south, marrying up, marrying down, getting divorced—but moving.
Her mother had recognized her the moment she was born—
“Okay, Mommy,” Angelina whispered. She stepped away from the window and went to the bedroom to get her computer, but she sat on the bed instead, looking around, this bed her mother shared with a man named Paolo.
For eighteen years her mother had put her to bed. Don’t leave yet, Angelina would say, not yet! Her father, from the doorway, would say, ’Night, Lina, go to sleep. Now Angelina gazed through the window at the sea; it was dark, the ships had their lights on. She heard her mother coming up the stairs. And she knew, Angelina knew, that she had seen something important when her mother helped the man who was unsteady crossing the street. Briefly—it would be brief, Angelina knew this, she knew she would always be the child—but briefly a ceiling had been raised; she pictured her mother’s quick and gracious loveliness to that man on the street: A street in a village on the coast of Italy, her mother, a pioneer.
Sister
Pete Barton knew that his sister Lucy was coming to Chicago for her paperback book tour; he followed her online. Only in the last few months had he had the house wired for Wi-Fi, and he had bought himself a small laptop computer, and what he most liked watching was what Lucy was up to. He felt a sense of awe that she was who she was: She had left this tiny house, this small town, the poverty they had endured—she’d left it all, and moved to New York City, and she was, in his eyes, famous. When he saw her on his computer, giving speeches to auditoriums that were packed with people, it gave him a quiet thrill. His sister—
Seventeen years it had been since he had seen her; she had not been back since their father died, although she had been to Chicago any number of times since then—she had told him this. But she called him most Sunday nights, and when they spoke he forgot about her being famous and just talked to her, and he listened as well; she’d had a new husband now for a number of years, and he heard about that, and she sometimes spoke of her daughters, but he didn’t care about them so much—he did not know why. But she seemed to understand this, and just spoke of them briefly.
When his telephone rang on Sunday night—a few weeks after he’d learned about her Chicago tour—Lucy said to him, “Petie, I’m coming to Chicago, and then I’m going to rent a car on that Saturday and drive to Amgash to see you.” He was astonished. “Great!” he said. And as soon as they hung up he felt fear.
He had two weeks.
During that time his fear increased, and when he spoke to her on the Sunday in between, and he said, “Really glad you’re coming to see me,” he thought she’d have an excuse and say it wouldn’t work out. Instead she said, “Oh, me too.”
So he set about cleaning the house. He bought some cleaning stuff and put it in a pail of hot water, watching the suds, then he got down on his hands and knees and scrubbed the floor; the grime there amazed him. He scrubbed the kitchen counters, and was amazed by their filth as well. He took down the curtains that hung in front of the blinds and washed them in the old washing machine. In his mind they were blue-gray curtains, but it turned out that they were off-white. He washed them a second time, and they were an even brighter off-white. He cleaned the windows, and noticed that their streaking was on the outside as well, so he went outside and cleaned the windows from there. In the late August sun they seemed to still have streaky swirls when he got done. He thought he might keep the blinds down, which is what he usually did anyway.