In the Middle of All This by Fred G. Leebron

her. Don’t you call me judgmental—”
    â€œShe said that to you?”
    â€œShe says that to me every time I talk to her. Every time . She says it helps her to let everything out whenever she feels it.”
    â€œOh,” he said. He sighed. “So what do you think?”
    â€œWhat do I think?” his mother said. “Why should it matter what I think? You know what I think. It’s too … too … it’s just too impossible. Richard’s never there. She’s doing only unconventional stuff. I think it’s very …” She was groping for words. “Very desperate, I guess. What do you think?” she said.
    He shook his head, as if she could see him. “I think there are more sides to this than we’ll ever know.”
    â€œWell, no kidding. There’s the other line. Was there anything else?”
    â€œHow’s Dad?” he remembered to ask, his father’s own slow-moving, late-in-life cancer like a kind of overdue bill Martin too easily continued to allow to slip his mind.
    â€œStill with the prostate. I’ll talk to you soon.”
    â€œLove you,” he said.
    â€œLove you,” she said.
    It was an exchange he had stolen from Lauren’s talks with her mother.
    â€œSo what did she say?” Lauren asked.
    He told her.
    â€œI love the idea of life in the middle of all this,” she said.
    He stared at her.
    â€œI can’t help it. I do.”
    â€œWhat about Richard?” he said.
    â€œYou sound just like your mother.”
    His face crimsoned, and he gnashed his lip to keep from screaming at her.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just… remember how everyone thought their yoga group was a cult, and you had to keep telling them that at least Elizabeth and Richard weren’t selling off all their stuff, at least they were still materialistic. It took your family a long time to come around to the fact those guys weren’t brainwashed. Now it’s the one thing that’s saving her.”
    â€œI just don’t think this idea is very realistic.” He was sorry as soon as he’d said it.
    â€œRealistic? What’s realism got to do with it?” She went to the fridge and brought out a brick of cheddar cheese and unwrapped it and started chopping it angrily in narrow strips. “Cheese gum!” she shouted into the living room. Max came running, and from upstairs they could hear the race of Sarah’s footsteps. “We’ll talk about it later,” she said.
    She had to call him. She didn’t want to, but after whatever she’d left on the machine last night, she had better. What to say? What to say? By the time she got to the end of wherever she was going, nothing would be left unsaid. It would all be out in the open and shrunken to corpuscles of grief and self-pity. Maybe she shouldn’t be allowed to call anyone anymore. Maybe that’s what this was all about, taking her privileges one by one. Was she so tender that one appointment could crush her so? Hadn’t she learned anything? She switched on the computer and entered e-mail.
    â€œSend me the cassette,” she wrote him. “Then we’ll talk.”
    She hit SEND . He wouldn’t get it for another day—he refused to have e-mail at home—but she liked how relatively immediate it was and how she needn’t risk getting his voice on the phone and having to go further than she wanted.
    She had new mail. Her mother. Martha. Her oldest nephew. People tapping away at her from all over, tapping their little words of encouragement and companionship. Tap, tap, tapping. Once Martha’s son had had each child from his entire first-grade class send her a get-well card, and it had made her feel as if she’d already died. Not yet, she thought. Not yet. At first she’d saved the cards, with their bright crayon drawings and smiling faces and stick figures and their endlessly