How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet

for the day with a last pat on the head; hastily he grabbed his keys from a bowl on a side table. He left.
    All day he worked hard and took very few calls, and it was past seven when he finally finished. He was the last to leave
    the office, something he liked because he could survey it at his leisure, walking around, shuffling his nearly noiseless feet across the carpet. He stood and stared out various windows that offered views past other buildings and onto pieces of the ocean. He saw the blurs of ships like cities in the distance, unmoving on the gray surface. They were large ships, dark ships, solid and far across the waves. Often he saw them through these office windows and the next day they were gone.

    When he got home his mother sat red-eyed in a lawn chair on the balcony, Terry in another chair beside her, an ashtray balanced on his mother’s chair arm. He felt a pang of need— Beth should be here, she would be better at this than he was.
    Of course after one evening they were not at that point. It would be far from appropriate.
    He knelt in front of his mother and took her hand. “Are you OK?”
    She nodded slowly, vaguely. Her face was clean of makeup.
    “Do you need to talk about it?” She shook her head.
    “I’ll get us something to eat.”
    “She broke things,” said Terry, catching up to him in the kitchen.
    “She broke things?”
    “She threw the dishes down on the floor. See? No plates,” and he opened the cabinet door above his head to display its emptiness. “She threw out all her shoes. And the—what— vacuum cleaner.”
    “She was just, what was she? Angry? Crying?”
    “I gave her a tranquilizer. I have them for the airplanes? And so she is better.”
    When they brought the food out his mother decided she wanted to be inside, but she also wanted to smoke. T. opened the windows and the three of them sat at the table. His mother stared down at her soup with a lit cigarette in her hand; Terry slathered butter onto a piece of bread.
    “You shouldn’t be able to do that,” said his mother finally, in a voice so soft he could barely hear it.
    “Do what?” he asked.
    “Get a divorce without telling the other person.” He watched her long ash fall onto the table.
    “I was thinking,” he said softly. “When you were staying here before you went traveling, you were going to Mass at St. Anne’s, right?”
    His mother nodded.
    “Maybe we should go in together tomorrow. You can talk to the priest.”
    “I hardly know him.”
    “Then let’s call home. Let’s call Father Stevens. OK? He’ll be able to help with this.”
    “I didn’t tell him I was leaving,” mused his mother. “But I did send a postcard. From Cabo.”
    “Let’s call him.”
    He left his hand on her shoulder. In the morning, he was telling himself, she would talk to her old parish priest, kindly and soft-spoken. She trusted him implicitly.
    He would marvel later at how a mind could slip into otherness without you even noticing it. Slip away right beside you, motionless.

    After dinner Terry turned on the television in the living room, where he settled down with a beer to watch a game, pretending intense concentration. Angela said weakly that she was going to wash her hair, which T. seized upon as evidence
    of a restored normalcy. He said his own goodnights to both of them and retired to his room with the portable telephone, relieved.
    While she ran her bath in the room next to his he called Beth and spoke to her, told her in low tones about the crisis. She was sympathetic and sounded sincerely worried; she offered to help but he did not want to give an impression of neediness. After he hung up he lay in bed letting his mind roam to business, legs splayed on the bed, one hand idly scratching the hair on his groin; while his mother picked up and inspected Terry’s orange vial of tranquilizers he patted the bed and watched his dog jump up to curl at his feet. He closed his eyes and considered the wind farms of Palm