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smile she had smiled at me all my life. ‘Who do you think it is?’ she said. The phone quit ringing and the house was completely silent except for the TV.
    ‘Maybe it was Dad,’ I said.
    ‘Maybe it was,’ she said.
    ‘It could’ve been a wrong number, too,’ I said, though I thought the phone call was my father and I felt afraid because I hadn’t answered it.
    ‘We’ll never know now,’ my mother said. ‘But. What Iwas saying.’ She took a last drink of her beer. ‘You’re happy if the thing you naturally want makes the other person happy. If it’s not that way, then I don’t know. I guess you’re in limbo.’
    ‘Where’s that?’ I said, because I had never heard that word before.
    ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s the place where nobody wants to be. It’s the middle where you can’t feel the sides and nothing happens. Like now.’
    For a moment I felt the phone was about to start ringing again, felt a current go through the lines of the house, as if the lines were part of me, alive and surging with a message. But it didn’t ring, and the feeling in me died out.
    ‘Tomorrow might be a better day,’ my mother said. ‘Now’s not so hot.’ She reached and turned off the lamp beside her bed. ‘Turn off my light, Joe,’ she said. I switched off the overhead light. ‘And go to bed, too,’ she said, lying there in her clothes in the light from the television. ‘Something’ll happen to make things seem different.’
    ‘I hope so,’ I said.
    My mother turned over and faced the wall. I thought she went to sleep at that instant, because she didn’t say anything else to me. And I went to my room down the hall, and in a short time afterward I went to sleep myself.
    The next day I went to school as I would on any other day, but my mother told me as I was leaving that she was going out that morning to look for a better job than teaching swimming classes.
    ‘I don’t want to be poor,’ she said. She was standing at the bathroom sink in her petticoat, putting black pins in her hair. ‘We might have to move into a smaller place,’ she said. ‘I thought of that. Would you mind that?’
    ‘I think Dad will be back,’ I said.
    ‘Do you?’ she said. ‘Is that your best opinion on the subject?’ She looked at me where I was in the hall, holding my coat and my school books under my arm. It was warm in the house. The bathroom heater was turned up high, and I could see the little blue flames.
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is.’ I was surprised she was thinking about these changes already.
    ‘Fine. I’ll remember that,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ She glanced at me with pins in her mouth and her hands in her hair, and nodded. ‘You’re a very trusting boy. You wouldn’t be a very good lawyer. You don’t want to be a lawyer, though, do you?’
    ‘No,’ I said.
    ‘What
do
you want to be?’
    This was something we had not precisely talked about for a long time, and I did not have my answer ready. ‘I’d like to work on a railroad someplace,’ I said.
    ‘That’s not very good,’ my mother said. ‘You have to find a better profession. When you come back today have a better answer.’ My mother looked at herself in the mirror. ‘We went to college,’ she said. ‘Your father and I both. But you wouldn’t know it.’ She stared at herself, wrinkled her nose. ‘Handsome is as handsome does, I guess,’ she said. ‘You’re wasting your life standing here watching me, sweetheart. Go to school.’ And I went to school just as she said.
    When I came back home at three o’clock–it was not a day that I worked at the photographer’s studio–there was a car parked across the street from our house, a pink, four-door Oldsmobile I did not know, and a man was in our living room, a man I did not know either.
    The man stood up when I came in the front door. He and my mother had been sitting in chairs, not very close together. My mother’s hair was fixed with the black pins she had been putting in that