This All Happened(20)

            She wants to paint her study. So I drive down and pick her up and we zoom over to Matchless Paints and choose a colour I call avocado green. Lydia says there are a lot of greens in avocado.

            The centre yellow, closest to the pit.

            We get the man to add one fraction of green. It’s the green of unripe banana.

            The man lifts his arms and slips a finger under the tight short sleeves of his shirt, as if his biceps need room.

            A fraction is the minimum amount of paint that can drip from the beaker. It’s enough paint to cover your fingernail. Enough to change considerably the hue of a gallon of avocado. The power of pigment.

            With all the pictures off the walls her study looks relaxed. We’ve stacked Lydia’s paintings and lamps in between the legs of upended chairs in the hall. I expect a caravan to be hauled up outside, a thin horse, ruts in the road from wagon wheels. There is a primitive, European feeling of exodus, of imminent rush and migrant behaviour, hanging around Lydia’s stairwell.

            25 Stories are all about meeting someone, Maisie says. You have the narrator. Then you are introduced to a character. And how does that person shape the protagonist? That’s all a story ever is. Your protagonist meeting someone. That’s how my novel begins, I say. Little Leo Percy (Josh) meeting Rockwell Kent (Max) at the train station.

            I want to write a kid’s book for Una. Have a whale meet a shark and discuss his time on land. How his tail is flat now and he has to return, always, to the surface to breathe. A story about returning home, but how the experience away changes you permanently.

            26 I wake up on the couch cushions on the living-room floor. The rain sounds like plastic bubbling off the walls. Mom is directly above in my bed. I picked her up last night at the bus station. I watched her guide her feet down the steep hammered-metal steps.

            She had her bags on the chair by the phone. She said, Is that okay?

            Yes, I said. We can bring them up to your room later. Oh, there’s a limit, she said.

            What?

            They only go that far for now it’s a joke.

            She asks about commitment, and I explain that Lydia and I are considering the question. She says, You should give yourself a deadline.

            I say, I’ve never been in love before.

            She says, Well, it’s good to have your heart broken.

            27 I introduce Mom to Iris and Helmut, and they look at her with little grins on, as though she explains certain aspects of who I am. Mom tells them I was a quiet child and I went through a time when I said even less. I would stay in my room. But she wouldnt investigate. I was conscientious and reliable. My brother, Junior, would come home from school and sprawl in the porch. I’ve just got to rest, he’d say. My mother told him people were waiting for their newspapers. When I took over the route, I was an obedient paperboy.

            She mixes brewer’s yeast in orange juice for her breakfast. She says she can run on that all morning.

            She notices I have a hole in my shoe. She says, You take after your grandad. He wore starched shirts and wingtip shoes, very grand. But the shirt cuffs were frayed and the soles of the shoes had holes.

            28 Lydia wants to take us out for lunch. She chooses a table against the wall. There are fresh flowers and Mom admires them.

            We order the specials.

            Mom says money is just after sex for problems in a marriage. Then she clarifies: Money never came between us in an irreconcilable way. We had differences but worked through it. And as for the first thing, the same can be said.

            When the waitress arrives my mother asks: Are you having a wedding, or do you always have flowers?