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get to was more like letting go of a dream next morning that he half knew he could, if he tried to, follow up, since it had come only after he had woken up, not a sleeping dream which he didn’t ever have. And did follow up when he was staying up the street at his grandparents’, come to think of it, but this in turn wasn’t because his grandmother asked him for more of the dream once he got started; for she would have a story that was like his dream, he always accepted that; but with the conclusion about his friends and his father, he couldn’t follow it up, or not for a while; but then the next thought in the thought got together with the first one, he got to the next step by accident one day when he flashed anger like some ability withheld in his face at his grandmother for something she hadn’t meant to say but he throttled down seeing she was the one he loved, realizing it here fifty yards down the street from his own house but felt he hadn’t lost anything by blowing up, though it was wrong. And the step from that first thing about his father and his friends keeping him from where he had to get to was then that where he had to get to was this smart mother of his, but in her place was the future, and God that was where he had to get to. And the accident—accident?—that word his wife years later used when his own son, no paltry dribbler, unburdened himself in his pants at nursery school—was his grandmother saying, "Things haven’t been quite the same between your mom and dad since before Brad came along," but the next thing in Jim’s thinking was only months later and he’d been more openly opposing his father by announcing he was going to work for the summer on a friend’s family’s farm a few miles out of town where in the field where they would plant horse corn the furrows and red hunks of rock-like earth felt to the eye and the foot like a larger scale—planning to go to work there for the summer when his father wanted him in the office and made so much of this that Jim saw his father had gone a little crazy. Jim did not appeal to his mother. She was sick all that spring, that much he later and much later knew for sure: his father would tell her to see the doctor and she said he always said, See the doctor, or she said, Of course, of course; still, Jim found his way through the atmosphere in the house, he went to his mother. The house though he was older had gotten bigger. And the quiet after supper was a distance between his parents he would like to reckon by blame but he was stretched between where he’d been and where he had to get to and with no one to run him down more than his father who was somewhere downstairs or (who knew? by now) saying of Jim’s grades, "You have only yourself to blame," yet yes Jim went to his mother who was sitting on the edge of her bed watching him when he opened the door, one night after supper which she or Brad aged eleven had cooked, to tell her about the farm job that coming summer, and keeping in shape. She in her calm way smiled as if there were no trouble except maybe how to tell what was funny here, which you might get to in time but she hadn’t the energy for or maybe time. He didn’t mention his father, only the farm. She said she wished Jim’s little brother Brad would do something like that, that he would growl and sweat once in a while; and then she said, "You will go away where you belong."
    This scared Jim because it came out like a command—but whose?, and she was the one receding, or they both were and you couldn’t figure which of them more so.
    And he anyway didn’t get around to telling her—because he didn’t have on hand the words to say—her drawn sick face kept from itself a health inside as sharp and dangerous as it was far.
    "And live a more human life," his mother said, and did not reach out to touch him, though he saw it was late for her to tell him stories that she anyway had never been inclined to tell, for she played music