Nobody Sent Me

Did you eat your lunch.
Did you say your prayers.
Did you wear an undershirt.
Did anybody ask you anything.
Is it all right?

The Point, 1998. Chris is thirteen, and every weekday at twenty to seven his mother rings twice, showers at his grandmother's, and asks him the same four questions. Then one more, looking at the window. Someone always tells her that it is.

He is thinner by a summer of walking, and on his way up the hill to a school his grandmother is paying for with a failing heart. His mother counsels other people's children for the Board of Education. On Saturdays she stands outside the church fence at Star of the Sea, at the one bar worn down to bright iron, and prays through the five o'clock Mass without going in.

By the summer he finishes school, his mother sleeps sitting up on a bench under the highway ramp and will not come in from the street. A college across the country wants to know when he will arrive.

One night he sits on the next bench until dawn. When she wakes, she asks who sent him.

"Nobody sent me. I came."

The second novel of the Aspartame series, after Behold Your Mother. It stands on its own.