Physics of Sunset. Jane Vandenburgh

smart-mouthed. Growing up, she’d hung around him all the time. He was constrained by his father from ever belting her, though it often occurred to him. He had swatted her a few times; she had always yakked at him, talked with her mouth full. She also lied. She had actually been as annoying as an insect.

      He was talking into the lightweight plastic of the handset—the phone felt ridiculous in his clutching hand. “But she might miss it,” he whispered. “Since it was Pop’s,” he added.

      “Know what, Alec?” Betsy asked. “She doesn’t miss anything. She doesn’t miss you and she doesn’t miss me. The other day when I took her grocery shopping on Hillside Avenue, she tried to pay the cabbie with the red of her dialed-out lipstick. Only, know what? I’m telling you this, then I’m hanging up. The cabbie was Ben and the taxi was our station wagon.” She hung up.

      Alec held the buzzing nothing of the (wait, wait) telephone.

      He was remembering the last time he took his mother out to lunch at that fish place in Queens Village he’d been to a hundred times, the name of which now escaped him. She shook out her napkin, placed it in her lap fastidiously. His mother still had lovely manners. She looked around the room in her superior way, then leaned forward confidentially. She reached out one hand, Alec took it.

      It was a strange object, this hand, large and out of scale against his mother’s shrinking body. The fingers stuck out almost directly from her palm, which emerged flipperlike from her wrist, each segment going off at what seemed like an increasingly useless angle.

      She pressed her lips together, nodded at what the waiter had set before her, winked to show Alec she was no one’s fool. This was a plain salad of lettuce and tomato with Thousand Island.

      Viv watched the waiter leave, then leaned forward to ask Alec something. Her face was humorous, even wise. He leaned forward eagerly—now she was going to tell him something. “Alec,” she asked, “say again? What’s the name of what I’m eating?”