I Shall Not Want by Julia Spencer-Fleming Page A

my regrets.” He shrugged the jacket off and hung it on a hook. His mother grabbed its collar and thrust it back at him.
    “Mom!”
    “I want you to drive me. It’ll be dark coming back, and I don’t like to drive in the dark.”
    “Since when?”
    “A woman of seventy-five has the right to develop a few little quirks. Now, are you going to take me, or are you going to sit here in my house, eating food I’ve made, with your big feet up on my hassock watching my television?”
    He glowered down at her. “Now you’re trying to guilt me into going.”
    “You’re darned right I am. Is it working?”
    He took the jacket. He had been living at her house since his wife died. No, since before. He had moved in with his mom when Linda had thrown him out of their house in what he had thought was going to be a temporary separation. It had become a permanent and irrevocable separation two weeks later, with her death. Her stupid, senseless, preventable death.
    He couldn’t stand to go back to his own house, and he couldn’t stand to sell it, so he puttered along in limbo, buying groceries, fixing odds and ends, paying Mom’s bills when he could get hold of them before she did. She hadn’t asked him how long he was staying or what he was going to do. She hadn’t asked anything of him.
    “All right.” He jammed an arm back into his jacket. “I’ll take you. And I’ll pick you up. But I’m not staying for dinner.”
    “We’ll see about that.”
    In his pickup, she chattered on about Janet and Mike’s girls, and about Cousin Nane, and about the latest meeting of her antiwar group, Women in Black. He let her words wash over and around him, as unnoticed as the late-afternoon sun slanting through chinks in the clouds or the faint green traces of spring emerging from the last clutches of winter’s gray and brown tangle. It was all part of a world that kept moving and changing, and he didn’t want anything to do with it.
    They passed an enormous Hummer, pimped to the nines and radiating a bass line that rattled his windows. “Those vehicles ought to be illegal,” his mom huffed, and then she was on about greenhouse gases and blood for oil and American entitlement. Same-old same-old. In the dips and hollows, where snow still covered the ground, a thick white mist hovered knee-high, like a company of ghosts unable to break the bonds of earth.
    He was startled into awareness by guitar strings thrumming their way out of the cab’s speakers. “What are you doing?” he asked.
    “Well, since you weren’t listenin‘ to me, I thought you might like to hear some music instead.”
    He reached over and snapped the CD player off. “No,” he said. “No music.”
    His mother looked at him. “No music.”
    “I don’t like listening to music.”
    “Since when?”
    Since my life went straight into the crapper. Since every other goddam song makes me think of Clare
. He did not say what he was thinking. He had a great deal of practice, each and every day, in not saying what he was thinking. Instead, he said, “A man of fifty has the right to develop a few little quirks.”
    “Huh,” his mother said, but she left him alone as the county highway twisted and turned through densely packed trees, skirting the mountains to the west of Millers Kill. Eventually, the forest gave way to a broad valley, the road falling away like a fast-moving stream to run up and down the gentle hills between one dairy farm and the next.
    They were closing in on Janet and Mike’s quarter-mile-long driveway when his mother said, “Go on past. We’re meeting them at the neighbor’s.”
    Russ took his foot off the gas. “Mom. This isn’t some sort of setup, is it?”
    She looked—not guilty, she never looked guilty as far as he could tell—but like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “I’m not sayin‘. It’s a surprise.”
    “Listen, Mom. If they’re fixing me up with some sweet little widow woman or divorcée, I’m turning