The Corrections

on the trip, and although he was currently ahead by $58,000 on his Axon investment he’d worked hard for those shares and he’d taken all the risk, and Bea Meisner herself had urged him not to give Enid the addictive drug; so why had he felt guilty?
    As he drove, he imagined the needle on his cranial-pressure gauge creeping clockwise. He was sorry he’d offered his services to Enid. Given the brevity of his visit, itwas stupid to spend the afternoon on a job she should have paid a handyman to do.
    At the hardware store, he stood in the checkout line behind the fattest and slowest people in the central tier of states. They’d come to buy marshmallow Santas, packages of tinsel, Venetian blinds, eight-dollar blow-dryers, and holiday-theme pot-holders. With their bratwurst fingers they dug for exact change in tiny purses. White cartoon puffs of steam shot out of Gary’s ears. All the fun things he could be doing instead of waiting half an hour to buy six six-inch bolts assumed ravishing form in his imagination. He could be visiting the Collector’s Room at the Museum of Transport gift shop, or sorting out the old bridge and track drawings from his father’s early career at the Midland Pacific, or searching the under-porch storeroom for his long-missing O-gauge model railroad equipment. With the lifting of his “depression,” he’d developed a new interest, hobbylike in its intensity, in framable and collectible railroad memorabilia, and he could happily have spent the whole day—the whole week!—pursuing it …
    Back at the house, as he was heading up the walk, he saw the sheer curtains part, his mother peering out again. Inside, the air was steamy and dense with the smell of foods that Denise was baking, simmering, and browning. Gary gave Enid the receipt for the bolts, which she regarded as the token of hostility that it was.
    “You can’t afford four dollars and ninety-six cents?”
    “Mother,” he said. “I’m doing the work like I promised. But this is not my bathroom. This is not my safety bar.”
    “I’ll get the money for you later.”
    “You might forget.”
    “Gary, I will get the money for you later .”
    Denise, in an apron, followed this exchange from the kitchen doorway with laughing eyes.
    When Gary made his second trip to the basement, Alfredwas snoring in the big blue chair. Gary proceeded into the workshop, and here he was stopped in his tracks by a new discovery. A shotgun in a canvas case was leaning against the lab bench. He didn’t remember having seen it here earlier. Could he have somehow failed to notice it? Ordinarily the gun was kept in the under-porch storeroom. He was sorry indeed to see that it had moved.
    Do I let him shoot himself
?
    The question was so clear in his mind that he almost spoke it out loud. And he considered. It was one thing to intervene on behalf of Enid’s safety and confiscate her drugs; there was life and hope and pleasure worth saving in Enid. The old man, however, was kaput.
    At the same time, Gary had no wish to hear a gunshot and come down and wade into the gore. He didn’t want his mother to go through this, either.
    And yet, horrible though the mess would be, it would be followed by a huge quantum uptick in the quality of his mother’s life.
    Gary opened the box of shells on the bench and saw that none were missing. He wished that someone else, not he, had noticed that Alfred had moved the gun. But his decision, when it came, was so clear in his mind that he did speak it out loud. Into the dusty, uric, non-reverberative silence of the laboratory he said: “If that’s what you want, be my guest. I ain’t gonna stop you.”
    Before he could drill holes in the shower, he had to clear the shelves of the little bathroom closet. This in itself was a substantial job. Enid had saved, in a shoe box, every cotton ball she’d ever taken from a bottle of aspirin or prescription medication. There were five hundred or a thousand cotton balls. There were petrified half-squeezed tubes of ointment. There were plastic pitchers and utensils (in colors even worse, if possible, than beige) from Enid’s admissions to the hospital for foot surgery, knee surgery, and phlebitis. Therewere dear little bottles of Mercurochrome and Anbesol that had dried up sometime in the 1960s. There was a paper bag that Gary quickly, for the sake of his composure, threw to the back of a high shelf because it appeared to contain ancient menstrual belts and pads.
    The daylight