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so like William McKelvey’s that Carl had to laugh. “Never wake up before noon. Always hated breakfast.”
    “How about an ice cream?”
    “The Dairy Queen doesn’t open until ten.”
    “Well—”
    “I want to show you my school. They got monkey bars last year. I’ll teach you my tricks.”
    There was a new sign at the edge of town:
    WEST GULL
pop. 684
    Like Lizzie beside him, everything had prospered. Every house seemed to have had its trim painted, its siding replaced, its grass fertilized into a brighter more sparkling green.
    He pulled to a stop in front of the West Gull Elementary. A low wide building, an oddity in town because it had been faced with yellow bricks instead of red. The old metal roof had been painted a bright blue that matched the shiny blue doors and windows; the effect was to make the whole school like an oversized plastic toy.
    “Your grandmother used to teach there. Did you know that?”
    “Lennie?”
    “No, not your mother’s mother. My mother. Elizabeth.”
    “Your mother,” she sighed. “Were you ever in her class?”
    “Once.”
    “Was she nice?” Lizzie’s green eyes were slits in the sun.
    And suddenly Carl could remember being Lizzie’s age, staring at his hands on the desk, suddenly conscious of the way his nails were bitten down, inflamed. Raising his eyes tohis mother and realizing she had a funny way of glancing at him every few seconds as though she thought no one else would notice. He remembered how uncomfortable it had been to have every kid in his class spend the whole day staring at his mother, how embarrassed he was if the least wisp of her hair was out of place, if her blouse was tucked in unevenly or the back of her skirt smudged with chalk. The way she stood at the blackboard, her behind swaying, the chalk squeaking. The way she had of sitting at her desk and sliding her glasses down her nose to read, as though she didn’t even
care
what she looked like.
    “I wouldn’t want to be in my mother’s class,” Lizzie said. “Everyone would make fun of me.”
    “I know what you mean,” Carl said. “No one ever lets you forget about your mother.” Then Lizzie ran ahead to the play area, pulled herself up on the bars and began swinging along them, turning to him every few seconds with a proud but questioning smile.
    At noon on the day Carl McKelvey came back to West Gull, Adam Goldsmith was standing in front of Richardson’s New & Used. He didn’t know Carl had returned, his eyes were half-closed, and he watched with his usual disinterest as Carl’s truck turned in to park between a set of the newly painted yellow diagonals in front of the Timberpost Restaurant. Through the plastic windows of the truck’s canopy Adam Goldsmith could see a jumble of furniture and cardboard boxes. When he was a child men would appear on the streets of West Gull, their shabby coats heavy with dirt. By nightfall they would be gone, Adam never knew where. Now it was young men in trucks packed with the remnants of their last stop, their last woman, their last job.
    He had been thinking about Moses in the desert. The story told was that because he broke his magic staff, God had punished him by denying him the Promised Land. How could Moses have been so stupid? But there had been so many promises. The truth was that Moses had broken his staff on purpose. After a certain point a man wants to stay where he is. No one could say history had proven Moses wrong.
    It was one of those brilliant mornings when the place a man most wants to be is outside soaking in the sun. Adam Goldsmith had made that choice. He was planted on the sidewalk letting the summer heat paralyze him, letting his mind drift from young men in trucks to the Depression to the wandering in the desert and that heavy ache in his arms and neck Moses had carrying those stone tablets down from the mountain, when the truck door opened and Carl stepped into the light. The jolt hit Adam in a single pulse which struck his chest