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"What are you doing here?" I asked, still holding her, talking into her hair.

"I work here," she said, pushing me away a little.

"I know that," I said. "But why here? Did you know Anne Marie and I used to live upstairs?"

"Yes," she said. "That's why I work here. And that's why I used to drink here before I worked here."

"I don't get it."

"I just wanted to be close to you, Sam, to know where you were.'

"But why didn't you just come upstairs and let me know you were so close?"

"I don't know," she said. "I didn't want to be too far away, but I didn't want to be too close, either."

"Of course you didn't," I said. My father left us but moved only twenty minutes away; my mother wanted to be in the same building as me, but not in the same apartment. I moved back to Amherst, but not too close to my parents; and then I moved back into my parents' house, which was not too close to my family in Camelot. Not too close was our family curse, the way incest was for some royal families and hubris for others. "But wait," I said. "We moved to Camelot five years ago."

"I know."

"But you're still here. Why?"

"Hey," a waitress said to my mother as she careened by with her full tray of dishes and steins, "Beth, I could use some help. Table six."

"I'll be right back," my mother said to me, and then she walked off in the direction, I assumed, of table six.

"Beth!" I called after her. "I knew you seemed like a Beth now!"

"You know Beth?" the bartender said. I sat back on my stool and swiveled to face him. Two freshly poured steins of beer sat between us on the bar.

"I'm not sure," I told him.

"She's a sweetheart," he told me.

"She is?" Of all the many words I'd heard used to describe my mother, "sweetheart" had never been one of them. I'd never even heard my father call her that. I wondered if he ever called Deirdre that. I wondered if my mother wondered if he ever called Deirdre that. "Beth is a sweetheart?"

"Sure she is," the bartender said. "Just look at her."

I turned and did. My mother was standing at a table in the barroom, talking with a man and his son. The man was a genuine, prematurely white-haired Yankee Brahmin sheathed in dark corduroy and wool, and waterproof in his duck boots. His son wasn't even a little bit Yankee or Brahmin. He was a baggy-pants-and-expensive-sneakers kid wearing headphones who would have been the same kid if he'd grown up in New Jersey or California. He was the sort of kid who would get older and move to Phoenix and hustle insurance in a mean glass tower and water his grass in the desert. I could hear the father lecturing my mother about something or other, because he was that sort of Brahmin: the sort who felt compelled to give you a lesson on some important subject or other. No doubt that's why his kid was wearing headphones. My mother Elizabeth wouldn't have been lectured for ten seconds. She would have ripped the headphones off the kid's head and told the Brahmin where he could stick them. But not Beth. She stood there with a pleasant expression on her face and listened until the Brahmin was through with his lesson; then she tousled the kid's hair as she headed toward the kitchen. My mother was a Beth, all right, and Beth was obviously a sweetheart.

"You're right," I said. "Beth is a sweetheart." I must have said this in such a way as to give the impression that I was smitten, because the bartender grimaced empathetically, and said, "Sorry, bud, she's married."

"Married," I said, waving my hand, by which I meant to communicate, Who isn't?

"Yeah, but she's really married," the bartender said.

"Have you met the guy?" I asked.

"No," he said, "but she talks about him a lot."

"What's she say about him?"

"He's got a big brain," the bartender said, and then, maybe sensing that I didn't have one, he tapped his forehead with his forefinger.

"I bet he reads books," I said.

"He gets paid to read books," the bartender said, shaking his head, as though wondering who would pay a person to do such a thing, which,