Mohawk

plumbing if he wanted to. He would tell her about his plans later. “Scrooge!” he thought to himself suddenly, as the drift of his ex-wife’s earlier remark became clear. Catching on, even belatedly, was pleasant.

23
    Sunday morning after Thanksgiving, Anne Grouse informed her mother that she would not be going to church. “Why not?” Mrs. Grouse said. When her daughter made a point of not answering, Mrs. Grouse retreated, rhetorically, half a step. “I mean, if you’re ill—”
    “I know what you meant, Mother. I’m not ill. I’ll drive you and Randall.”
    “No you won’t. You’ll go right back to your warm bed if you—”
    “It’s forty degrees out.”
    “Pooh. A few short blocks.”
    As they waltzed around the subject a little longer, Mrs. Grouse refused to surrender the notion that her daughter was ill, at least for the sake of public discussion. Privately, she knew better. Her daughter had been an infidel always. She went to services only for the benefit of the boy, who was beginning, Mrs. Grouse feared, to show many of the disturbing traits her daughter had manifested at the same age. More than once he had observed that the sermon made no sense. Mrs. Grouse was enormously fond of her grandson, but she was of the opinion that he was getting too big for his britches, and his mother remained living testimony towhat could happen when such impulses were not nipped.
    The more she thought about her daughter’s sudden refusal to attend services, the more certain she was that Anne intended to corner her father and broach some proscribed subject. Mrs. Grouse had redoubled her vigilance of late, always guarding against upset. She took special care to insure that Anne was never left alone with Mather Grouse, lest she harp on the subject of the oxygen tank or introduce another one conducive to excessive enthusiasm on her husband’s part. This latest tactic on Anne’s part was unfair, for it invited Mrs. Grouse to shunt her Christian duty in order to protect her home.
    In the car she smoothed her white gloves savagely and tilted her jaw in a fashion that suggested life’s unfairness and a good deal more. “Your father had another bad night,” she said when Anne slowed down. The traffic always bottled up in front of the church while elderly parishioners were extracted from cars and bundled across the street. “Neither of us had a wink of sleep.”
    Anne put the car in neutral to wait for an old woman who, suddenly disoriented, darted off in the wrong direction, was retrieved, then pointed in the right.
    “The fourth night in a row,” her mother continued. “Maybe he’ll be able to doze while we’re away.”
    Anne murmured in agreement, but Mrs. Grouse knew nothing was promissory in it.
    “It’s his time alone …” she ventured. By now they were at the crosswalk. Randall got out and held the door for her, but Mrs. Grouse lingered. Far back in the line of cars, someone honked.
    “I’ll pick you up in an hour,” Anne said.
    “Maybe we’ll just walk.”
    “I’ll pick you up.”
    “Why not come in. You’re right here and all—”
    “No thank you, Mother.”
    There was nothing to do but get out, so Mrs. Grouse did. “We’ll say a prayer for her,” she said to her grandson. “Won’t we?”
    “Sure,” Randall agreed. “Why not.”
    Mather Grouse was indeed dozing when Anne returned, but he started awake guiltily. The television evangelist was gesticulating at him, but the sound was inaudible. To Anne her father had aged a great deal during the last year, even since October. His chest had become concave, and inactivity had added slack flesh to his middle. He looked more like a man deep in his seventies than one in his midsixties. The skin along his throat was pale and translucent.
    “Go back to sleep,” she urged softly, her mother’s version of things suddenly too real and accurate to be ignored. Her father was a sick man, and she ought not to bother him.
    “No,” he said flatly. “Sleep is overrated. Have you ever noticed how it’s always recommended to people anybody with half a brain can see need to wake up?”
    Anne smiled, and remembered him always saying things like that when she was a girl. Long before she was able to figure them out, she had admired the way they sounded and her father’s ability to say them when nobody else she knew could.
    Mather Grouse apparently appreciated this one himself. “I wonder if I read that someplace or if I thought it up myself. I