He did not go to see Lieutenant Commander Speck on Tuesday.
On Tuesday night, instead, he drove his Datsun up the hill to Thirteenth Street and parked in front of the bungalow and sat in the car with the engine ticking for ten minutes before he went in. The house was the same as it had always been. The same chain-link fence and the same lemon tree and the same porch light with the same moth-shadow dead in the bottom of the glass. His mother had stayed in it after his father died because the rent was cheap and because, she said, she was not going to give anybody the satisfaction. Duncan had never been sure who anybody was.
Myrna Whitfield was fifty-four. She had worked at the StarKist cannery on Terminal Island since 1958, cleaning tuna, then as a floor lady, now as a line forewoman with forty women under her, and she came home every night smelling faintly of fish no matter how long she stood in the shower and had never once complained of it. She was small and straight and had gone gray without seeming to notice, and she worked while she talked, as if conversation alone were idleness, so that when Duncan came in she was at the kitchen table with a pile of timecards and a pencil.
"You eat?"
"At work."
"Sit down anyway." She did not look up. "The Phillies are going to win it tonight, the radio says. Your father would have hated that. He couldn't stand Philadelphia. He said the whole city smelled like a ship's bilge."
"Was he ever there?"
"Once. On a tanker. In 1950." She made a mark on a timecard. "What's the matter, Duncan?"
He sat down across from her. On the windowsill above the sink the radio was on, KNX, low, a man talking about Carter and Reagan and the debate in Cleveland next week, and the hostages, always the hostages. His mother turned it off.
"Who was Sig Aasen?" Duncan said.
The pencil stopped.