He smiled and hit his right turn indicator at the stoplight, preparing to go down North Wheelock and across the bridge into Vermont, at the bottom of the hill. Of course, much of what they'd just been talking about dated back a few years. His mother had slowed down recently, reading less and watching more television. And since landing in the wheelchair, she'd retired the use of that library card.

Their years together were numbered, clearly.

In the darkness of the car, his smile faded away. As silly as it sometimes sounded when he admitted it out loud, he'd lived with his mother all his life so far, and he was fair and square beyond middle age. His older brother, Joe, had been the restless one, leaving home early to join the service, seeing combat halfway around the world, going to college for a few years in California. Even now he lived in Brattleboro, near the Massachusetts border, sixty miles to the south.

But Leo had never seen the attraction. He and their mom lived in the farmhouse he'd been born in, and his room overlooked the fields his father had once tilled. When the old man died so many years ago, leaving behind two boys and a young widow, the three survivors had looked to one another for their grounding. Joe had used that as a springboard to go forth into the world; Leo had seen it as all he really needed. He began working at the market in Thetford Center, just down the hill from the farm, and settled into a life of dating girls lacking in serious intentions, working in the barn on old cars from the sixties, becoming the most highly prized butcher for twenty miles around, and establishing an easy and permanent friendship with his mother.

Which he knew was closing in on a natural end.

"You're awfully quiet all of a sudden," she said softly.