Three more shots sent him outside for air. He took deliberate steps, his boots crunching on the gravel drive and then slightly slipping on the little pockets of ice on the trail leading to the orchard. As a child he had loved smashing the iced-over puddles with rocks from the stone wall, and he and Sarah would venture out onto the larger puddles, scaring each other as the spider-webbing cracks sounded like snapping tree branches echoing off the barn's steep sloped roof.

"What are you going to do with her, Roy? Just throw her in a home? She insisted we not do that to Dad, but we're going to do that to her?" Sarah had been furious. Roy had actually checked to make sure his seatbelt was on when her vocal pitch started to ascend and he realized she wasn't watching the road nearly as much as is prudent for safe driving.

They had gotten together for another lunch. It seemed to him that's what people of a certain class did when confronted with some form of domestic crisis, convene a series of meetings, usually over food, under the guise of finding a credible solution, usually by throwing money at the problem. Sarah could have been a consultant on this method of conflict resolution.

When her teenage son started smoking pot, she paid to send him to boarding school. When she suspected David, her husband, was sleeping with the real estate broker they had used to buy their house, she hired an expensive private detective to take hundreds of inconclusive pictures of him running errands, most of them on Sarah's behalf. And when her body started responding to the unkind urgings of Earth's gravitational pull, she more or less purchased the breasts and ass of a 23 year old. But suddenly money, it seemed, was a shortcut in solving the problem of what to do with their mother. Suddenly she insisted on taking the high road.

"Sarah, there is no way she can stay in that house, not one month longer. She will be fine at Pine Grove. It's a good facility."

Facility. The word had all of the charm of a just-pulled hand grenade. It made him think of Lysol and pee and crazy people. The government lab that he worked in was a facility. No, Pine Grove was not a very pleasant place, he knew this. But he decided he could put her there without remorse. Especially after what she had done to him. --JV

Roy and his sister had driven over in separate cars, alone in their thoughts. Coming up the long dirt drive, Roy's late-model Buick had soaked up the ruts, heaving like a pleasure boat cutting through whitecaps. The twisted, bare apple trees had flashed by in the headlights.

Roy thought of this as he worked the sponge across the wall.

Why not take his time, he thought. Why not give the old place an honorable sendoff, a last hurrah? Why not really scrub those damn walls, look around a bit, soak in some memories? He dropped the sponge in the bucket.

Walking to the pantry, Roy ran his right hand along the narrow hallway wall. The faded wallpaper's crazy little red robins and jays were still perched on berry bushes and slender branches after all these years. "This is for you guys," Roy said softly as he reached into a small cabinet. He pulled out a fifth of Old Turkey, untouched since his father's last ambulance trip six years ago. With a nod to the wallpaper aviary, Roy poured a finger's worth into a cloudy tumbler and threw it back. - RJ