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Marie and her mother had had this discussion many times over the past year. Marie would come home to their roomy and nicely decorated apartment, find her mother in tears before the TV set, and ask her mother why she liked to sit around and be sad all afternoon. All her mother would say, her voice quavering, was "Those poor people." She said this with equal compassion for babies dying of AIDS and women who had been the mistresses of politicians.

Marie's father had died when she was eleven years old. A professor, he'd left his wife and daughter comfortable on the proceeds from a large life insurance policy, which he'd dutifully kept up even in the worst of financial times. He seemed to sense that he would die young-a week before his forty-third birthday-of cancer.

After his death, Marie's mother gave up the two-storey house on the outskirts of town, and moved them into an apartment complex close to the city's largest mall and its two best schools. While Marie missed the house, she was soon enjoying herself in the vast busy city. Here, she could be anonymous, crippled to be sure, but lost in the pace and push of it all. People noticed you but they didn't notice you for long. And anyway, a mere cripple wasn't quite so freaky in a city where people wore green spiky hair and earrings in their noses and paid people to beat them.

Unfortunately, her mother didn't seem to make the transition very well. While she talked constantly of making new friends and taking advantage of all the activities swirling around her, she mostly holed up in her apartment, and went out only for mass and a few other church oriented events. Most of the time she stayed home and cleaned. In all the city there couldn't be a more spotless apartment. Furniture gleamed with wax, appliances beamed with buffing, even toilet bowls shone whitely. And somehow, in the day to day doing of these things, her mother had lost herself and her purpose in some terrible way. While she was certainly an attractive widow-a very pretty face, dark lovely hair spoiled only somewhat by the out of date pageboy style, and a trim body whose nice round breasts Marie envied from time to time-she never dated. Oh, there were men from the church, sweaty nervous widowers or lifelong bachelors, who paid furtive night calls for tea, cookies, and coffee in the front room before the great yawping electronic mouth of the TV set, but not serious men, not serious dates. So far as Marie knew, there had never been a serious man for Kathleen Marie Fane, not since the death of her husband. And so Kathleen Marie-beginning to grey now, two chins appearing where before there had been only one and the first faint brown spots of age showing on the slender hands-Kathleen Marie had her daughter and her apartment and was seemingly content with her comfortable isolation.

"Hi, Mom."

Her mother did not raise her eyes from the TV screen. "Hi." Then, "Those poor people."

"What is it today, Mom?"

"Lesbian incest victims."

"Oh."

"I didn't know there was so much of that going on."

"Neither did I."

The living room was done in Victorian furnishings, her mother having gone through an antique period not long after the death of her husband. There were some very nice pieces here, including a mahogany display cabinet with glazed doors and pagoda top and an oak framed tambour topped pedestal writing desk. Soft, pearl grey walls and beige carpeting set off the rest of the furnishings, which were an amalgam of modem set off with small, complementary period accoutrements. Whenever anybody visited Marie, the guest spent a mandatory amount of time oohing and aahing over the apartment. This wasn't the sort of place you expected to find in a modest middle class neighbourhood.

"I'm making pork chops for dinner, honey," her mother said, as Marie went to her room.

"Remember, Mom, it's a work night."

"Oh, dam." For the first time, her mother's attention left the TV set. "I'd forgotten. Honey, can't you call in sick or something?"

"Mom, they depend on me. You know that."

Marie's bookstore job had long been a point of contention at home. Hardly rich but not in dire need of money, Marie's mother saw no reason for Marie to work, especially in a used bookstore in a part of the city that was crumbling and was by most accounts dangerous.

"I thought you were going to quit," her mother said. In a lacy blouse and jeans, her dark hair pulled back with a festive pink barrette, her mother looked almost as young as she used to. Young, and quite pretty. Only the dark solemn gaze and the tight worry lines around her mouth revealed her age and her predilection to fret and stew.

Marie paused on her way back to her room. "I said I'd think about it, Mom. That's all I said. That I'd think about it."

"There was another killing near there last night. I don't know if you saw that on the news or not."

Marie smiled, hoping to lighten the mood. "Yes, but was anybody abducted by Venusians?"

"Very funny, young lady."

Marie paused in the centre of the hallway and stretched her arms out toward her mother.

Her mother took Marie's hands. "Honey, I wouldn't worry about you if I didn't love you."

"I know that, Mom."

"It's just that neighbourhood-"

"I know. But the people are so interesting, Mom. I just like it."

And that was true. The bookstore attracted all sorts of interesting people-not just the usual paperback browsers, either, but holdovers from the days of beatniks who looked through all the Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg books; smart and somewhat sarcastic science professors who bought science fiction novels and made tart comments on the authors they were purchasing; and intense, lonely men and women-women she liked to think would fit into her group at school-who talked of all kinds of books (everything from mysteries to eighteenth-century romances) with great smoking passion. Despite the shabbiness of the store itself, and the somewhat frightening neighbourhood surrounding it, Marie loved her hours in the store, feeling as if she belonged there. The people who came in there took note of her foot, of course, but somehow it didn't seem to matter much to them. She strongly suspected that each of them-in his or her own way-was a geek, too.

"Anyway," Marie said. She'd been going to tell her mother later, savouring the moment when she could actually say that she had something like a date. Not exactly a date, true; but something at least not unlike a date.

"Anyway, what?" her mother said.

"Anyway, I've got a ride to and from the store tonight."

"You do?"

"I do."

"With whom?"

Marie couldn't help herself then. She grinned like a little girl opening a birthday present. "Remember I told you about Richie Beck?"

"The cute one who sits at your table every day but doesn't say much?"

"Right."

"He's going to give you a ride to and from the bookstore?"

Marie nodded. "Isn't that great?"

But instead of answering directly, her mother did something wholly unexpected, reached out and brought her daughter to her, and held her tighter than she had in years.

"I'm really happy for you," her mother said.

And Marie knew her mother was crying. That was the oddest thing of all. Her mother crying.

Marie felt her mother's warm tears on the shoulder of her cotton blouse. "Mom, are you all right?"

"I'm just happy for you."

Marie grinned again as they separated. "Mom, I'm not getting married. He's just giving me a ride."

Her mother, still crying softly, said, "But don't you see what this means?"

"What what means?"

"Richie. You."