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Dorothy had the morning to do housework. She filled the dishwasher, put the trash out, changed the beds, and brought the laundry down. It was strange to think no one would be coming home from school today. She was used to Ian not being around much, but he still came home like clockwork for vacations. She didn't know when she would see Edward next, probably Thanksgiving. He would want to see his friends.

She vacuumed, upstairs first, like the Irish babysitters had taught her: work from the top down. Leave chairs, wastebaskets out: it shows your work. If it's neat as a pin people will ask you what you did. Dorothy thought she smelled cigars in the boys' room, but then dismissed the idea. She had brought them both to see her father in hospice care, two days before he died, down to 60 pounds with cancer, reeking of bedsores, with skin as see-through as the lily-petals. Surely that lesson had stuck. Her children were everything to her. She wasn't sure she would ever understand about letting go.

Dorothy sighed and straightened the pictures in the hallway. In this one, the boys were 8 and 10, up to their knees in a salt-marsh in July, bug-bitten and sunburned. Edward was holding a yellow pail with a live whelk in it he wanted to keep, and Ian was dragging a minnow-trap of eels he promised to let go later. She had never got the smell of that day out of the backseat. Yet how she would trade a minute of it for this clean house! A sob welled up and made her throat hurt. She took a deep breath. She knew she must lighten up. Allen said she might try forgetting a few things. He meant well, but he didn't understand.

She thought of Maureen Neal yelling at her last year: "It's over! It's over!" Like the other mothers with older kids, Maureen said by senior year, you are done raising them. That milestone had come and gone. Dorothy supposed she should be grateful for someone giving it to her straight like that. Either you won or lost, but when the game was over, it was over. After such conversations, the gridiron moms might stand up from the cold bleachers to stretch. Notice how the coach was sitting out a senior, or playing him too much. Talk about who had heard from colleges.

Those games that had so often ended with someone getting badly hurt, so naturally the rule was to keep the sideline chitchat light. What a pounding that team took. When she closed her eyes, Dorothy could still hear the slapping of the helmets and shoulder pads making contact. She could not get used to it. So she told Ms. Bonardi, the faculty parent. "Used to it! None of us get used to it!" Ms. Bonardi said. "That's why we come to the games!" So the serenity prayer was what she had left, a little magical thinking to help you go back to sleep. It was not quite over for Dorothy.

Dorothy watered the houseplants and vacuumed downstairs. She put in the white wash and folded the dark. She needed these habits. She went out to get the mail. The sky was clear, and the red maple was starting to turn. Just a water bill and a course catalog from a continuing ed. program. The handicapped van was idling in the street as it let down the lift for the DiAngelo boy.

Dorothy stepped back inside. "You just love them more," people said, but that wasn't the whole story. You might love the world proportionately less. If the lift did not come down right, Mrs. DiAngelo would scream, "The button, push the button!" There was no way to help; anyone who observed the mother's pain seemed only to cause more. Cars queuing up behind might try to retreat, but Mrs. DiAngelo would run toward them madly, yelling, "Just wait until it's your kid needs services!" If the bus was late she tended to abuse the driver: "I waiting all this time! You late!" Serenity had not been granted Mrs. DiAngelo--Dorothy thought as she listened for the sound of the wheelchair rolling away on the gravel path--only endurance.

Dorothy brought the ladder and bushel baskets up from the cellar, and spread an old sheet under the pear tree. With a basket in one hand, she climbed half-way up and tested the ladder hard against the trunk. Last year, she had fallen, nothing serious, but it made her think. She had never seen so much fruit. March had seen record rains, May sunshine for the bees, and July hardly a thunderstorm.

She twisted a stem with three ripe pears on it, and then pulled. Perfect. She snapped off another cluster; so many just for the picking. The leaves rustled as she worked. Some fruits were small or twisted with scaly patches or insect detritus. Some had brown bruises spreading through them. All these "seconds" she dropped. Soon the basket was full and she brought it down the ladder, resting it on each rung in turn. Moving like an old lady, she thought.

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