Read There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In for Free Online Page A

about how my friends and colleagues vanished, retreating into their cozy lives after I was unjustly sacked. These days I limit myself to a dignified telephone call once a month and a very occasional raid on their dinner tables, but of that I already spoke. Of my scrimping I spoke, too. Mr. and Mrs. Provinces drew stipends in addition to financial aid, plus their hordes of visitors supplied groceries in exchange for an evening in a warm house, even attempting to stay overnight in their room, on the floor, like some collective family. My two idiots were moved to tears by this behavior, seeing in it proof of their friends’ personal devotion to them. But I held my ground firmly and called the police, protesting the presence of hordes after eleven at night; once a whole police squad marched in, demanding to see everyone’s IDs. A regular Greek tragedy, with me the chorus. This is what my son was coming home to.
    But I didn’t wish them ill. I tapped my reserves of oatmeal, the only form of nourishment Provinces disliked, and every morning I made a pot of plain cereal, as though for myself, for my sick liver, and every afternoon I found an empty pot in the sink. How I loved my daughter, all of her, down to her unwashed feet in old slippers, her bony shoulders beneath a threadbare robe—all seen from the back, for she no longer showed me her face. I’d scoop her up in my arms, lay her down on clean sheets under a satin comforter (stashed away for now), so she could spend those last days before birth resting, but she kept trotting to her finals, trying to finish early, appealing to professors with her neat pregnant belly to make concessions for her. News about her reached me in snippets of overheard phone conversations—our phone has a short cord, and I’m not deaf, not yet. So Alena worked on her exams and stuffed her beloved, and I sent letter after cheerful letter to the human sewer where my son was spending his days. I’d grown used to Provinces and begun calling him (to myself) “our dud,” in preparation for “our dad.” To Andrey I explained away Alena’s silence by saying she was overworked, and I mentioned my fears for her health, that she might end up in a hospital, which is exactly what happened.
    That night I dragged myself home after a full day at the library working on my courtroom news column—one needs to eat, somehow, and there was no way I could work at home, surrounded on all sides as I was by constant slamming and knocking, plus loud telephone conversations about the new favorite subject: nutty Mom and her syphilitic boyfriend the plumber. This time I came back to a blissful silence—at ten the house was empty. I had dinner, alone, in the kitchen, bathed quietly, and fell into my clean, cool bed, only to wake up, as always, at midnight, this time from a ringing silence. I got up and started pacing in front of their door. In a panic I pushed it open and discovered an untouched bed with a rusty stain on the blue bedspread. My first thought was that he’d killed her; my second, that she’d gone into labor. The dud showed up drunk at two in the morning, staggering past me into the bathroom and vomiting. “What happened? Where’s Alena?” I kept asking through the door. He emerged as white as chalk and announced that Alena had given birth.
    “Congratulations. A boy or a girl?”
    “A boy.”
    “Where are they?”
    “Twenty-Fifth Maternity Ward,” and he collapsed like a drunken swine.
    I left him where he was. Then I scrubbed the bathroom and for the rest of the night washed and ironed a pile of secondhand baby clothes, the numerous donations solicited by me. The dud meekly took containers of food to Alena every day and even ironed, but every night he disappeared, only to repeat his rendezvous with the toilet. I loosened the purse strings, for the dud had nothing: his father, apparently, had drowned at sea and the mother spent her last days in hospitals. I asked him what was wrong with her; I