LITMIR.BIZ

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the glint of joy in her eyes. Dan gave her a peck on the cheek and squeezed her in his arms. She felt tiny.

      “Mom’s been so excited knowing you were coming,” she said, in a way that told him his absence the past few years had been more marked than he cared to believe. “How’s Ked?” she asked.

      “He’s good. He’s really tall now. Almost as tall as me.”

      “They grow so fast you can’t keep up with them. Geez, eh? It’s funny. Mine are nearly grown too. I hardly see them any more.”

      She still talked like a high school majorette. Dan recalled her fondness for mohair sweaters, pleated skirts, and hair barrettes.

      She put a hand on his shoulder and nodded to the bedroom door. “Go on in, Danny. She’s been waiting for ya.”

      Gloom met his eyes, a half-drawn shade simply masking the fact that the light was permanently obscured by the house next door. The wallpaper was Sedona Rose on Pickle Green, some daft artist’s rendering of happiness and cheer. Paper daisies in a snow-white vase sat atop a dresser. The room smelled of disinfectant covered with something homely. If he were to die of a wasting disease, he knew, he could do worse than come back here to be tended to by Leyla. Everything had been tidied up and put away, the room almost too clean to admit to any suffering. He imagined the dull days winding ahead for his aunt, but with a fixed value attached to their number.

      On the mantle ranged the usual collection of cards: Get Well Soon, Heard You Needed Some Cheering, and Hope You’re Feeling Better — his own hadn’t reached them yet. All with the usual compulsory euphemisms that said everything but the truth: Goodbye For All Time or Prepare To Meet Your Maker. From behind one card peeked the corner of a photograph: himself as a dirty-faced kid of three or four, with a grin to break your heart. What had happened to that boy? Dan wondered.

      His eyes adjusted. His aunt lay on the far side of the bed, as if avoiding the light. Flannel rose in soft swells around her sleeping head. A hearing aid curled around one ear like a pink foetus, her hair Marcel-waved into tiny seashells. As a boy he’d watched, fascinated, as she egg-whited the tips of curls and stuck them to her cheeks. Imagining herself glamorous, no doubt. Maybe she’d fancied herself a movie star: Joan Fontaine or Lana Turner. And why not? Life held few enough rewards for someone like her.

      At one point she’d briefly turned Jehovah’s Witness, driven for comfort by a husband’s beatings and a brother’s drinking. Eventually the husband vanished, though Leyla said for years afterwards her mother would turn a hopeful ear to the door if there were footsteps outside at night, still praying for his return. It never came. No one knew if he were still alive or, if dead, where he’d been buried. The consensus was that he’d come to a bad end somewhere and that it had been well deserved, whatever it was. Dan recalled her sweaters that always smelled of dampness. She would wait till his dad had gone to work and then start in on him, clutching him to her chest and making him promise he would never drink, smoke, or swear. Devil’s work. His father did all three, Dan knew. He used to wonder if she’d asked him to make the same promise. He hadn’t listened, if she had. But even religion hadn’t lasted forever, like most things in her life.

      He remembered her as a woman who spent much of her time planning diets of one sort or another: the grapefruit-only diet, the no-bread diet, the sugar-free diet, and various others with no particular name. All of them defined by a lack. She’d never been a great cook, but she always made sure there was food on the table for Dan and Leyla. Her specialty was peas in gravy on white bread, with greasy ground beef mixed in. Her version of a balanced meal, no doubt. Some days there might be mashed potatoes instead of the sliced bread with its tan leathery borders. Afterwards, orange fat lay congealed at the bottom of the electric frying pan — her one frivolity — until its rounded corners slid under the iridescent soap bubbles in the sink. Most of her days were spent in silence, which was just as well because when she spoke people looked in fright at the sound of her voice, like a whoopee cushion on Prozac. But more than anything, he remembered her as a woman who had taken in another woman’s child to raise as her own.

      Someone — probably Leyla — had propped a chair in the corner. He dragged it close and sat next to her. Here she was, his aunt who had always been kind, always accepting. His aunt, who had spent thirty years selling tickets at the movie theatre before retiring on a government pension. Goodbye and thanks for a job well done. When she was younger she’d dreamed of reinventing herself by opening the classifieds to see what fascinating job she could apply for that might just blow her horizons wide open and make all her dreams come true. What’ll it be next: waitress at Kresge’s Red Grill or counter help at Herb’s Bowl-a-Rama? Another time it was a day cashier at Woolworth’s followed by a stint as stock clerk at Zeller’s. The options were stupefying. Maybe she thought they’d go on forever, but one day they ran out and she ended up where she began, dying of emphysema, her life and choices behind her forever.

      Dan leaned over the bed, taking care not to bump the fat green cylinder that pumped itself out via the long thin tube attached over her head and feeding into her nostrils. Her skin was wrinkled and translucent, as if, oxygen-starved, her body had subsisted on a diet of light. Her hands were swollen like pudgy starfish.

      Here, then, was the salt of the earth. It didn’t get any better or purer.

      Eyelids flickered open, eyes cornflower blue. “Hello, Danny,” she said, as though she’d seen him only a short while before.

      “Hello, Auntie.”

      “My goodness, you look awfully good. Handsome as ever. It’s so nice to see you home again.”

      The sentence must have exceeded her lung capacity, because Dan heard the intake of breath, the sharp rasp behind the words.

      “How are you feeling?” he asked. “Is Leyla doing a good job of looking after you?”

      She spoke a little slower, pacing herself. “Oh, don’t you worry — she’s doing a good job. You know what she’s like.” She took a long pull on her oxygen.

      There was a peaceful sound to her voice. Or maybe it was resignation — he’d never known her to be a fighter. She would just as easily go along with whatever Death had in store for her as a request for supper to be made for visitors. Compliance — her greatest virtue — was one and the same with her.

      They spoke for ten minutes before Dan felt her tiring. She wouldn’t let him go, hanging onto him as long as she could. “I’ll come back again tomorrow,” he promised.

      She shook her head. She needed more of him right now. “Will you go out to visit his grave while you’re here?” she asked, squeezing his hand as though encouraging a small boy about to tackle a very big task.

      “Sure.” He turned his eyes to hers. He hadn’t intended to go to the cemetery and knew he probably wouldn’t keep his word, but she wanted him to say yes. “And maybe hers, too.”

      “You haven’t been out for a long time,” she said, heaping on the reasons to go now that she’d got him to say he would, just as she’d once made him promise never to drink, smoke, or swear.

      “No,” he said. “I haven’t.”

      “You weren’t so lucky when it came to parents,” she said.

      “I had you,” Dan said, resting his hand on her arm.

      “Still do.” Her eyes teared up a little. “He loved you too, you know. Even though you thought he didn’t.” She took another pull on the oxygen.

      Dan shook his head. “I don’t know.”

      With all the presence she could summon, she gazed directly at him. “He did,” she insisted.

      Dan smiled indulgently. “Maybe I didn’t understand him. It was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter now.”

      “Doesn’t it matter to you?” she asked. She was silent for a while. “I think you’re right. Maybe you never understood your father.” Her eyes carried a look of well-worn sorrow.

      “You knew him

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