"I said okay, yes."

"You say it like a record, an old broken record. Mean it, if you say it! Jus' like a stray cur."

"I mean it." God, her voice was like steel wool.

"Sorry excuse for a man."

"Damnit, mamma--"

"Don't you dare use that tone with me!"

"I'm sorry, but--"

"Think you can run rampant now? Dance on my grave, I suppose."

"No, no, mamma."

"Do you believe I'm here with you now, son?"

He hesitated, shaken by the fact he did very much believe; he could not help but believe. It was her voice, and he'd seen her parading through the house in that ugly print nightgown with the gardenias on it.

"Yes, mamma."

"Is everything then understood?"

"Yes, mamma."

"Then we'll have no more of it ever, will we, Wilbur?"

Wilbur mulled this over. It was the word ever that he was having trouble with. Ever meant forever, always, like that song said, "What's forever for if nobody stayed together forever.... "And now mamma, she was gone and part of his mind told him it was so, and yet she was still here because he could go up to her room and she was there, and so, in a real sense, she was still with him and she always would be.

"You take care of me, Wilbur," she told him. "It's your job to take care of me. We're blood, Wilbur, blood's thicker'n water. Blood's what makes us close ... blood ties, darling. Don't ever forget it."

He hadn't.

"So what're you going to do now I'm gone?" she asked from somewhere deep within his inner ear and from somewhere far, far away.

"I--I don't know. Suppose I'll go out for a walk, mamma."

"Just like you ... always thinking of yourself, even at a time like this."

"But, mamma--"

"Shush! Don't you but, mamma, me!"

"Ain't been out in days."

"Then--then you've decided?" her voice cracked.

"I can't do it, mamma."

"You big ox! You mean, you won't do it."

"Can't ... can't."

"Won't, that's it. You want to get shed of me. Always have wanted to get shed of me."

"No, no, mamma."

"Then why're you going?"

"Need air, mamma ... alls I need is air."

"Going to get a box to put me in!"

"No, never!"

"Going to get a man to come put me in it. Fill a box with my bones and veins and limbs." She started that horrible sobbing. "Put me in the dirt, in a--a graveyard!"

He stood at the door, playing the knob back and forth with the argument that had run in his head now for several days. "No, mamma ... I just got to think ... think clear and hard."

"You figure now I'm dead you don't have to love me no more?"

"No, mamma, no!"

"Why're you going? Where do you go? That place where they got girls dancing with no clothes on? You pervert ... raised a little baby to become a pervert."

"No, mamma ... mam, I'm coming back."

"Alone or with a hussy?"

"Alone, I promise."

"Now you got the whole house to yourself, in your name it is, you think you can bring in a whore!"

"It ain't like that, mamma."

"Make me sick!"

"Mamma."

"Makes me sick..."

"Mamma, please," he said, tears streaming.

Her voice suddenly sounded chilling, dead: "I ain't leaving here, ever ... ever."

His hands went to his head, pressing on either side of his brain. "Mamma, what do you want from me? Just tell me."

"Going to watch over you forever. Keep you safe."

"What do you want, mamma?"

"Blood ties," she moaned, "they're most important, baby boy. Some way you got to put mamma back together again."

Like humpty-dumpty, he thought, recalling the old nursery rhyme she favored reading him when he was a child.

"I don't think I can."

"Have you tried?"

"No."

"Haven't even tried," she said.

"It won't work."

"Make me sick!"

"Mamma..." he whined.

"Go on! Go out. Leave me to the flies."

"No, I' II stay ... I'm staying," he relented, relocking the door and going to the stairs, staring up, seeing her there on the landing, her dead eyes looking back at him and her jaw slack, the voice emanating as if piped in through her back.

"Bring me up some warm milk, dear," she cooed, her form fading, ghostlike, until it disappeared altogether.

Wilbur went to the kitchen. Things there were in a state of disarray, as bad as all the other rooms where newspapers had accumulated over the years and the old woman's cats slept and urinated and otherwise relieved themselves. Wilbur had thought to get rid of the cats when his mother died, but when he had started after one, grabbing hold of it, it screeched and tore at him, and deep within its pupils he saw his mother staring back at him. He had dropped the cat in fright.

He now went about the business of making mamma's cocoa. She liked it with a tad of honey, a pat of butter beside the Ovaltine itself. Dirty dishes littered the sink. Standing water there had turned oily and green. He snatched a glass from the filthy water, knowing mamma, in her present condition, wouldn't mind. Clean or dirty, it didn't matter now. Germs couldn't hurt her any.

He padded out with the cocoa and took the steps one by one, guilty and angry and confused all at once. Guilty for having put the rat poison in her cocoa the night she died. That had been a bad Wilbur, indeed. Angry because he really did want to leave her forever and knowing she'd somehow lodged her ugly soul in his brain, reading his thoughts, and still persisted in controlling him. Confused, too, because of the things she wanted him to do, confused and not a little afraid.

Poisoning was easy, quick, and clean, but what she proposed in order to correct the terrible error ... God. Now that was not at all easy, nor quick or clean. What she proposed sounded to Wilbur like madness, and yet, being dead as she was and knowing something about such things as life and death and forever, and being who she was, perhaps she was right ... perhaps he ought to try?

He'd continue to think about it.

He reached the top of the landing and went to mamma's door, pushing it gently open with his toe, the cocoa shaking with the effort. He looked across at mamma's form in the dark, where she sat up in bed and tsked and tsked, annoyed it was taking him so very long--annoyed as she always was with him.

"You do this one thing right, just this once," she told him now in the dark as he placed the cocoa at her bedside, "and maybe I could learn to trust you and love you like a proper son, Wilbur.... Wilbur? Are you listening to me, Wilbur?"

"Yes, mamma," he said aloud. "I'm listening."

The bed creaked when mamma shifted her weight to accept the cocoa. "You have a sip with me, Wilbur," she said. "Don't know that I can trust you anymore. Suppose if you wanted to, you could poison me anytime, anytime! Leave you with no troubles. Leave you with this house, my savings. That'd make you happy, now, wouldn't it? Wouldn't it? Would, wouldn't it? Has, hasn't it, hasn't it, hasn't it?"

She was going to be here forever. She'd come back like she said she would. She'd never leave this house. She would never leave him. He'd been a fool to ever think otherwise, a fool to take the rash action she had for years accused him of. Now, thanks to her, he had lost his job, lost all contact with the outside and lost all interest in cleaning and grooming. His nails had grown to the length of a woman's. His hair had grown to his shoulders, and his face was covered in a twisted, ratty beard, the beard mother'd never allow if she were here. Yet, she was here, and she was allowing him some freedoms he hadn't previously enjoyed, after all.

Wilbur's eyes were bloodshot and rheumy from lack of sleep and worry, for she spoke to him even in his sleep, always at him.

But now, what she suggested was sick--sick beyond all the sick thoughts he had ever felt or sensed beneath the surface of their relationship. And she attributed it all to the fact that they were blood related and he must do for her in this life what she couldn't do for herself, being she had no body or nails or hands to work; all she had to work with was his mind--his mind and her infernal, and apparently eternal, voice.

He wondered if he could carry out her request. Bring home a sweet girl to meet his mamma; the kind of girl she could be proud of; the kind of girl mamma was in her youth; the kind of girl who didn't care so much about outward appearance as about what was in a man's heart; the kind of girl who'd blush at the thought of sleeping with a man on the first date. Ma said it was as much for him as for her. She pointed to the fact that he was the last hope of carrying on the family since his brother had died a few years earlier. But behind mamma's remarks lurked something else, something she wasn't saying ... not yet, anyway.

He had watched and waited.

People came and went, but none with the right look.

She had to be just the right height and size, and her hair had to be silvery blond, the kind that caught the street lights and turned its orange glare into a kind of moonlight even here on the grimy street. He imagined her being kind to him, wanting to come away with him to his house. She'd want to meet mamma because mamma had been a lot like her in the pictures, when she was young. She'd have to be a good girl, no stripper or prostitute. She must be chaste and sweet and proper, a working woman like mamma'd been all her life. She might like old show tunes, black and white movies, and she'd likely collect things--little things like bric-a-brac, maybe saltcellars depicting little bears or pigs or something. She might even collect stamps, and she'd like to read. She could read him stories.

He had seen possibilities now in the lot outside one of the big buildings in the district where mamma had told him to look, where street girls didn't work; where factory girls worked at proper jobs. The street here was lined with factories that manufactured all manner of items, from furniture and carpenter's tools to paper and candy. He liked Bloomer's candy and here was the place where they made it. It was enormous, a big chocolate square of a building, stories and stories high. The night shift was coming on and the day shift was going off, and he saw her. She was going inside when he first saw her. He'd have to wait until midnight before he'd see her again, before he would have an opportunity to make her acquaintance.

He had fantasized about her name while he waited, and it had developed from Mary and Jane to Esmeralda. He fantasized about her body as well, imagining her alone with him and asking him to take down her clothes. She'd make a fine mate for him. Mamma would approve, he was almost sure.

He'd gone to a corner restaurant and had had coffee after coffee, waiting, until the woman behind the counter began to stare at him from the door leading into the kitchen. He knew he'd have to wait outside somewhere after that, and he found a place alongside the building near her car. He went over it again and again in his mind there, working out the details as to how to approach her, strike up a light conversation, make her laugh. It could be done. She could be convinced of his niceness, convinced to come with him.

He'd pulled his Volvo around the block, not wanting anyone to see it. From time to time, he feared what he was about to do. He'd tried this already with two other girls and they hadn't been cooperative at all, and he'd had to shut them up when they began to scream.

They were so soft to the touch, like bunnies in a storybook.

Then he saw people coming out. It was just after midnight. He braced himself below the steps in full view of her car, squatting between two garbage dumpsters. But she did not come. He waited longer, and still she didn't come. He became frustrated, wondering if he'd missed her; maybe she'd left with another person out another door, knowing he was out here waiting for her. Or maybe she was still in there, where lights outlined offices against the night sky.

He waited longer. 12:05 ... 12:06 ... 07 ... 08 ... 9 ... There she was, just emerging, quite alone, looking all about the deserted street, waving at someone who'd just pulled out of the lot and was going down Van Buren. He inched out of hiding, but he remained in a deep shadow that was like his inherent shyness taken shape. He moved closer to her car and to her. Esmeralda, he thought, how lovely the way the light is reflected off your hair and in the deep pools of your eyes. Mamma had read a lot to him, and she'd made him practice such lines in the event an occasion arose in which he needed to call one up, like now.

He stepped out of the shadow, his form towering over her, his hand going instantly up in a gesture of pleading when he saw she was about to scream. "Don't be afraid of me," he said, his lopsided grin genuine. "I--I ain't nothing but a child, mamma always says."

She gasped. "Whataya? ... Please, leave me alone," she said.

He looked hurt. "But, Esmeralda, you got to come with me."

"I'm not ... my name's Mollie and--"

"Mamma's holding supper."

She stared at him with a tinge of pity and then she looked all around. "Where is your mother, and why're you out alone here?"

"Wilbur, that's my name."

"Wilbur, why're you out alone?"

"Mamma's hurt," he lied, "and she needs help, and I come to get it. She said I should find a nice girl who'll help."

She shook her head repeatedly. "Come with me inside the building and we'll telephone for an ambulance and get your mother some help, Wilbur. Come along." She held out a hand to him.

He took hold firmly and immediately hurt her, the grip like a vise. "Let go, please," she pleaded loudly, and this made him clamp his other arm across her breasts and his hand over her mouth. She struggled with each suggestion he placed in her ear.

"Come home with me to see mamma...."

She kicked and tried to bite.

"She needs company besides me...."

She struggled still harder.

"It wouldn't be bad for you...."

Her teeth got firm hold of his hand and they drew blood, but he still held tight. Choking on the blood, she had to give in when she realized he was dragging her into the dark alleyway.

"Why can't you be nice to me?" he asked repeatedly.

"Please," she begged in return, kicking out at the dumpster beside them, causing a booming noise to thunder down the deserted street.

That's when he snapped her neck, the bone-crack sound of it dry and brittle.

Oh, God, he thought, he'd done it again, and he tried desperately to set the head upright and fix the damage. It wasn't going to be a good night after all, and he'd have to return home with no one to sit up with mamma so he himself could go to sleep.

He feared going home empty-handed and remembered now what the knife deep in his coat pocket was for, what mamma had told him he must do if he couldn't get a whole girl. He remembered mamma's constant complaints about her "vitals," as she called her internal organs. They gave her trouble. She had a bum heart, a rotten kidney, and a lousy stomach. She'd always say, "One day modern science will find a way to replace all the organs of the body, like they do now with heart transplants and kidney transplants, and when that day comes, Sonny, I want to be ready."

But Wilbur didn't want to get blood on his hands and coat and shoes, and so he resisted using the knife to please the dead old crone. He resisted for several minutes that lasped into five and ten, and then, blubbering with the acid tone of mamma's voice in his ear, he raised the knife and brought it down. He parted the clothes and began working on the outer layers of the skin, his hand shaking, certain that he'd destroy what he wanted to retrieve before he could possibly get at it....