"There was a wonderful sunset across the distant sky, reflected in the sea, streaked with blood and puffed with avenging purple and gold as if the end of the world had come without intruding on everyday life."

            —The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

"I've been a bad girl," his mother said in a mock–baby voice. At 95 the once vigorous Mildred Vaughan had been enfeebled by a stroke and arthritis. She hobbled around on a walker though she preferred being pushed to the bathroom in her wheelchair. Sometimes she did not make it there in time.

"It's all right, Mom," Jeremy Vaughan assured his mother. A middle–aged bald man, Jeremy had spent his entire life trying to be a grown–up. The baby of the family, and the only boy, he'd always been pampered, spoiled. Even as a parent he'd felt as though an infant around his parents, who'd referred to him and his older sisters as "the kids," right up until his father's death fifteen years earlier. Jeremy still suffered pangs of guilt recalling how he tried and failed to revive Forrest Vaughn with CPR, as if he'd wished his father dead. Of course, everybody had forgiven him, told him he was heroic for even trying, but Jeremy still had this lurking suspicion he'd willed his father's death.

"Could you get me another pair of little girlie pants from the chest of drawers in my bedroom?" Jeremy felt real compassion for his mother's embarrassment, though slightly annoyed at her contrition, the babytalk.

When Jeremy went to his mother's bedroom to root around in her underwear drawer, he had a sudden, vivid memory from over half a century before, rooting around in his mother's underwear drawer and finding her diaphragm in its seashell case, the knowledge that his parents had a sex life.

Briefly, Jeremy considered burying his face in the crotch of his mother's panties and felt a pleasurable sickness in his stomach, a pure writhe of revulsion, even as he considered that objectively it was only laundered cotton.

"Jeremy?"

He turned to see his wife Claudia in the doorway to his mother's bedroom. She was looking at him strangely, and Jeremy wondered if people really could read thoughts.

"I'm getting Mom some fresh underpants. She had an accident."

An accident. The euphemism reminded him of the day years ago when he had taken his son Bart to an end–of–school–year pool party and all the children had been ordered out of the pool when a turd had been found floating in the shallow end. One of the children had had an "accident," the hostess had explained.

"Here, let me take them to her. She'll be less embarrassed if I do it." Claudia held her hand out, imperious.

Jeremy meekly handed the underpants to his wife, as if a sneak thief relinquishing stolen property. Again, he wondered what his wife was thinking and why he should feel guilty.