Connections

by John Dutton

July 4th, 2003. The connection from Chicago took off at 8.55. As the light diminished, the first fireworks appeared: 227 years of disconnection from a network called the British Empire. The plane climbed, and in ten minutes I saw forty, maybe fifty more firework displays. Sterile spores bursting out of the darkness.

To my fixated mind the displays looked like nodes in a network; each linked to the other via invisible bonds. The resonance made me smile. Traveling home to witness this elegant manifestation of the subject that had kept me at Berkeley during six weeks of empty lecture halls and yawning computer screens.

Was my return to Vermont really delayed by my research? Maybe it was the blood vessel in my mother’s brain which had ruptured last February.

Post-doctoral research topic: Ghost hubs – how social network connections are sustained in the absence of a linking node.

I suppose 31 is a fairly young age to lose one’s mother. And 54 is a fairly young age to lose one’s life. But run-of-the-mill statistics don’t interest me. If I’d wanted to be an actuary I would have become one, like Fanny, my sister.

I only spent twenty-one of those years with mom. My life drew me away from Burlington; her death is bringing me back. Did I visit last July 4th? Don’t remember. I really don’t. I’m just too busy and my mind too frenetic to pay attention to such details. No, I’m just not in the same sphere of reference as the rest of my family any more.

This flight felt so different from the one last February. Back then I was heading from Bay Area misty rain to green mountain snow and tears. From academic corridors of jeans and collaboration to an unfamiliar country of suits and sympathy.

Looking at the stars out the airplane window, I thought about home. I pictured the letters h-o-m-e in purely graphical, topological form, determining each one’s nodes and connections. A trivial process, a habit which kicks in whenever I’m idling. The mathematician in me, ticking, clicking away. The rest of the sociology department looks at me askance. An interloper from  abstract science, trying in vain to purify the muddy waters of humanity’s web. But that’s why  network theory sets my wheels racing. Suddenly biologists are talking to computer scientists, electrical engineers are exchanging notes with immunologists. And human computers like me turn their coats and enter the world of people.

Network: A group of nodes, every one of which is connected to at least one other node. A special kind of network, called scale-free, consists of many nodes with a small number of connections and a few nodes with an enormous number of connections. Social networks tend to be scale-free, which accounts for the phenomenon popularized as Six Degrees of Separation.

I analyzed what those lines and curves in the word ‘home’ represent. Every letter seemed significant. An ‘h’ looks like an entrance, an ‘o’ like a protective wall or a castle moat. An ‘m’ looks like supporting columns, maybe a reference to the classical architecture. But an ‘e’ is a funny shape. There’s something devious about the way it turns back around at the top without completing the loop. It looks squinty somehow. An ‘e’ has something to hide. My mind drifted back to mom. The ‘o’ in ‘home’ now a space. A zero.

They didn’t understand why I hadn’t come sooner. Fanny wanted to get together for supper on the 4th. I bullshitted about needing to catch up the research I’d missed back in February. A long weekend was the last thing I wanted. A missing person effects the perception of time for those who were close to them, a black hole stretching the continuum around it. The weekend was going to be long enough with the regular two days.

My itinerary was ideal: take the last flight before the overnighter. Arrive in Montreal at midnight, rent a car and drive the forty-five minutes to the border. No customs wait, then arrive in the wee hours when everyone’s in bed. Skip breakfast, dad will be gone to the restaurant by the time I emerge. Perfect plan.

On the I-89 to Burlington I realized my morning lie-in might not pan out. The girls would be there. Fan’s girls; my nieces. Emma, the six year-old future star of stage, screen or webcam, Sally, her three year-old doppelganger, and Beth, Sally’s diametrically-opposed twin. An interesting mini-network in themselves – its hyperactive dynamics had set off a gray brushfire that spread at a frightening pace from their father’s temples to the rest of his hair – they would have one purpose in mind: to show me some neicely love. Love you are powerless to resist, escape from, or even swat at hopefully. Fan would show up with them at, what, 8.30 am if I’m lucky? A sitting duck. Uncle Jim – drained by 10. They put the ‘eek!’ in ‘weekend’.

Hubs: The nodes in a scale-free network which have an exponentially large number of connections. An obvious example is the American airport system. A less obvious one is the World Wide Web, where the millions of average websites only have at the most ten links, while the hubs, such as Yahoo, are few in number, but have millions of links.

Montreal is a hub. Not only in the airport sense, but in the viral sense. It ‘s now well established that patient zero in the AIDS epidemic was a French-Canadian flight attendant by the name of Gaetan Dugas. Nobody knows where he caught the virus, but in 1982 he became the initial hub in the network representing its transmission. Two circumstances combined to make him special: the distances he traveled for work and the high number of sexual partners he had due to his behavior. Remove either of those circumstances and he wouldn’t have been a hub. But someone else almost certainly would have. Or maybe not. Maybe the disease would have been identified in time and contained, like SARS. The critical thing is that the hubs are key in such a network. A colleague of mine (a physicist, not a sociologist) suggested to me that the only chance of success in combating AIDS in the Third World would be to target the hubs, i.e. concentrate all available resources on distributing medication to prostitutes and needle-sharers. It’s ethically distasteful, of course. The people who spread the virus most get rewarded with medication. But the alternative is just pissing in the wind.

“What is the purpose of your visit?”

How much time does he have till the end of his shift?

My eyes were still closed when they barreled through the bedroom door. Fan must have made them creep up the stairs. Squeals wrenched me from a dream about mom, and eight tiny limbs pummeled me through the sheets. Uncle Jim the Jungle Gym.

When I finally peered out from under the twins I was surprised that Emma was holding back, almost hiding, behind her mother in the doorway. This was new behavior. She had turned the corner. This was what school had done to her – now she was a woman, and women didn’t go jumping up and down on their uncles. Later in the weekend she smirked when I mentioned last year’s idols, Britney and Christina. Now it was Avril Lavigne. She had a fake tattoo. Not on her arm, but in the small of her back, like some other singer. I felt sorry for Fan in anticipation of Emma entering teenland, if she even lasted that long before demanding the piercings and low-cut jeans…

At the same time, what was I into when I was her age? Kiss. Dad was sure I’d grow up a devil-worshipping freak in makeup. I makes me laugh, how ridiculous it all was. They weren’t devils, they were clowns, performing at a six year-old’s party.

“Hi, bro.”

“Hi. Unnnggh.” The hair-pulling had started. Emma edged her way shyly into the room.

“Hi, uncle Jim. I made butterfly wings yesterday.”

“I thought God made butterfly wings.”

She laughed. “Silly. It’s a craft project.” Then she came over to the bed and thumped me, just for old time’s sake.

Mom used that word. People were ‘silly’, not ‘dumb’, or ‘stupid’. I guess it was her English upbringing. She was in Emma’s smile. Not her eyes, where people always see deceased loved-ones, but in her smile. Shame that the eyes have this privileged reputation as the window of the soul, because the smile is so much more revealing. Everyone can read a smile.

“Come on, girls,” said Fan. “Give uncle Jim a chance to get up.” They climbed off. “I got you muffins. From the Scrumptious Café.”

“Thanks.”

What did I expect? That she would make me mom’s bacon and eggs, sunny-side up, while juggling three kids? That exact smell would never greet me again as I staggered down those stairs past her souvenir plate collection.

We sat in the living room. It was a good thing the nieces were there, or I might have felt sad, seeing photos of mom, her books and her trinkets. As it was, the circus continued: clowns, tumblers, and dancers all embodied by the twins and their ringmistress Emma. I became the juggler of toys: Mr. Potato Head, Barbie, sticker-albums, nurse’s kit, plush animals, all thrust under my nose one after another, sometimes almost up it. Only when I was about to be completely submerged under three furless, giggling monkeys did Fan intervene.

A brief entr’acte ensued during which Emma showed me a book her parents had bought her on their trip to Montreal the year before: La Terre vue du ciel. I asked Emma if she knew what the title meant in English and she did: Earth Seen from the Sky. French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand had traveled the world taking pictures from a plane at the perfect altitude to clearly see whatever feature (some man-made, some natural) was of interest below, yet high enough to capture its graphic form rather than a National Geographic-style documentary record.

The photos were fascinating because every single one was beautiful, without revealing the source of the beauty. You couldn’t be sure what it was a picture of; all you could see were shapes and colors. A description accompanied each photo. Emma told me proudly that she was learning French.

One of the images looked like a bacterial culture. A central colony with a multitude of outgrowths, many of them interconnected. I had seen this type of image many times. It’s a typical network structure, featuring a central hub, connected to many smaller nodes by links of varying sizes. In fact, though, it was a photo of a tree in Tsavo East National Park in Kenya, called the Tree of Life, because it was the only shelter from the searing sun for miles around. The ‘outgrowths’ were brown animal tracks inscribed and reinforced over the years in the green scrub. Some tracks had been more used than others, and were therefore more present. A network of pathways without any planning, formed solely by the attractor – the Tree of Life – in the center of the photo.

Would the network remain for long if the hub were removed? Would animals blindly follow the same tracks that had been laid down in the past? Or would they realize the tree had vanished, and simply walk in another direction?

Theory: In certain special kinds of networks the links to a node can remain even when the node is removed.

Eventually the girls got bored with uncle Jim. Left in the kitchen with Fan, I looked around at mom’s influence, her architecture. No wonder people see ghosts. I kept doing it the whole weekend. Not just in the familiar, family places (popping her head around my bedroom door; leaving the bathroom wearing her robe; bending over the garbage to scrape off the scraps) but even on Church Street with another family, turning her head toward me, then evaporating, a stranger with her hair, staring blankly. On that sultry Saturday I had to get out of the house and wandered downtown with a sharper perspective than ever before. Burlington was a mini-Berkeley. Had I really left home or just shifted the geography to suit me? Which aspect of the distance was real and which was artificial?

But she wasn’t a ghost. A demon, a benevolent demon, briefly possessing the bodies of others as I passed near them. Her demon was everywhere. A woman emerging from the candle shop was usurped for an instant, my mother smiled at me, then left her alone. On a boat thirty yards from the lakeshore she turned to me in the body of a woman wearing a pink, patterned sarong. Then a wavelet twinkle and she disappeared once more.

I’m no believer in any kind of spiritual stuff, but it was easy to see why other people are. Your mind recreates the connections that linked you to the absent person. Connections with no node to join to. So the node is projected by the mind, like a phantom limb.

Current research: The English Civil War – the removal of the monarchy and execution of the king in 1649; the establishment of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, followed eleven years later by the restoration of the monarchy. The monarchy is the hub which was removed, then restored (albeit with a different king) with virtually all of the network connections to it still intact. Does this violate the rules of network formation? Did other links to similar hubs, such as Parliament, keep the connections active, or did the connections themselves allow the Restoration to take place?

“Bob’s on Prozac.”

“You’re kidding.”

She took a sip. The coffee was exactly how mom used to make it.

“He worries about his job. Last year was hard on him. The aerospace industry is in the toilet.”

“But Prozac? He never seemed like… well, I knew he got stressed, but…”

“The panic attacks started last fall. He’s under so much pressure, and I can’t work because of the twins.”

“Jesus.”

Her eyes had seen the hand she’d been dealt. Not a bad hand, not a good hand. But this was it. She wasn’t young any more.

“So are you seeing anyone?”

“Not right now.”

Fan expected to be entertained whenever she asked that question. She’s had two relationships her whole life; I’m a pinball. She has a house and three kids. I’m two years older than her and am still a student in the stereotypical fashion.

“So you were seeing someone.”

“Yes.” I let the pause do its job.

“And?”

“Well…here’s the thing: she couldn’t handle the truth. All I need are A Few Good Women…”

“Ha ha. What kind of truth?”

“We dated for a few weeks. Great sex. She really liked me, I could tell.”

“With your male intuition an’ all.”

“Uh-huh. But I didn’t feel anything. Except, you know, down there.”

Fan shook her head almost imperceptibly. “So you dumped her?”

“No! That was the point: I didn’t want to dump her at all. I was having a great time.”

“Until she found you in bed with someone else?”

“Not even. I decided to be a man. She’s a really nice girl. So I was honest for a change. Told her I knew I wasn’t going to fall in love with her.”

“You what?!”

“I didn’t want her to be under any illusions.”

“Where were you when you told her this?”

“Lying naked on the living room floor.”

“After having sex with her?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s terrible! How could you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Say that after having sex with her.”

“It seemed like a good time to bring it up. While she was in a good mood.”

“Why do guys think it’s best to wait till a girl’s finally feeling good about things before dropping a bomb?”

“It’s logical. Like an equation.”

“What?”

“If you’re going to subtract an amount you need to start off with a larger amount than the amount you subtract or you end up with a negative result. So being in a good mood is equivalent to having a large original amount before the subtraction.”

“You’re an asshole.”

She had lost her humor. “No. For once I wasn’t an asshole. I told her the truth so she wouldn’t be more hurt down the road.”

“You have no idea how the female mind works.”

She had a good point there. “But I was being honest. Can’t you at least give me that?”

“No. It wasn’t a nice thing to do.”

“But why? I really want to know.”

“It wasn’t nice.”

“Yes, you just said that.”

Things were going downhill fast. The usual scenario when we discussed my love-life. “You just said I wasn’t nice, but I don’t understand why.”

“Can we change the subject please?”

“What?”

“I don’t want to talk about this any more.”

“But you called me an asshole. At least help me understand what I did to make you say that.”

“Just drop it. I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

She got up and rinsed her cup in the sink. “I’m going upstairs to check on the girls.”

I shrugged to my imaginary audience of sympathetic guys, all wearing ‘She thinks I’m an asshole’ T-shirts.

Emergence: The idea that the whole of a system, or network, can be more than the sum of its parts. Typical examples are avalanches, where a quantity of snow behaves as a unit, rather than a collection of individual flakes, and ant colonies, which display the properties of a unified organism though each ant behaves according to very simple, pre-programmed rules. Maybe consciousness can be explained by the theory of emergence; the neurons and synapses of the brain operate according to relatively simple chemical and electrical rules, but the brain as a whole displays intelligence and consciousness.

My Grand Tour of Burlington ended at the cemetery. This is where mom has been ‘laid to rest’. After being incinerated, of course, as per her wishes. At the memorial service I looked at the coffin on the conveyor belt to the flames and thought, “That’s not mom in there. It’s just decomposing organic matter. She’s already gone. It’s just a wooden box. The wood used to be part of a viable organic network, containing a collection of organic molecules which also used to be a viable network.” I know Fan would have cried if I’d shared those thoughts with her. I’m an asshole. But that’s what I was thinking.

At the plaque marking the spot where her ashes are buried, I had the same feeling. “It’s not her.” Why even bother standing here? Why bother bringing flowers? She’s gone, and if all that remains are the quilt on my bed, the lintel decoration – things she made – and the memories of her in the minds of the people who knew her, then we should exercise those remains. Don’t allow them to atrophy; use them, renew them. Because they are her true remains, not a collection of carbon molecules. I remembered reading last year about a German company which turns the ashes of a loved-one into a diamond. What a joke. An expensive joke, too. You might as well believe that your loved-one exists in the exhaust fumes of the car you drive. All our molecules are recycled eventually, whether as a diamond or a pile of shit. What counts for genuine remembrance is the network which sustained that person as an individual. Let them resonate in your memories and activities. Gather together with people who knew them. They are a hub.

I’m the person I am thanks to her genes and her love. The network continues beyond the individual. Or rather, there are networks within networks within networks, each one a node in a higher-scale configuration.

I arrived home at 6. Dad was already there. He hugged me. He didn’t used to do that. Oh well – some good is coming from mom’s death.

“How are you, son?”

“Fine, you?”

The typical pleasantries, though now he seemed unsure of himself. Mom usually took the lead.

The girls ran into the kitchen to smother him. In the living room, Bob was watching TV. It was difficult not to analyze his every word and gesture for signs of stress or behavior-altering drugs.

“Hey. What’s up?” I asked.

“I’m fine.”

Like weather. No storms, no heatwaves. Drugs had made Bob a perpetual sunny September day. Bob is coasting in his weather-bubble.

We chatted about the minutiae of the local news, including the always-entertaining Vermont’s Most Wanted segment. “Janet Boucher, 42, for bail evasion; Mark Foote, for narcotics possession.” Probably an ounce of weed. These are the best criminals Vermont can come up with!

Dad came in just as the sports report began. A narrow defeat for the Expos. “It’s always the same. I don’t know why I bother.” Like most of the ‘fans’, he never bothers going to the stadium to watch them in person and then complains because the team doesn’t have the budget to compete with the big boys. “Did you get out to any games yet this year?”

He asks me the same question every time he sees me. Baseball is the territory on which we meet.

“No, I was busy trying to finish my research before the summer.”

“And is it finished?”

“Yes and no.”

“Uh-huh. Oh! Did you see that catch!”

He was watching the screen during his last question and my answer. He carries a locker-room with him all the time. Running a sports theme restaurant is his heaven on Earth.

Attractors. The points towards which certain dynamic systems tend to converge. A common example is the period of a pendulum, which will converge on a specific frequency no matter how fast we start it swinging. Attractors are often illustrated graphically as basins in a lumpy surface into which a marble will eventually roll. As networks develop they often clump together around attractors, which, for the internet, are called hubs. In the network of the human brain the attractors may turn out to be memories or what we know as ‘states of mind’. Babies and schizophrenics lack deep attractor basins in their neural networks, the result of which is that they flit suddenly between widely divergent mental states.

Fan very kindly made dinner. One of the contradictions in dad’s life is that he runs a restaurant and can’t cook for shit. In fact, if you asked him to cook shit, he would probably screw it up and produce something which tasted nice.

The kids sat at the “big girls’ table” in the kitchen, where they could do less damage to the walls, floor and furniture. We automatically took our regular places in the dining room. The others had eaten there many times since mom’s death, but this was a first for me, except for during the smothering haze following her stroke, when we all became zombies, possessed by death, but still lamely repeating our pre-stroke habits. The space at the table where mom always sat dominated my field of vision. I remember wondering whether she was located in my blind spot, and all I had to do was shift my gaze to one side to be able to see her out the corner of my eye.

“So the girls are still sleeping well?” asked dad, as he always did. My sleep patterns as a baby must have traumatized him. He was obsessed with that question, although I suspect mom had dealt with me most of the time.

“Yeah – no problem,” answered Bob.

“Because when Jim was a baby…”

(Fan and I looked at each other and smiled our ‘here we go again’ smile.)

“…his mother and I had to walk him up and down the corridor, singing to get him to fall asleep.”

“Yeah – I remember you saying.”

“And you know what the worst thing was?” Bob was either being polite or else Prozac had erased his memory for useless anecdotes. He shook his head. “That for some reason we chose the Do-re-mi song from The Sound of Music.” Bob smiled and took a swig of beer. “And it repeats, you know. It ends with, ‘that will bring us back to Do’, then starts again with ‘Doe, a deer…’ My God, we must have sung that a hundred times over, some nights!”

At this point I was mimicking dad saying the “hundred times over” part and Fan started to snicker. Dad looked at her. “It’s true, you know.”

“Yes, dad, we know.”

I guess at this point I felt that I should make some kind of enquiry into dad’s disposition. It seemed like the right thing to do. “So, how have you been? Keeping busy with the restaurant, I guess.”

“Well, I’m glad you asked me that, son, because I have to tell you and your sister something. And you, Bob.” We all stopped chewing and looked at each other. “You remember Pattie, Pattie Tiernan, who we used to go and stay with in Connecticut when you were little?”

“Auntie Pattie and uncle Derek in Glastonbury?” I said, nervously. There were many such ‘uncles and aunties’ when we were young.

“Yes. Well they got divorced a long time ago and she runs a bed-and-breakfast in Maine with her children. You remember Marty and Kyle?” I nodded. Fan was looking at dad like he was turning leprous before her eyes. “Anyway, she got back in touch with me after your mother died. Sent me a letter saying she had heard through Nate Stevens. We got together a couple of months ago.”

“What do you mean, got together?” asked Fan, her voice trembling slightly.

“Had a drink, reminisced about old times.” Silence. Dad was about to open one of the lockers in his locker-room, and we all knew it. “The thing is…what you should know is…back then, in the seventies…Pattie and I fell in love.” A pause. Half a second? Half an hour? “We couldn’t do anything about it because of you two and Marty and Kyle.”

My mind rapidly oscillated between three thoughts: ‘Did mom know?’, ‘Is he lying?’, and ‘What does this mean?’. Nothing else coherent, the neural equivalent of heart fibrillation – a quivering, superfast spasm locked in a self-reinforcing loop. Dad snapped me out of it with a sledgehammer blow.

“Pattie is going to move in here with me.”

I couldn’t even bear to look at Fan’s face. Bob stared down at his plate.

He continued, matter-of-factly: “We’ll see how it goes. She’s looking forward to seeing you again after all this time. She’s not going to replace your mom, though.”

Fan got up from the table and ran upstairs. Bob slowly pushed back his plate, excused himself and followed her. I don’t know what happened up there.

I looked through the doorway into the kitchen. The girls had stopped what they were doing and were staring back at me. Their animal senses had perceived the earthquake before the rest of us. When I turned back to dad I felt a surge of empathy. What was he supposed to do? Even if this story about falling in love twenty-five years ago was a fabrication, how could I blame him? He’d never lived alone in his life and was incapable of doing it. Not just physically (cooking, cleaning, laundry, daily household maintenance), but emotionally. He’s a social creature; he hates being alone. Mom’s death was as wrenching for him as if he’d been plucked from his life and set down on a desert island.

“She’s not going to replace your mom,” he repeated, his eyes distressed.

“I know, dad. It’s okay.”

Beth ran into the dining room. “Where did mommy and daddy go?”

“They’re upstairs,” said dad, softly. “Come and give granddad a hug.” She climbed up onto his lap. He was good with all three of them. He’s friendly. That’s why people like him.

Suddenly an argument broke out between Emma and Sally. Squealing, a crash of cutlery on plates, a flailing of arms and Emma’s glass falling to the floor, shattering. The argument ceased. There followed a gap in which mom would have done something. I don’t know what – telling them to watch out for the broken glass, soothing words, gentle admonishment – all I know is that there was a space and a period of time which she would have filled. I heard a door open upstairs and Fan call out, “Is everything okay?” Beth jumped down from dad’s lap and ran to the stairs. I got up and walked swiftly into the kitchen to make sure that the other two didn’t step on the shards. After I had scooped them up, I looked at dad, motionless at the table with his back to the kitchen. He would always wait patiently, talking to me and Fan while mom finished cooking, then his face would light up as she entered, carrying his steaming plate. I’m sure he did the exact same thing after we had moved out. I realized that he would soon be doing the exact same thing with Pattie. The phrase ‘ingrained behavior’ is a good one. Habits build up in crevices like the marbles in my mathematical attractor basins.

Tipping point: The point at which a network changes, sometimes irrevocably, into a new configuration. Examples are my mother’s stroke and the phase transition of water into ice. Water doesn’t gradually become filled with ice crystals as the temperature drops towards zero Celsius (25% ice at 6°C, 50% ice at 4°C, for example) but instead suddenly has a complete transition at a very narrow temperature range (around 0°C). Many organic and social networks display this property of a tipping point.

Fan left soon after dinner on the Saturday, not another word to dad except a curt goodbye when she was already half-way out the door. I spent the rest of the evening watching the ball game on TV with him, just like the old days. The oppressive absence of mom continued to exert its weight on me, and, I guess, on him. There were no random noises as she busied herself somewhere else in the house. No polite enquiries as to when the game would be over. No offers of tea and biscuits.

But, to my surprise, at the seventh inning stretch, dad sprang from his chair and asked if I wanted tea and biscuits. I’d never heard him say ‘biscuit’ before, save for when he would tease mom about her using it and other British-isms like ‘aubergine’, ‘aluminium’ and ‘trousers’. “They’re double-chocolate chip,” he said, with a boyish grin. I smiled at him and said sure. The simple things really did make him happy. We munched and sipped until the end of the game. He chattered away to me, reminiscing about this player and that, the memorable games we watched together when I was a kid, the time Gary Carter and his wife sat at the next table to us in a Montreal steakhouse.

By Sunday lunchtime he had run out of ways to avoid the subject of Pattie, so he left to clean the beer pipes in the restaurant. He was good at keeping busy. Or at evading emotional discomfort, whichever way you look at it. I let him go. He was fine. Fan was the one who needed help.

I called her and asked if they wanted to spend the afternoon down at the boardwalk with me.

The girls were excited by the opportunity to take advantage of uncle Jim once more. Ice cream was their weapon of choice, and my wallet surrendered without a whimper. Bob considerately led them away to ‘look at the ducks’, leaving Fan and I the chance to talk. We sat on a bench, the breeze from the lake fooling us into ignoring the sun’s heat on our delicate half-English skin.

“He doesn’t know how to live on his own,” I said. She just stared at the ground between her feet. “And you have too much on your plate to help him. Lucky he’s got the restaurant, or he would have gone into a depression already.”

“He had an affair. Mom left her homeland then spent her whole life picking up after him and raising us. She never had a life of her own.”

“Who are we to judge?”

“What are you saying? She’s our mom! At Christmas she told me how she was looking forward to her retirement so she could travel. I mean really travel – see the world. She never went anywhere – just Montreal, Boston, New York, and back to England every few years. She wanted so much to visit France and Italy. She gave so much to dad and what’s he doing now she’s gone a couple of months? He’s going to sleep in the same bed – her bed – with ‘auntie Pattie’. I wonder why she got divorced? Maybe her husband wasn’t as understanding as mom. ‘We fell in love.’ Fuck that!”

She needed to get all that out of her system. She was right – it was a personal tragedy that mom didn’t get to do everything she had hoped. “Life is unfair,” I said. That was my deep insight.

“Yeah, well, it may be unfair, but I don’t have to put up with Pattie living with dad. If he thinks life is gonna carry on as usual…if he thinks the girls are gonna call her grandma….” Her eyes were full of tears. She tipped her head back, squeezed the lids tight, and rubbed away the moisture.

I put my hand on her shoulder. “We don’t know what went on. No one knows what goes on between a man and a woman.” I thought about telling her what I had seen in the storage room when I was fifteen, but I couldn’t. What was the point? “She’s still our mom. She’s still their grandma. Those links will never fade away.”

“I know.”

“And, who knows? You might get along fine with Pattie. And you know that dad is completely incapable of being alone, right?”

“Yeah.”

“The bottom line is, he has his life to deal with. You have yours. You have a great family. That’s your priority.”

“Yeah. You’re right.”

Bob was wandering back towards us. Beth broke free and ran into her mommy’s arms. Sticky little hands clamped themselves around Fan’s neck. She smiled and kissed her. I made a face, tongue lolling out of one side of my mouth. Beth giggled. “Did you see any ducks?”

“Yeah. Three ducks.”

Emma climbed onto the bench behind me and put her hands on my eyes. “Guess who!”

“Britney Spears.”

She laughed and stuck her head over my shoulder so I could see her face. “Silly!” she shouted. Fan smiled at me.

I convinced Fan and Bob to eat at the restaurant with me. The girls were ecstatic; granddad would be there and he always spoiled them rotten. I was glad Fan said yes. It was the best thing we could do to keep things on an even keel with dad, at least until Pattie showed up.

When the meal was over and the twins were beginning their bedtime meltdown I said goodbye to them and told them I’d be back for Thanksgiving. That was going to be interesting. Fan and Bob left with their wailing entourage. I helped dad close up, like I used to in the year before I left for Berkeley. Not a word was spoken about mom or Pattie.

The next morning I got up late and exchanged brief pleasantries with him over toast and coffee. Then he hugged me, told me to have a good trip, and asked if I needed anything. I smiled at the irony. No, I told him, I was fine. I stood at the kitchen window and watched him pull out of the driveway. The old station wagon, his beast of burden, misfired but valiantly accompanied him on another trip to his refuge: the restaurant.

Back in the eighties I would sometimes go over there on late summer afternoons, before the evening shift began. I would waste my time practicing darts or using the key to get free games on the pinball machine. Mom and dad were usually there, preparing for re-opening, but I didn’t really pay attention to their comings and goings and they didn’t pay much attention to me.

One day when I was fifteen I stopped playing pinball and went into the storage room to get myself a bag of chips. If I took one from the bar, dad would notice. I opened the door and froze. Mom and one of the regular customers (Andy Something, good-looking, younger than her) were standing, arms around each others’ waists, foreheads touching. No kissing, no fondling, but they broke apart, guilty as hell. “I was just getting a bag of chips,” was all I could think of to say. I felt for some reason like I was the one who should provide an explanation.

I turned and shut the door behind me. I don’t know exactly what went through my mind, but I wandered aimlessly up and down Church Street until suppertime. I have no memory of how mom behaved when I saw her the next morning, but I never mentioned the incident to her, and she never brought it up with me. That was the only time I saw evidence of infidelity from either of my parents. Who knows what goes on between a man and a woman?

The song playing on The Buzz when I crossed the border into Canada was that pointless remake of Drift Away. Hah! If only.

I felt sorry for Fan. I was flying to out-west, she was stuck in Vermont with her family, dad, and the space where mom used to be. Her absence was a concrete presence, defying all the laws of physics and mathematics. Maybe, counter-intuitively, distance will make my connection with mom more solid; I won’t be constantly reminded that she isn’t there any more. But Fan will feel the amputation, the raw pain from the phantom limb. The prosthetic, the interloper who will soon arrive, might only increase Fan’s focus on the pain. She might tip our family into a phase-transition and irrevocably reconfigure our connections. Or will the network stay intact, kept in place by our memories and love? I’d like to think that science has got it wrong.