The Stand

“Sure.” He shuffled his feet. “I wanted to apologize. I should have called you last night—”

“Yeah. Good idea.”

“I stayed with Buddy. We… uh… we went out steppin. Did the town.”

“I figured it was that. That or something like it.” She hooked a small stool over with her foot, climbed up on it, and began to count the bottles of floor-wax on the top shelf, touching each one lightly with the tips of her right thumb and forefinger as she went. She had to reach, and when she did, her dress pulled up and he could see beyond the brown tops of her stockings to the waffled white flesh of her upper thighs and he turned his eyes away, suddenly and aimlessly recalling what had happened to Noah’s third son when he looked at his father as the old man lay drunk and naked on his pallet. Poor guy had ended up being a hewer of wood and fetcher of water ever after. Him and all his descendants. And that’s why we have race riots today, son. Praise God.

“Is that all you came to tell me?” she asked, looking around at him for the first time.

“Well, where I was and to apologize. It was crummy of me to forget.”

“Yeah,” she said again. “But you got your crummy side to you, Larry. Did you think I forgot that?”

He flushed. “Mom, listen—”

“You’re bleeding. Some stripper hit you with a loaded G-string?” She turned back to the shelves, and after she had counted the whole row of bottles on the top one, she made a notation on her clipboard. “Someone has had themselves two bottles of floor-wax this past week,” she remarked. “Lucky them.”

“I came to say I was sorry! ” Larry told her loudly. She didn’t jump, but he did. A little.

“Yeah, so you said. Mr. Geoghan is go

“I didn’t get in a barroom fight and I wasn’t in a strip-joint. It wasn’t anything like that. It was just…” He trailed off.

She turned around, eyebrows arched in that old sardonic way he remembered so well. “Was what?”

“Well…” He couldn’t think of a convincing lie quick enough. “It was. A. Uh. Spatula.”

“Someone mistook you for a fried egg? Must have been quite a night you and Buddy had out on the town.”

He kept forgetting that she could run rings around him, had always been able to, probably always would.

“It was a girl, Ma. She threw it at me.”

“She must be a hell of a shot,” Alice Underwood said, and turned away again. “That dratted Consuela is hiding the requisition forms again. Not that they do much good; we never get all the stuff we need, but we get plenty I wouldn’t know what to do with if my life depended on it.”

“Ma, are you mad at me?”

Her hands suddenly dropped to her sides. Her shoulders slumped.

“Don’t be mad at me,” he whispered. “Don’t be, okay? Huh?”

She turned around and he saw an u

“Larry,” she said gently. “Larry, Larry, Larry.”

For a moment he thought she was going to say no more; even allowed himself to hope this was so.

“Is that all you can say? ‘Don’t be mad at me, please, Ma, don’t be mad’? I hear you on the radio, and even though I don’t like that song you sing, I’m proud it’s you singing it. People ask me if that’s really my son and I say yes, that’s Larry. I tell them you could always sing, and that’s no lie, is it?”

He shook his head miserably, not trusting himself to speak.

“I tell them how you picked up Do

“I’m not in any trouble!” he said indignantly.

“Yes you are. I know the signs. I’ve been your mother for a long time, and you can’t bullshit me, Larry. Trouble is something you have always looked around for when you couldn’t just turn your head and see it. Sometimes I think you’d cross the street to step in dogshit. God will forgive me for saying it, because God knows it’s true. Am I mad? No. Am I disappointed? Yes. I had hoped you would change out there. You didn’t. You went away a little boy in a man’s body and you came back the same way, except the man got his hair processed. You know why I think you came home?”

He looked at her, wanting to speak, but knowing the only thing he would be able to say if he did would make them both mad: Don’t cry, Mom, huh?

“I think you came home because you couldn’t think where else to go. You didn’t know who else would take you in. I never said a mean word about you to anyone else, Larry, not even to my own sister, but since you’ve pushed me to it, I’ll tell you exactly what I think of you. I think you’re a taker. You’ve always been one. It’s like God left some part of you out when He built you inside of me. You’re not bad, that’s not what I mean. Some of the places we had to live after your father died, you would have gone bad if there was bad in you, God knows. I think the worst thing I ever caught you doing was writing a nasty word in the downstairs hall of that place on Carstairs Avenue in Queens. You remember that?”

He remembered. She had chalked that same word on his forehead and then made him walk around the block with her three times. He had never written that word or any other word on a building, wall, or stoop.

“The worst part, Larry, is that you mean well. Sometimes I think it would almost be a mercy if you were broke worse. As it is, you seem to know what’s wrong but not how to fix it. And I don’t know how, either. I tried every way I knew when you were small. Writing that word on your forehead, that was only one of them… and by then I was getting desperate, or I never would have done such a mean thing to you. You’re a taker, that’s all. You came home to me because you knew that I have to give. Not to everybody, but to you.”

“I’ll move out,” he said, and every word was like spitting out a dry ball of lint. “This afternoon.”

Then it came to him that he probably couldn’t afford to move out, at least not until Wayne sent him his next royalty check—or whatever was left of it after he finished feeding the hungriest of the L.A. hounds—on to him. As for current out-of-pocket expenses, there was the rent on the parking slot for the Datsun Z, and a hefty payment he would have to send out by Friday, unless he wanted the friendly neighborhood repo man looking for him, and he didn’t. And after last night’s revel, which had begun so i

“Don’t go,” she said softly. “I wish you wouldn’t, Larry. I bought some food special. Maybe you saw it. And I was hoping maybe we could play some gin rummy tonight.”