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was all I could do for him before seeing him again in the morning.
    I was out of energy and money, which are very closely linked when you're chasing coke.  I inhaled the last of my supply and started over to my mother's apartment at Heritage Park.  We had made dinner plans before, and I'd left her a message that I was strapped for cash.
    Heritage Park is actually a cluster of five-story glass-and-steel buildings on Lynn's pier that was supposed to spark gentrification and save the city.  Instead, the development was itself consumed by urban blight and spit back out as subsidized housing for the elderly, disabled and poor.  My mother qualified on the first count:  She was seventy.  As to her health, despite the ravages of fifteen years of diabetes, she insisted she had been sick not a day in her life.  And she was far from poor; my father's life insurance policy had netted her about half a million dollars.
    I leaned to kiss her at the front door.  Her thin, cool lips brushed my cheek.  She retreated a few steps and squinted up at me.  "You look sick."
    I have always looked weak or ill to my mother.  As a boy, I trusted her impressions of me, which ultimately made me feel disabled.  No doubt she had the same corrosive effect on my father.  "I feel great," I said.  I walked past her into the living room.  "Eyes bothering you again?"
    She stayed at the door and inspected me as I sat down on the couch.  Her eyes narrowed to slits.  Deep crow's feet fanned across her temples.  At five feet two and about a hundred pounds she reminded me of a deeply rooted weed.
    "Dr. Fine told me he suggested laser treatment for your retinas."
    "He'd like to make a little money, that friend of yours."  She readjusted a strand of pearls that had drifted to one side and captured her little breast, then limped into the kitchen.  The diabetes had destroyed most of the nerves in her left foot.  "Nothing's wrong with my eyes.  I see everything I want to."
    I smiled at that truth, remembering her habit of locking herself in the bedroom and blaring television whenever my father flew into one of his rages.  "You got my message?" I yelled to the kitchen.
    "No..."
    "I left a message on your answering machine."
    "Oh?"
    I picked up a piece of blown glass twisted to look like candy.  It was just one of the fake things in the room.  The décor — including oversized, never-opened coffee-table books, antique spectacles perched on the side table, a silk flower arrangement on the mantel of the false fireplace — only resembled that of a home.  I felt like I was in a Levitz showroom.  "The message was about my mortgage," I yelled again.
    "That?  Oh, yes, I got it."  She brought our plates to the dining room table.  "I hope you still like tuna.  I found a beautiful piece at Star Market."
    I have always disliked fish, and I was certain that my mother, if only unconsciously, remembered this.  "Tuna sounds perfect," I said.
    "Come.  Sit down."
    I sat at the dining room table with her, tried to ignore the odor of fish mixed with her perfume and picked around the tomatoes in my salad (which cause me an allergic skin reaction).
    "How's your Kathy?" my mother asked, slicing her fish into a checkerboard.
    "Wonderful."
    "I never got a thank-you note for the bracelet I sent her for her birthday.  It's been a month."  She stared at me as she chewed one of her fish squares.  "So I wondered maybe something was wrong."
    "She's been busy at the hospital."
    "Everybody's having babies.  Probably you would have been happier as an obstetrician yourself.  You wouldn’t have to think so much."  She added two heaping sugars to her tea and took a sip.
    "If you don't watch your sugar, your foot will get worse."
    "My sugar's fine."
    I swallowed a forkful of tuna without chewing or breathing.  "Excellent fish," I nodded.  "So what do you think about the mortgage?"
    "What mortgage is that?"
    "The message I left..."
    "Oh, of course.  The