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By Root 677 0

“It was only a half-baked idea that I had when I was young.” But if he really meant that, why doesn’t he go on and sell? No, he couldn’t possibly; she has spent so much time sweeping this place, preparing it for him, opening and shutting bureau drawers as if she’d find his secrets there. She can imagine Ruth in this kitchen, Cody out surveying fence lines or whatever it is men do on farms. She can picture Luke running through the yard in denim overalls. He is old enough to go fishing now, to swim in the creek beyond the pasture, maybe even to tend the animals. In August, he’ll be eight. Is it eight? Or nine. She’s lost track. She hardly ever sees him, and must conquer his shyness all over again whenever he and his parents pass through Baltimore. Each visit, his interests have changed: from popguns to marbles to stamp collecting. Last time he was here, some two or three years back, she got out her husband’s stamp album—its maroon, fake-leather cover gone gray with mildew—only to find that Luke had switched to model airplanes. He was assembling a balsa wood jet, he told her, that would actually fly. And he was planning to be an astronaut. “By the time I’m grown,” he said, “astronauts will be ordinary. People will be taking rockets like you would take a bus. They’ll spend their summers on Venus. They won’t go to Ocean City; they’ll go to beaches on the moon.” “Ah,” she said, “isn’t that wonderful!” But she was too old for such things. She couldn’t keep up, and the very thought of traveling to the moon made her feel desolate.

And nowadays—well, who can guess? Luke must be involved in something entirely different. It’s so long since he was here, and she’s not sure he’ll ever be back. During that last visit, Ezra got his old pearwood recorder from the closet and showed Luke how to play a tune. Pearl knows very little about recorders, but evidently something happens—the wood dries up, or warps, or something—when they’re not played enough; and this one hadn’t been played in a decade, at least. Its voice had gone splintery and cracked. How startled she’d been, hearing three ancient notes tumble forth after such a silence! Ezra and Luke walked south on Calvert Street to buy some linseed oil. Not two minutes after they left, Cody asked where they’d got to. “Why, off to buy oil for Ezra’s recorder,” Pearl told him. “Didn’t you see them go?” Cody excused himself and went outside to pace in front of the house. Ruth stayed in the living room, discussing schools. Pearl hardly listened. She could look through the window and see Cody pacing, turning, pacing, his suit coat whipping out behind him. She could tell when Ezra and Luke returned, even before she saw them, by the way that Cody stiffened. “Where have you been?” she heard him ask. “What have you two been doing?”

Luke never did learn how to play the recorder. Cody said they had to go. “Oh, but Cody!” Pearl said. “I thought you were spending the night!”

“Wrong,” he told her. “Wrong again. I can’t stay here; this place is not safe. Don’t you see what Ezra’s up to?”

“What, Cody? What is he up to?”

“Don’t you see he’s out to steal my son?” he asked. “The same way he always stole everybody? Don’t you see?”

In the end, they left. Ezra wanted to give Luke the recorder for keeps, but Cody told Luke to leave it; he’d get him a newer one, fancier, finer. One that wasn’t all dried up, he said.

Pearl believes now that her family has failed. Neither of her sons is happy, and her daughter can’t seem to stay married. There is no one to accept the blame for this but Pearl herself, who raised these children single-handed and did make mistakes, oh, a bushel of mistakes. Still, she sometimes has the feeling that it’s simply fate, and not a matter for blame at all. She feels that everything has been assigned, has been preordained; everyone must play his role. Certainly she never intended to foster one of those good son/bad son arrangements, but what can you do when one son is consistently good and the other consistently bad? What can the sons do, even? “Don’t you see?” Cody had cried, and she had