Too Much Happiness

wearing a kind of robe.
    “A Hare Krishna?” said Sally.
    “Oh, Mom, if you’re a monk it doesn’t mean you’re a Hare Krishna. Anyway he’s not that now.”
    “So what is he?”
    “He says he lives in the present. So I said well don’t we all, nowadays, and he said no, he meant in the real present.”
    Where they were now, he had said, and Savanna had said, “You mean in this dump?” Because it was, the coffee shop he had asked her to meet him in was a dump.
    “I see it differently,” he said, but then he said he had no objection to her way of seeing it, or anybody’s.
    “Well, that’s big of you,” said Savanna, but she made a joke of it and he sort of laughed.
    He said that he had seen Alex’s obituary in the paper and thought it was well done. He thought Alex would have liked the geological references. He had wondered if his own name would appear, included in the family, and he was rather surprised that it was there. He wondered, had his father told them what names he wanted listed, before he died?
    Savanna said no, he wasn’t planning on dying anything like so soon. It was the rest of the family who had a conference and decided Kent ’s name should be there.
    “Not Dad,” Kent said. “Well no.”
    Then he asked about Sally.
    Sally felt a kind of inflated balloon in her chest.
    “What did you say?”
    “I said you were okay, maybe at loose ends a little, you and Dad being so close and not much time yet to get used to being alone. Then he said tell her she can come to see me if she wants to and I said I would ask you.”
    Sally didn’t reply.
    “You there, Mom?”
    “Did he say when or where?”
    “No. I’m supposed to meet him in a week in the same place and tell him. I think he sort of enjoys calling the shots. I thought you’d agree right away.”
    “Of course I agree.”
    “You aren’t alarmed at coming in by yourself?”
    “Don’t be silly. Was he really the man you saw in the fire?”
    “He wouldn’t say yes or no. But my information is yes. He’s quite well known as it turns out in certain parts of town and by certain people.”
    Sally receives a note. This in itself was special, since most people she knew used e-mail or the phone. She was glad it wasn’t the phone. She did not trust herself to hear his voice yet. The note instructed her to leave her car in the subway parking lot at the end of the line and take the subway to a specified station where she should get off and he would meet her.
    She expected to see him on the other side of the turnstile, but he was not there. Probably he meant that he would meet her outside. She climbed the steps and emerged into the sunlight and paused, with all sorts of people hurrying and pushing past her. She had a feeling of dismay and embarrassment. Dismay because of Kent ’s apparent absence, and embarrassment because she was feeling just what people from her part of the country often seemed to feel, though she would never say what they said. You’d think you were in the Congo or India or Vietnam, they would say. Anyplace but Ontario. Turbans and saris and dashikis were much in evidence, and Sally was all in favor of their swish and bright colors. But they weren’t being worn as foreign costumes. The wearers hadn’t just arrived here; they had got past the moving-in phase. She was in their way.
    On the steps of an old bank building just beyond the subway entrance, several men were sitting or lounging or sleeping. This was no longer a bank, of course, though its name was cut in stone. She looked at the name rather than the men, whose slouching or reclining or passed-out postures were such a contrast to the old purpose of the building, and the hurry of the crowd coming out of the subway.
    “Mom.”
    One of the men on the steps came towards her in no hurry, with a slight drag of one foot, and she realized that it was Kent and waited for him.
    She would almost as soon have run away. But then she saw that not all the men were filthy or hopeless looking, and that some looked at her without menace or contempt and even with a friendly amusement now that she was identified as Kent ’s mother.
    Kent didn’t wear a robe. He wore gray pants that were too big for him, belted in, and a T-shirt with no message on it and a very worn jacket. His hair was cut so short you could hardly see the curl. He was quite gray, with a seamed face, some missing teeth, and a very thin body that made him look older than he was.
    He did not embrace