Mohawk

not one thing from her mother. He began to suspect that only circumstance could keep her in check, her very virtues bordering on vice. She was too proud, too loyal, too ambitious, perhaps too beautiful. And she was too vulnerable, though Mather Grouse alone saw that side of her.
    Mrs. Grouse joined him in the living room and looked at the television disapprovingly. “Are you going to sit there and watch, knowing how it upsets you?”
    “Football does not upset me. I don’t particularly enjoy it. Baseball upsets me. And it doesn’t upset me; it excites me.”
    “You aren’t supposed to get excited.”
    “I seldom do, thank you very much.”
    One of the more disagreeable features of Mather Grouse’s existence was the never-ending debate over what upset him. Of late, Mrs. Grouse had come to see virtually everything he enjoyed as a potential source of upset. She seemed intent on making his remaining years one long Lenten season. When he objected, she reminded him that objections were upsetting. “Send the boy down, if he wants,” Mather Grouse called after his wife.
    Mrs. Grouse was at the kitchen door when the bell rang. She frowned at the clock on the wall. “Who could that be?” she said before she could think. Then it occurred to her that the doorbell at such a late hour on Thanksgiving might portend something about her sister, and she scurried back into the living room. “Who is it,” she asked her husband, who had not budged from his chair.
    “We won’t know until you open the door. Whoeverit is, tell them to go away.” Actually, he was curious. The porch steps usually groaned under a visitor’s weight, and he hadn’t heard them groan.
    Mrs. Grouse tugged the front door open and peered into the dark. She was about to conclude that it was all a prank, when a large man stepped forward out of the shadows. Mather Grouse couldn’t see who it was from where he sat, but he recognized immediately the deep, soothing voice.
    “Mrs. Mather, I presume,” said Rory Gaffney.
    Mrs. Grouse instinctively stepped back and looked questioningly at her husband, whose expression had darkened. Her single backward step was enough for the man to insinuate himself into the doorway, which he pretty well filled. What Mrs. Grouse noticed most was the man’s huge hands, which predisposed her against him. Her husband’s hands were small, almost like a woman’s, and they were one of the things she had always liked best about him. The world was full of men with swollen fingers and knuckles. The other hateful thing about their visitor was his eyebrows, black and unruly, and he used one of his paws to smooth them.
    Rory Gaffney smiled and nodded as he carefully surveyed the living room and, like an auctioneer brought in for an appraisal, every object it contained. “It is exactly as I expected,” he said. “Mather Grouse would provide just such a home for his family. Your husband was always a family man, Mrs. Mather. Never once got into the baseball pool or played a daily double. Never once in all those years. Some of the fellows at the shop didn’t like it, but they weren’t family men, Mrs. Mather, that’s the thing. They had families, all right, some larger than they knew, but for the likes of these men there’s always fifty cents for the number, a dollar for the pool.There was always a little fun at the shop, you see. But not for Mather Grouse. Not for a family man.”
    Though flustered by the man’s presence, Mrs. Grouse was too polite to interrupt, so he kept talking. What she found most odd about the situation was that the man was talking to her and somehow not really talking to her at all. He was looking right at her and certainly seemed to be speaking to her. But though he had his back to her husband, Mrs. Grouse felt it was Mather Grouse he was talking to, and that if she were to disappear from the face of the earth, the man might not even notice.
    “No, some of the men didn’t like it, Mrs. Mather. Some said Mather Grouse thought he was too good, but I always said it was because he
was
better than those fellows, and he had a right to think so if he wanted. That’s what I always said, and that’s God’s own truth.”
    Mather Grouse had not stood up, and when their visitor finally turned to face him and offer one of his paws, Mather Grouse shook it reluctantly.
    “A good handshake,” Rory Gaffney said, not letting go when the other man tried to break it off. “One of the few pleasures left to old men