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hungry? Would you like something to eat?”
    â€œNo thanks. I ate on the flight.”
    â€œYou
did
?” Mock horror, an old family joke. He actually likes airplane food.
    It’s amazing she can find humour at all, given what hashappened. But maybe not so amazing, maybe it says that all her years with him have been an emergency and that yesterday’s debacle was simply the emergency continuing. In fact maybe what he was witnessing here wasn’t the collapse of a monumental relationship but rather a last shard hitting the ground, and the settling dust.
    Richard can only imagine the two of them in recent years. His father growing quietly wilder, his mother concerned with security to the point of paranoia. He does see this all the time with older purchasers and perhaps it makes sense: the less life to lose, the more one wants to protect it. His mother has always been afraid of encroaching crime, the inner city crawling out. He remembers her locking car doors, even taxi doors, when she drove through a downtown, particularly its grubby perimeter. He recalls his father, in a family discussion about a next new place to live, asking if she would like him to design her “a castle with a clear view of the peasantry coming up the slope.”
    Gazing out the window he eventually registers the school of kayakers he’s been staring at. They look tentative. He thinks he can make out grey heads. His mother is slowly spooning and tinking something into a teapot. What was it like for her when the doors first came off and the blankets hung? Listening to his father during that call, Richard actually thought it a cool idea, at least a funny idea.
    â€œOkay, Richard, picture this,” was how his father put it, his voice pocked with the years but his confidence as robust as ever. “You’re a thief, a bad guy. You’re walking down a street, a suburban street. You’re casing it. You pass a house with
no doors
. Instead it has
blankets
hung over the door holes. You’re a thief. Is that the place you pick to rob? Would you rob thatplace?” The question’s rhetorical, but his father waits. All his life, Richard has had to answer the rhetorical questions too.
    â€œI dunno.”
    â€œNo. You wouldn’t. Why? Because a person who uses only a blanket has no worries about safety. You’re a thief and you see this house and you imagine this unbelievable monster living in there behind those blankets. Right?”
    â€œI guess.”
    â€œMaybe it’s a guy just waiting for someone to
try
. You wouldn’t go in there if you were paid to. Someone who feels safe living behind a blanket is a witch or a maniac. No way you’re wandering in there to steal their stuff.”
    He had a carpenter lift the doors off, up went the blankets, and his mother had stayed for a while. It must have been a final torture for her. Apparently the blankets were authentic Navajo, flown in on this whim of his, and expensive. And then a month or so later — his mother isn’t clear on this, though his father had phoned her at her new condo to explain — he’d had the carpenter come back to remove the blankets, and the garage door too, even plastering over all the holes from screws and hinges and locks. Smooth, pristine entranceways.
    Richard knows her torture was only a side issue, a by-product. Of his art. His art was all. It always had been. In fact it was maybe her paranoia that triggered this particular project in the first place. Him trying to prove something to her. It was perverse and juvenile and it failed. Richard remembers another prank that was also probably a reaction to his mother, in that house — they called it a hacienda — his father reno’d while they lived in it, on the north California coast. He built a family room extension to include a living redwood tree that was four feet in diameter. To accommodate movement, not so much from growth butfrom wind, he