He turned, dazed, toward the house.
Inside, framed by the frosted window of the front room, stood his mother. The frost had made a soft oval around her, like the border on an old photograph, and the lamplight behind her lit up her silver bob like a halo. She had clearly been watching the whole time. She did not pretend otherwise. She looked her son dead in the eye through the glass, and she raised both hands and gave him an enthusiastic double thumbs-up.
---
It had begun, as most of Wes Callahan's troubles began, with a letter he should not have written.
His mother wrote to him every week. She had written to him every week since he left for college in 1966, and she had kept on writing through the year he dropped out, the year he lived in a van in Vermont with a fiddle player named Moose, the long, wandering year he spent busking his way through Europe with a guitar and a rucksack and forty dollars sewn into the waistband of his jeans, and the five years since then that he had spent in New Haven, giving guitar lessons in the back room of Brannigan's Music on State Street, playing weekends with a band called the Lamplighters in whatever bar would have them, and living above a shoe repair shop in an apartment where the radiator knocked all winter like a ghost that wanted to be let in.
Her letters came in blue envelopes with her looping, slanted hand across the front, and they were full of small news. The Congregational church had a new minister who was very young and wore sandals. Hal Szabo next door had helped her put the storm windows up, which was kind of him, though he talked the entire time about the Yankees. She had planted tulips. She had pulled up the tulips, because something had eaten them.
After his father died, the letters changed.
It was not that they became sad. Barbara Callahan did not, as a rule, permit herself to become sad in writing. But something crept into them, a sort of listening quality, as though she were writing from a very quiet house and could hear the clock ticking in every line. She mentioned the porch light. She had started leaving it on all night, she wrote, because the house seemed so dark otherwise, and it was nice to think that if anyone needed to find their way, they could. She mentioned that Frank had always hoped Wes would find someone to come home to. She mentioned it once, and then not again for a month, and then once more, lightly, in a postscript, like someone touching a bruise to see if it still hurt.
In March, on a gray afternoon when he had eleven dollars to his name and two students who had canceled and a cold coming on, Wes sat down at his kitchen table and wrote back to her, and somewhere between the paragraph about the band and the paragraph about his landlord, he wrote: *I've been seeing someone. Her name is Linda. I think you'd like her.*