"Your toenails need cutting," I say. "Do you have a clipper?"

"Don't be silly. Candy does that."

"Why don't we give Candy a break and let me take a turn?"

"We've got better things to do." She drags on the cigarette. "Tell me the truth. What did you think of Leonard?"

"His name's Lawrence. Leonard's his last name."

She bridles. "You know who I'm talking about."

"A nice man. Smart, considerate, good company. I'm happy for Candy."

"They're virtually living together. I don't understand how she squares that with being a Catholic. A Eucharistic minister, no less."

"Maybe like you said, it's virtual between them."

"Aren't you the comedian! Me, I don't feature Lawrence as the masculine lover-boy type. You know, he does all the cooking."

"The best chefs are men."

"Do you cook?"

"I don't have enough s.e.xual confidence."

She chuckles, and in an effusion of her distinctive brand of maternal affection, says, "You're such an a.s.shole. Have you looked in the cedar chest?"

"Yeah. You saved everything, didn't you?"

"Of course. You were my beautiful baby. My best shot at the big time after things bottomed out with Candy and Maury."

"Is that what I was?" Despite myself, I'm moved. Moved, among other things, to wonder what she has in mind. I'm not sure I was meant to see Maury's file. I scoop the papers from the floor and reinsert them in the buckram folder. Mom sucks at the Kent and says nothing.

"This is fascinating stuff," I say tentatively. "But I'm surprised by how Maury sounded. Maybe the cops didn't quote him word for word."

"Maybe. But he'll surprise you, Maury will. I ever tell you about the time-he couldn't have been older than four-he came home holding his hands behind his back? Said he had a present for me. I asked him what and he showed me a fistful of maggots. He'd been rooting around in a garbage can and decided they'd make swell pets."

Mom shakes with laughter, then with coughing. It racks her so badly, I'm afraid she'll choke. Scrambling down onto the floor, I pat her shoulders. Her bones are rickety and I'm afraid to pound harder.

"Poor Maury," she wheezes. "I shouldn't make fun of him. In his way, he was a love, just like you and Candy. When we first bought this house, other places down the block were still being built, and the carpenters sort of adopted Maury. In the morning I'd open the front door and he'd run outside and I didn't see him again until suppertime. He was gaga over that gizmo, the one with the bubble in it, that says whether a board is level or not."

I bide my time while she gathers momentum toward wherever she's going. She proceeds at her own pace, and there's no pushing her. You just have to enjoy the garrulous ride.

"I sewed him a little ap.r.o.n," she says, "with pockets for nails and a hoop for a hammer. d.a.m.ned if he didn't learn how to use tools. When he sets his mind to it, he catches on quick. The carpenters let him have some sc.r.a.ps of plywood, and he banged them together and made a box for my jewelry. I keep it in the drawer of my night table."

"I suppose he's more capable than he seems."

"I'm getting a crick in my neck." Mom pats the carpet on the other side of her. "Move around here."

Again I do as I'm told, and together we lean against the cedar chest. "What do you remember about your grandparents?" she asks. "I mean my parents."

"Not much." The truth is nothing at all.

"By the time you were born, my father was on his last legs from kidney failure. The doctor ordered him to pee in a bottle for them to test it. But Daddy said the h.e.l.l with that and peed wherever he pleased. He'd do his business right out in the front yard. He was a maverick. I guess I inherited his orneriness."

"You? Ornery?" I josh her.

Lost in reverie, she gazes at the ceiling, where light reflected from the windshield of the derelict car in her driveway shimmers and dances. This hopscotching through family history is part of the flow that used to bind us together. There was, there still is, a powerful current between us as her words surge forward and, at the same time, eddy into whirlpools of the past. Whatever her faults as a mother, she's always had a voice that echoed in me like a blood fable.

"The night my father died," she goes on, "I stayed at my parents' house and ironed the suit he was supposed to be buried in. I hung it on a hook in the room where I slept. Only thing is, I never dozed off. I stared at that suit so long, it looked like he was in it, and his arms and legs were moving. I had to climb out of bed and touch it to prove to myself it was empty. After he was in the grave, we gave his clothes to Goodwill and I never much thought about him again. My mother now, she was a different matter."

"How's that?" I obediently hit my mark.

"I dream about her all the time. Do you dream?"

"Very little," I lie.

"Maybe you have to be old. Or maybe you have to have had a mother like mine. She lied about everything. Even now I don't know the whole truth. She told me she sailed over from Ireland as a young woman, met your grandfather, and married him. It wasn't till she died and I went through her papers that I found out she changed her name, first and last, the minute she set foot in the USA."

"She wasn't the only immigrant to do that."

"I have a hunch she was running from something. A husband or the law back in County Cork. Maybe she was mixed up with the IRA. On top of changing her name, she knocked a decade off her age. Claimed she was twenty-five when she was pushing thirty-five. She didn't have me until she was past forty. Nearly as old as I was when I had you. It's a miracle it didn't kill her considering medical care back then."

"What woman doesn't like to pa.s.s for younger?" I say.

"Well, it makes you wonder what else she lied about," Mom says. "Learning she had a different name and a different age, I started to rethink everything about my mother. But after she was dead, it was too late to ask. I decided I couldn't really blame her for doing what she had to do to get to America and get a man."

"Right." Clasping a hand to the nape of her neck, I knead the stringy tendons. "Otherwise, you wouldn't have been born. And if you weren't born, where would I be?"

"That's my point. Sometimes people do things that start off wrong, then end up okay. So while you might regret what you did, you can't completely wish it never happened."

She stubs out her cigarette and drops it in the ashtray. Suddenly a tremor seizes her. I feel the shaking in my hand. She's crying.

"What's the matter?" I ask.

"You're going to hate me when you hear the truth."

"Did you hate your mother when you found out her real name and age?"

"Yes, a little."

"But you got over it." I continue to try to soothe her with my hand.

"What she did wasn't as bad. I lied about something far worse."

"How bad can it be?" I ask, thinking, Here we are down on the dirty floor surrounded by family dregs-pictures of a dead father, a girl in a wheelchair, a boy in prison, legal briefs, and psychiatric reports. What could conceivably be worse than what's already gone wrong? As the possibilities pour through me, I fear I might start shaking too.

"I won't ask you to promise not to hate me," Mom says. "But I want you to hear me out to the end."

Without lighting another cigarette, she inhales, and there's a rasping noise of old smoke ravaging her lungs. "You were born left-handed. I noticed that straightaway when you were a teeny baby and I tied a sock over your hand."

Immense anticlimax fizzles through me. Is this what she's been tediously circling?

"In those days," she adds, "lots of mothers believed it was bad to raise a southpaw in a right-handed world."

"Well, it's not exactly a tragedy."

"I asked you not to interrupt," she barks. "Your real father was left-handed, and I didn't want you to be like him."

A master of double and triple takes, I'm able to project a reaction for the benefit of spectators in the last row. But at the moment I'm frozen in wooden-faced disbelief. "My real real father?" father?"

"You're not Maury's and Candy's full brother. You have different fathers."

Along with incredulity, with absolute shock, a curious exhilaration, very close to giddiness, wells up inside me. Absurdly, I feel free. I feel I've been reborn. Yet while this news seems the answer to everything, I insist, "You need to tell me the rest."

"You know how babies are made." Her nostrils flare in warning.

"Look, I'm the one who should be upset. Not you. I'd like some background."

"About what?"

"Who's my father?"

"What's the difference? You never met him and you never will. His name wouldn't mean a d.a.m.n thing to you."

"Yes, it would. It'd mean I know my name."

"Your name's Quinn Mitch.e.l.l. Leave it at that."

"Didn't it dawn on you that I might like to meet him?"

Her eyes go frantic. "He has to be dead by now. He was older than me. He'd be near a hundred. Promise you won't look for him or his family."

"How can I when you won't tell me his name?"

"Tom Trythall. There! Satisfied?"

"No." She's so quick to confess, I question how much trust to place in the name. The previous configuration of the family, painful and convoluted as it was, may be preferable to the facts I'm dragging out of her. Still, I insist, "You have to explain. I want to know everything."

She removes her gla.s.ses, and the asymmetry of her eyes diminishes. "Your father ... Jack, he'd go off on benders that lasted days. When a woman sits at home and the man is gone, the loneliness is terrible. Rumors spread. Then I met Tom and he was sweet to me. It started off innocent enough, just talking over coffee. But we got to like each other, and I figured since people were already gossiping ... well, what the h.e.l.l, why not?"

"Did you love him?"

"I thought I did at the time."

"Did you tell him you were pregnant?"

"Yeah. But there was no future for us. He had a wife and family. And me being Catholic, I didn't relish a divorce and living the rest of my life in sin. I didn't see any solution except to play the hand I was dealt."

"Did Dad ... did Jack know?"

"Put it this way, he suspected. Now next thing you'll ask is whether that's what we were fighting about the day he died."

"It hadn't crossed my mind. But since you brought it up ..."

"Look, Jack and I argued at the drop of a hat. This was just one more thing." She thrusts her gla.s.ses back on and glares at me.

"What became of Tom Trythall?"

"After the murder, he pleaded to get back together. That's a man for you. Raring to go like nothing had happened. But I was finished. I had no time and no more interest in that type of love. Even if I'd wanted to be with him, which I didn't, there was always a mob around-cops, lawyers, nosy neighbors. And I had to think about you kids."

"You never had any more contact with him?"

"A couple phone calls. I don't know whether I should tell you this"-which naturally ensures that she will-"but he hounded me to get rid of the baby. Get rid of you. I told him to go to h.e.l.l, and not just because it's a mortal sin. I couldn't bear not to have you. I was sick the whole nine months. It was like a snake had curled up inside me and was eating its way out. But I never considered an abortion." She clamps a hand to my arm. "Was I mistaken, sweetheart? Would you rather not have been born?"

The question demands a prompt, emphatic answer. I should sing out, Of course not, you did the right thing. But after my euphoria, the giddiness is giving way to an inner earthquake, a great seismic shift as of continental plates grinding into new alignment.

"Do you hate me?" she breaks the silence. "Why don't you say something?"

"I don't know what to say."

"You at a loss for words!"

"I need time to think."

"At least say you forgive me."

Having served since childhood as her sounding board and more often as her whipping boy, I'm now expected to grant absolution. I do so, yet ask, "Why are you telling me this now?"

"I don't want to die with it on my conscience."

"Haven't you confessed it to a priest?"

"More than once. He told me it wasn't fair for you not to know."

"Fair?" I'm at a loss as to how the term applies in this case. Then it occurs to me that Candy may have known all along. Does this account for her bristliness at what she perceives as my princely advantages? Does she imagine that because of my lack of Mitch.e.l.l blood, I started off on a pedestal and from that launching pad I winged upward to success?

"What are you thinking?" Mom asks.

"I'm thinking how awful it must have been for you to keep this secret for so many years."

"Sometimes I worry Tom's family will squirm out of the woodwork," she says, "and hit you up for money or embarra.s.s you."

"I'm not that easy to embarra.s.s."

She dries her eyes on a cuff of her housecoat. "So you don't hate me? If my mother did this to me, I'd kill her."

I nudge her shoulder with mine. "I'd never tangle with you."