As we played game after game of checkers, mostly in silence, I had time to consider what was most unusual about Edward’s house. It was not its size, or its darkness （though, curiously, the dim made it not gloomy but snug, and even as the afternoon stretched on, there was no need to turn on a lamp）， but the fact that we were there all alone. In my house, I was never alone. If my mother was at one of her meetings, there was Jane, and, sometimes, Matthew. But Jane was always there. She was cooking in the kitchen, or she was dusting in the living room, or she was sweeping the upstairs hallway. The farthest she strayed was to the side of the house, to hang the laundry on the line, or, occasionally, to the driveway, to bring Matthew, who was washing the car, his lunch. Even at night, she and Matthew were only a few hundred feet away, in their apartment above the garage. But I had never before been to a classmate’s house where there was no mother. You didn’t expect to see a father—they were creatures who materialized only at dinnertime, never in the afternoon—but the mothers were always there, a presence as reliable as a couch or a table. Sitting there, on Edward’s bed, playing checkers, I had the sudden notion that he lived by himself. I had a vision of Edward making himself dinner on the stove （I was not allowed to touch the stove in my house）， eating it at the kitchen table, washing the dishes, taking a bath, and putting himself to bed. There had been plenty of times when I had resented the lack of any true, meaningful privacy in my house, but suddenly the alternative—an absence of people, nothing but time and silence—seemed horrible, and it seemed to me that I should stay with Edward as long as I could, for when I left, he would have no one.
But as I was thinking this, there was a sound of the door opening, and then a woman’s voice, bright and cheerful, calling Edward’s name. “My mother,” Edward said, and for the first time, he smiled, a quick, bright grin, and climbed off the bed and hurried into the living room.
I followed, to see Edward’s mother kissing him, and then, before he could say anything, approaching me with her arms held out. “You must be Wika,” she said, smiling. “Edward’s told me so much about you,” and she pulled me close.
“It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Bishop,” I remembered to say, and she beamed and squeezed me again. “Victoria,” she corrected me, and then, seeing my face, “or Auntie! Just not Mrs. Bishop.” She turned to Edward, her arms still wrapped around me. “Are you boys hungry?”
“No, we had a snack,” he said, and she smiled at him, too. “Good boy,” she said, and yet her praise seemed to include me as well.
I watched her as she went to the kitchen. She was the most beautiful mother I had ever seen, so beautiful that if I had encountered her in another context, I would never have associated her with motherhood at all. She had dark-blond hair twisted into a bun at the base of her head, and her skin was a dark gold as well—more light-filled than mine, but darker than her son’s—and she wore what was in those days considered a low-cut dress of pink cotton, with white bands at the sleeves and throat, and a full skirt that spun around her legs as she moved. She smelled delicious, like a combination of fried meat and, beneath that, the gardenia blossom she wore pinned behind her ear, and she didn’t walk but twirled through the little house as if it were a palace, someplace expansive and dazzling.
It was only when she said that she hoped I was staying for dinner that I looked at the round-faced clock above the sink and realized that it was almost five-thirty, and I had told Matthew and Jane I’d be home an hour ago—never would I have assumed I would have wanted to stay at another boy’s house for so long. I could feel myself entering that stage of distress I often did when I knew I had done something wrong, but Mrs. Bishop told me not to worry, just to call home, and when Jane picked up, she sounded relieved. “Matthew will come get you now,” she said, before I even had a chance to ask if I could stay for dinner （which I wasn’t sure I wanted to do, anyway）。 “He’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“I have to go home,” I told Mrs. Bishop, when I had hung up, “I’m sorry,” and she smiled at me again.
“You’ll stay next time,” she said. She spoke in a slight singsong. “We’d like that, right, Edward?” And Edward nodded, though he was already moving about the kitchen with his mother, removing things from the refrigerator, and seemed to have forgotten I was still there.
Before I left, I gave her the jar of mango jam in my bag. “This is for you,” I said. “She”—I knew not to clarify that “she” was the housekeeper, and not my mother—“said you could give it back to me when it’s empty and then she’ll refill it next season.” But then I remembered the tree outside, and felt foolish, and was about to apologize when Mrs. Bishop pulled me close again.
“My favorite,” she said. “Tell your mother thank you.” She laughed. “I may need to ask her for the recipe—every year I swear I’m going to make jam, and every year I never do. I’m such a klutz in the kitchen, you see,” and she actually winked at me, as if she were letting me know a secret that no one else was privy to, not even her son.
I heard Matthew’s car pull up outside, and said goodbye to them both. But on the lanai, I turned and looked through the screen door and saw the two of them, mother and son, in the kitchen making dinner. Edward said something to his mother and she tipped her head back and laughed, and then reached over and rubbed the top of his head, playfully. They had turned the kitchen light on, and I had the strange sense that I was looking inside a diorama, at a scene of happiness I could witness but never enter.
* * *
—
“Bishop,” said my mother, later that night. “Bishop.”
I knew, even then, what she was thinking: Bishop was a famous name, an old name, almost as famous and old as our own. She was thinking that Edward was someone like us, and yet I knew he wasn’t, not in the way she meant.
“What does his father do?” she asked, and as I admitted I didn’t know, I realized that I hadn’t thought about his father at all. Part of this was, as I have said, because fathers were shadowy presences in all of our lives. You saw them on weekends and in the evenings, and if you were lucky, they were benevolent, distant beings, with an odd piece of candy for you, and if you were unlucky, they were chilly and remote, dispensers of whippings and spankings. My understanding of the world was very limited, but even I somehow comprehended that Edward didn’t have a father—or, more accurately, that Mrs. Bishop didn’t have a husband. The two of them, mother and son, were so complete together, cooking in that miniature kitchen, she playfully butting her hip against his side, he dramatically skidding to the right, his mother laughing at him, that there was no room for a father or a husband: They were a matched set, one female, one male, and another man would simply disrupt their symmetry.
“Well,” my mother said, “we should have them over for tea.”
And so, the following Sunday, they came. They couldn’t come on Saturday, I heard Jane tell my mother, because Mrs. Bishop had to work her shift. （“Her shift,” my mother echoed, in a tone that conveyed some meaning I couldn’t quite interpret. “All right, Jane, tell her Sunday.”） They arrived on foot, yet weren’t hot or flushed, which meant they had taken the bus and had walked to our house from the closest stop. Edward was wearing his school clothes. His mother was wearing another full-skirted cotton dress, this one hibiscus-yellow, her dark-blond hair in its knot, her lips painted a cheery red, even more beautiful than I’d remembered.