Talk to Jay Passer on the Fictionville blog
He pushes her in her wheelchair around the sunlit block. Leaves rustle and dance on the boughs of the little sidewalk maples. He has on his head an enormous white pontoon hat of stiff straw and his expansive grin is enormous. He pushes his mother down the sidewalk towards the one tavern in the neighborhood left where they are still welcome. And only welcome with guarded reluctance. They speak quietly as if submerged in sanctity. The man, impeccably rumpled, looks at his mother over a bottle of Merlot. She is a dingbat and a crone, her face at once shocked, compliant, dazed, stupefied. Is it possible she can speak at all? She drinks her wine in short, exasperated gulps. She manages her glass with a sluggish dexterity, brings it to faintly quivering, soundless lips, and swallows. An extreme effort. Summer is almost over, the days the mother and son spend in the motel room on the block are shortening, the days spent long in the mornings with the
sunlight through glittering maple, dappled on the porch where they’ve set up a little wrought-iron table in front of their room. Quaint, succinct, dainty, European. This middle-aged son looks at his mother over a bottle of Petit Sirah. She is dear to him. It is a time of peace and contemplation. They are in Paris and they are younger. Knossos, chatting in a bone-blue café. Vegetables bought from ashen market-stalls in Prague. Jerusalem, after a light rain, a dinner of cold pilaf. There is some money and he has never married. He stays close to his mother for she is dear to him. She shares the wine and there is some money and he pushes her in her wheelchair. In the dimness of the tavern they drink Merlot. Where they are still welcome. A toast. To your health, Mother.