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to him only obtusely. He had grown up here and belonged to it and it was not like some property external to him. He felt more possessive over his tractor.
    He understood how it must have been difficult for his wife to come into the place, but she did so gently, without displacing anything. The bigger changes they seemed to make together, putting the shower in, painting the upstairs rooms. The house took her in just as the family had. She had come to play as a child and then there had been a long ten-year gap, but it was as if the house remembered her and accepted her in the way a dog might recall an old friend of its owner.
    â€œHow is it?” asked his mother.
    â€œSteady,” he said. He began to tell her the counts and the small crises and the surprises and they talked for a while, the conversation shifting about like something in the wind being lifted and dropped, left for a while, lifted again.
    His mother had a staid, farmhouse traditionalism. You could go abroad to an agricultural place and you would find the same taciturn dependability in the women there. You would be able to sit at their table and there would be the same ironic hospitality, and then they would unload cookery at you and you wouldn’t be able to move. If you were hurt, their responses would be nurse-like and unsympathetic but their remedies would work, and if you were to make one of them angry it would be a great and dangerous thing. They are like this because they have been charged for generations with keeping their men working, by feeding and repairing them, and there is no room for sentimentalism in that. You would not find kinder people, but their kindness would be in essential things and they would pour it on you.
    But this sureness of purpose can only come from having a defined role and from not questioning it. It was certain to him that his mother had never questioned the role, but with that same conviction—age being a role in itself—she had adopted oldness when she assumed she should, rather than when her body told her to.
    She had seemed to prematurely age, to adopt some strange outwardly witnessed notion of old people in the wayteenagers put on some adulthood. There was no adjustment to the fact that eighty was not a rare age anymore, and that sixty was what forty used to be. She started to order elasticated trousers and strange shoes that made her look incongruously aged like teenagers look in grown-up clothes, and seemed to choose a stock phrase book of senior comments which she took to saying with a wistful acceptance; again, like a teenager trying to sound grown up.
    He didn’t know exactly what to do about this, but it was wearing. And then suddenly she was old, and the incongruity was not there.
    Like a teenager finally growing up and letting the honest little bits of character from childhood come through, now his mother actually was old there was something once again more girlish to her, and he could trace this. It was as if he was coming to know her as the person she was before she even had him. There were all these little signs, and he began to understand how there must have existed a great chemistry between his young parents that had gradually been rhythmically buried by life. The role, he thought, looking at her now, understanding her fearfulness at having to split her care once more between her husband and son, his father half-paralyzed and he bereft. It’s the role, he thought. The role gets you through.
    â€œMa,” he said. “I’m okay. I don’t want you to come round.”
    â€œIt would tire two people to death, this,” she said. He saw in her eyes the flash at the word she’d spilled, saw it catch in the air before her and shifted his head, letting her know she could let it go. She understood that he was not being proud, remembered his childish independence and hoped it would be enough.
    â€œI have to get through this,” he said. “It’s easier if I