SPIN

Come nightfall I closed the curtains and turned on every light in every room, more lights than my mother had ever deemed appropriate at any given time, a declaration against death. I wondered if Carol had noticed the glare across the winter-brown divide, and if so whether she found it comforting or alarming.

E.D. came home around nine that night, and he was gracious enough to knock at the door and offer his sympathy. He looked uncomfortable under the porch light, his tailored suit disheveled. His breath smoked in the evening chill. He touched his pockets, breast and hip, unconsciously, as if he had forgotten something or simply didn't know what to do with his hands. "I'm sorry, Tyler," he said.

His condolences seemed grossly premature, as if my mother's death were not merely inevitable but an established fact. He had already written her off. But she was still drawing breath, I thought, or at least processing oxygen, miles away, alone in her room at George Washington. "Thank you for saying so, Mr. Lawton."

"Jesus, Tyler, call me E.D. Everybody else does. Jason tells me you're doing good work down there at Perihelion Florida."

"My patients seem satisfied."

"Great. Every contribution counts, no matter how small. Listen, did Carol put you out here? Because we have a guest bedroom ready if you want it."

"I'm fine right where I am."

"Okay. I understand that. Just knock if you need anything, all right?"

He ambled back across the winter-brown lawn. Much had been made, in the press and in the Lawton family, of Jason's genius, but I reminded myself that E.D. could claim that title, too. He had parlayed an engineering degree and a talent for business into a major corporate enterprise, and he had been selling aerostat-enabled telecom bandwidth when Americom and AT&T were still blinking at the Spin like startled deer. What he lacked was not Jason's intelligence but Jason's wit and Jason's deep curiosity about the physical universe. And maybe a dash of Jason's humanity.

Then I was alone again, at home and not at home, and I sat on the sofa and marveled for a while at how little this room had changed. Sooner or later it would fall to me to dispose of the contents of the house, a job I could barely envision, a job more difficult, more preposterous, than the work of cultivating life on another planet. But maybe it was because I was contemplating that act of deconstruction that I noticed a gap on the top shelf of the etagere next to the TV.

Noticed it because, to my knowledge, the high shelf had received no more than a cursory dusting in all the years I had lived here. The top shelf was the attic of my mother's life. I could have recited the order of the contents of that shelf by closing my eyes and picturing it: her high school yearbooks (Martell Secondary School in Bingham, Maine, 1975, '76, '77, '78); her Berkeley grad book, 1982; a jade Buddha book-end; her diploma in a stand-up plastic frame; the brown accordion file in which she kept her birth certificate, passport, and tax documents; and, braced by another green Buddha, three tattered New Balance shoeboxes labeled mementos (school), mementos (marcus), and odds & ends.

But tonight the second jade Buddha stood askew and the box marked mementos (school) was missing. I assumed she had taken it down herself, though I hadn't seen it elsewhere in the house. Of the three boxes, the only one she had regularly opened in my presence was odds & ends. It had been packed with concert playbills and ticket stubs, brittle newspaper clippings (including her own parents' obituaries), a souvenir lapel pin in the shape of the schooner Bluenose from her honeymoon in Nova Scotia, matchbooks culled from restaurants and hotels she had visited, costume jewelry, a baptismal certificate, even a lock of my own baby hair preserved in a slip of waxed paper closed with a pin.

I took down the other box, the one marked mementos (marcus). I had never been especially curious about my father, and my mother had seldom spoken about him apart from the basic thumbnail sketch (a handsome man, an engineer, a jazz collector, E.D.'s best friend in college, but a heavy drinker and a victim, one night on the road home from an electronics supplier in Milpitas, of his own fondness for speedy automobiles). Inside the shoebox was a stack of letters in vellum envelopes addressed in a curt, clean handwriting that must have been his. He had sent these letters to Belinda Sutton, my mother's maiden name, at an address in Berkeley I didn't recognize.

I removed one of those envelopes and opened it, pulled out the yellowing paper and unfolded it.

The paper was unlined but the handwriting cut across the page in small, neat parallels. Dear Bel, it began, and continued, I thought I said everything on the phone last night but can't stop thinking about you. Writing this seems to bring you closer tho not as close as I'd like. Not as close as we were last August! I play that memory like videotape every night I can't lie down next to you.

And more, which I did not read. I folded the letter and tucked it into its yellowed envelope and closed the box and put it back where it belonged.

* * * * *

In the morning there was a knock at the door. I answered it expecting Carol or some amanuensis from the Big House. But it wasn't Carol. It was Diane. Diane in a midnight-blue floor-sweeper skirt and high-collared blouse. Her hands were clasped under her breasts. She looked up at me, eyes sparkling. "I'm so sorry," she said. "I came as soon as I heard."

But too late. The hospital had called ten minutes earlier. Belinda Dupree had died without regaining consciousness.

* * * * *

At the memorial service E.D. spoke briefly and uncomfortably and said nothing of significance. I spoke, Diane spoke; Carol meant to speak but in the end was too tearful or inebriated to mount the pulpit.

Diane's eulogy was the most moving, cadenced and heartfelt, a catalogue of the kindnesses my mother had exported across the lawn like gifts from a wealthier, kinder nation. I was grateful for it. Everything else about the ceremony seemed mechanical by comparison: half-familiar faces bobbed out of the crowd to utter homilies and half-truths, and I thanked them and smiled, thanked them and smiled, until it was time for the walk to the graveside.

* * * * *

There was a function at the Big House that evening, a post-funeral reception at which I was offered condolences by E.D.'s business associates, none of whom I knew but some of whom had known my father, and by the household staff at the Big House, whose grief was more authentic and harder to bear.

Caterers slid through the crowd with wineglasses on silvered platters and I drank more than I should have, until Diane, who had also been gliding among the guests, tugged me away from yet another round of so-sorry-for-your-loss and said, "You need air."

"It's cold out."

"If you keep drinking you'll get surly. You're halfway there already. Come on, Ty. Just for a few minutes."

Out onto the lawn. The brown midwinter lawn. The same lawn where we had witnessed the opening moments of the Spin almost twenty years ago. We walked the circumference of the Big House—strolled, really, despite the stiff March breeze and the granular snow still inhabiting every sheltered or shaded space.

We had already said all the obvious things. We had compared notes: my career, the move to Florida, my work at Perihelion; her years with Simon, drifting out of NK toward a blander orthodoxy, welcoming the Rapture with piety and self-denial. ("We don't eat meat," she had confided. "We don't wear artificial fibers") Walking next to her, lightheaded, I wondered whether I had become gross or repugnant in her eyes, whether she was conscious of the ham-and-cheese aperitifs on my breath or the cotton-poly jacket I was wearing. She hadn't changed much, though she was thi