Free Someone Like Her by Janice Kay Johnson

for repairs and replaced temporarily with a smaller one, meaning long lines at the terminals during school spring breaks.
    By the time he folded up the newspaper and paid, he couldn’t remember much of what he’d read. He hadn’t been concentrating. He’d been thinking about his afternoon and what the librarian, the hairdresser and the Safeway manager had told him about his mother.
    He wished Lucy had gone with him to the latter two meetings. Neither Cindy nor George had relaxed with him as readily as they would have if Lucy had been there. He’d always believed he was skilled with people, but this context was different. He was an outsider. They looked at him like everyone in this damn town did,certain his mother wouldn’t have been homeless if he’d done his duty as her son.
    He’d buried his guilt years ago, but now it was as if everyone in Middleton were scrabbling at the dirt with their bare hands, flinging it aside to bare the coffin enclosing all his suppressed emotions. They were doing it willfully, and, God help him, he was encouraging them.
    “Crap,” he muttered, then grimaced when the passing waitress turned, startled. “Sorry.”
    “We all have days like that,” she said with a comforting smile, and continued on with a tray laden with dirty dishes. The restaurant was emptying out. Apparently Middleton shut down early, even on Saturday nights.
    They all had days like this? He seriously doubted it.
    He went to the hospital, exchanging greetings with the same nurse that had been on last night, and went into his mother’s room, where nothing had changed.
    This was the first time, Adrian realized, that he’d walked in when Lucy wasn’t here, talking or reading to his mother. Tonight, the chair—her chair—was empty. The only sound was the soft beep beep of the monitors. He wished he’d brought something to read to the woman who lay in this bed. That was pure genius on Lucy’s part. It filled the silence without requiring any real effort. He had no idea what he would have read to her, though. He hadn’t brought anything from home but work. Nothing in the Times seemed suitable, and he’d left it behind anyway.
    He walked around the bed and sat in the chair. “Hi, Mom. It’s Adrian. I’m back.” Yeah, brilliant. “I had dinner at the Steak House. I’m told you ate there sometimes.” More charity, but he hadn’t asked for the manager to find out what about his mother had awakened the kind impulse. He felt battered enough by what the other people had told him.
    “I wonder why you picked Middleton. Did it remind you of Brookfield? It sounds like people here were pretty nice to you, so I can see why you stayed. I wish I’d known where you were, though. That you’d given me a chance.”
    To do what? he wondered. Commit her to a mental hospital? What would he have done with his mother if he’d come upon her down on First Avenue in Seattle ten years ago and recognized her in the dirty, hopeless street person looking up at him from a doorway?
    He had an uncomfortable feeling he would have been embarrassed. He’d have wanted to whisk her out of sight. Get her on meds and insist they be regularized until she was a normal, functioning human being.
    Except that she’d never been quite normal and he’d loved her anyway. Not for the first time Adrian tried to imagine how two people as disparate as his parents had ever imagined themselves in love. Perhaps the answer was that they’d been drawn to the qualities in each other that they themselves lacked. His father had seemed solid, the very embodiment of stability and sanity, while his mother…she had been whimsical, creative and mysterious. Maybe they’d each thought they could soak up some of the other’s best qualities. If so, they’d failed. It was as if the marriage had accentuated their differences; Adrian’s father had become increasingly stern, while his mother had drifted further from the here and now and from her husband.
    Adrian sat