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Stephen once showed a discernment about sex, however, when Mugsie gave birth to her kittens. She chose as the birth site a space under a low table covered by a sheet in Stephen's basement room. Stephen was awakened by the mewing of the first two kittens and he slipped upstairs to alert me.

“How wonderful,” I'd said. “I'm coming down.”

“Wait,” said Stephen. “I need to prepare you. Mom, I feel terrible.”

“Why?”

“Well, Mugsie is having her kittens on my stash of Playboys. I hide ‘em under that table … I never thought she'd choose that spot. It doesn't seem right to me for her to be giving birth on pictures of a bunch of naked women …”

“Don't worry. Mugs doesn't know the difference. She obviously feels safe in your room, right there under that table near your bed. She feels safe and she doesn't read …”

“Don't look at the pictures,” he instructed me as we descended the stairs to his room.

“It's nothing I haven't seen before …”

“Mom!” Stephen drew away to reprimand me. “It's not the right thing for a mother to see.”

For a quarter of our lives together we were lost to the other. Now an intimacy goes with us. Stephen sounds breathless when he calls my name and I answer in kind, as if the world retains something of the vastness across which we once saw the other disappearing.

When I wake at six each morning, there is often a note slipped under my door from Stephen. Sometimes the notes read: Good morning, Mom. I hope you had a good night's sleep.

Other times his notes request that I type the last half or proofread a paper he has written, due today, that he has left on my desk. In exchange for the favor he offers that he will walk the dogs this evening.

His notes alert me to observations he has made about the animals. Dear Mom, I wanted you to know that Buster came down in the kitchen last night while you were asleep. He seemed twitchy so I gave him a Valium. Or, Dear Mom, Sybil came down into my room! Or, Sunny didn't come home last night…

Once, when I was dating a man Stephen disliked, he left me a note that read, Mother, to what chasm has your soul descended?

Sometimes Stephen's notes go on for pages, his cramped, all-caps printing swimming before my eyes. He is worried about Trevor, or he and his girlfriend have had a fight. Or he's read or heard something he remembers in the night: Mom, my teacher told me the greatest thing—if we seal all the windows in the house—really seal them up so no light gets through—we can actually turn the house into a camera. Isn't that the greatest?! Let's do it tomorrow …

The morning of his eighteenth birthday his note reads, Dear Mom, I know I won't be 18 until 3:07 P.M. (12:07 California time), but way to go, Mom! You had a handsome, brilliant, smart, stylish, amazingly exceptional baby boy!”

Christmas night 1995. Clear. Very cold. We've driven beyond the thin lights of Amherst into the country where the stars have such presence they scare the atmosphere. I'm thinking of the ancients who divided the night sky into the zodiac, like the twelve tribes of Israel. It's as if the stories that overlay the stars, like Jacob's curses and blessings of his sons, were attempts to measure human terror against a vast and unpredictable future.

The catalogue at the end of Genesis I once memorized to win a prize at Sunday school comes back to me:

Reuben, thou art my first born, my might, and the beginning of my strength… Simeon and Levi are brethren: instruments of cruelty are in their habitations… Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse's heels, so that the rider shall fall backward…

I've been waiting in the car for over an hour for Trevor, who has brought Christmas gifts to his mother, his younger sister and brothers. After walking him to the door and saying hello, I withdrew from the first reunion between Trev and his family. Trev touched my arm as I turned to go.

“Wait, please,” he'd asked. “Don't leave.”

“I'll be waiting in the car,” I promised.

Keeping the engine running for the heat, flipping