His mother was in the kitchen

They took that rest area out. It's gone, there's a slope and a guardrail and that's the whole thing now. Northbound, past Attleboro, before you get to the Sharon one. Sharon was the nice one. Sharon had a Howard Johnson's in it. This one had a men's room and a payphone. Eleven spaces. Twelve, maybe. And at eleven o'clock at night every single one of them had a guy sitting behind the wheel reading a newspaper. Tremendous readers, that crowd.

This is 1986. No. Eighty-seven, because the Buick was a year old and he told me it was a year old twice before I got the door shut, which tells you the whole guy.

Maroon Century. The squared-off one with the vinyl on the back half of the roof that's supposed to make you think convertible and doesn't make you think anything. My old man had a Cutlass with that on it.

I was thirty-two. I went about a hundred and fifty pounds and I was already bald, I've been bald since I was twenty-six, so whatever you're picturing, stop.

He puts his lights on and off. I go over, I get in, I'm in that car nine minutes, and he's drinking coffee milk out of a travel mug at eleven at night like a crazy person, and he says why don't you come back to the house.

Nobody said that. Nobody had a house. You did what you did and you went home, and that was understood by every man in that parking lot including the state trooper who I'm fairly confident was also not reading.

So I follow him. Down 95, off at Newport Ave. You know where the Apex was, the pyramid, looked like a spaceship sat down on Pawtucket. You'd come around the back of it. Down past where the Ann and Hope was, then up one of those streets behind Mineral Spring that climbs and then just quits for no reason anybody ever explained to me. Two-family. Asbestos shingle. Aluminum awnings over the front windows, blue and white stripe. Cement birdbath with no water in it.

His was the upstairs, he says. I parked on the street.

We went up the back way and did what we went there to do, and then I fell asleep.

Six in the morning I'm coming down the back stairs with my shoes in my hand like a cartoon. And the back stairs come out in the kitchen.

She's at the table. Housecoat. One of those round fluorescent rings on the ceiling and a percolator going, and she's got the big word search book from Brooks, and she's doing it in pen. In pen. HIBISCUS circled. I remember that because I stood there long enough to read it.

She looks up at me. She doesn't jump. She goes, and I gotta do the voice or there's no point to any of this, she goes, ohhh, you're the friend.

Yes ma'am.

Raymond's friend.

Yes ma'am.

You want toast.

I said no thank you. She got up and made toast. Sunbeam, and the butter was already out on the table in the dish with the little lid, so she'd been sitting there a while. Radio down low, WPRO, the fella doing the farm report. In Pawtucket. Where there's no farm.

She says where you from. I said Woonsocket.

Oh, she says. Woonsocket.

And then nothing! Nothing after it! She went back to her puzzle.

Then she says, you married. I said no. She says, smart.

And Raymond comes down in a t-shirt and he isn't embarrassed one bit, he says Ma, and she starts in on him about the milk. There's a bald stranger in her kitchen at six in the morning eating her bread and she's got her son on the milk.

Now. My car. Out front. On a street in Pawtucket, all night, with the plates showing. I had eleven years in at the registry by then. I ran plates for people all day long, that was the job. I sat there and ate two slices of toast.

At the door she says come back, he don't have nobody over.

I saw him that summer and into the next one and then I didn't.

By '89 there were four men I used to see in that lot and I didn't see any of them again and you did not ask about anybody. Anyway.

Anyway, they redid 146 around then and made it worse. My aunt left me her house in '99 and I've got the corner lot, and I keep that lawn better than the man across from me, who lies about what he puts down. He says lime. It isn't lime.

Two years ago I'm reading the Journal and there's an obituary, and his name is in it, husband of. There's not a hundred Raymond Ouellettes. Cranston. So I called the number. Took me two weeks to call the number, and that's not counting the twelve days before I looked it up.

Dunkin' on Reservoir, the one in the plaza that used to be an Almacs. He's seventy-eight. He's got a cane and he tells you about the hip inside thirty seconds, the whole hip, and then what the surgeon's father did for work. I had my hand going, the left one, which is the coffee. Everybody tells me it isn't the coffee. It's the coffee.

Forty minutes. We did the hip. We did the weather. He asked what I drive now and he still drives a Buick, and I told him that's a thing you catch off a car once and never get rid of, and he liked that, he hit the table.

He got married in '94. No. Ninety-two, because he said it was two years after Doris went in the place over by Oak Hill. She made ninety-four years old. Word searches right to the end, he says. In pen.

He never asked me one thing about anything and I never asked him either. I've got dinner every Thursday with Bobby Cadorette and Gerry Lussier, we've been eating at the same place since Mount Saint Charles, and we've had the identical four subjects since Nixon.

At the end he said we should do this again, and I said absolutely we should.

His cane was hooked over the edge of the table and it went down when he got up, and I got to it before he did. Then I held the door. There was a girl coming in behind him with a cardboard tray of coffees and I stood there and held it for her too.