"I don't think I'll have you as a son any longer. Still, it's a little hard—not impossible though —to throw you out. Stay as a tenant if you want. You can give me half what you get. That way you can stay. We'll do this for a time and see how it goes. And if it doesn't go then you can go. I'll ask you to leave if it doesn't work. I'll force you out."
"You stopped the allowance. That is why I'm working there so much on the weekends with so little pay when I should be studying "
"I didn't want it to go into dope."
"Oh, please. You are the one who smokes joints."
"Different. It is medicine for my migraines, and I don't take it often. Pay half and then you can stay—in your area below, and only this. Half and you can stay."
"All right," he said.
The next morning she woke up from a strange dream in which she was driving over her son the way Michael had run over the Indian boy; and as she woke up startled from the dream she was again startled in her awakened state. Nathaniel was there smirking at her in a corner of her bedroom, crunching on a cup of ice, and the shadow of his burly form was impinging on the edge of her bed. She was mute in a cold chill. He was there for a few seconds and then he was gone.
She again stayed at home the next day since her headache was now fully a migraine; but unable to concentrate on reading a book, she soon felt lonely and bored with so much resting in bed. She brought in a stray cat that she had been feeding for a month. It strangled her footsteps when she moved, cried if it wasn't touched, and when she put it on her lap it tried to suck on the buttons of her shirt as if it had regressed to the unopen-eyed newborn needing to be nursed and to immerse itself in a mother. The behavior was strange and she was half-tempted to throw it out had unwanted empathy not infected her thoughts. Furthermore, it gave her subject for thought, which she liked so well; and whenever an event or being provided her with a subject for rumination it gave her a gift that superseded the pleasure or pain of the interaction. If she had morality it was that of empathy and to measure a thing based upon it giving her subject for rumination. It was from the cat that she garnered, from her experience with it, that memories of traumatic events pressed into the actions of all things. She was watching Star Trek reruns, and drooling chewing tobacco into an aperture of a Coca Cola can when Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy were beaming up at the same time as her son. Obviously he didn't go to school. She told herself that she didn't "give a damn" and this time it was essentially true.
"Little pig, little pig, will you let me come in?" he asked from the doorway of her bedroom.
"It all depends," she said stoically. "If you have money you can leave it and go. If you don't have money you have broken two fundamental clauses in our contract—one that forbids you from this area of the domicile and a second that you have to pay what is owed to me." She was angry that even now, for his sake, she threw away money on tuition and tutors, was living in a house that was really beyond her means, and was a businesswoman, a lowly merchant, for his sake. She had sacrificed for him and it had been a waste.