For Love by Sue Miller

yourself, Mom. Listen to what you’re saying’
    She didn’t answer him.
    ‘Do you know how old I am?’ he asked more gently.
    ‘Of course I do,’ she said.
    He lifted his hands as if there was nothing further to talk about. But she didn’t look at him, so he started again. ‘Let me ask you, Lottie: you’ve never slept with someone
just to have some good old meaningless sex?’
    She stirred uncomfortably. ‘What I’ve done or not done is none of your business.’
    ‘Why not?’
    She looked over at him sharply. ‘Because I was discreet. Because I didn’t do it in front of you.’
    ‘Mom.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘You were away for the weekend. And you didn’t bother to call me. To say, “Oh, gee whiz, Ryan, I’m coming home.” ’ His
face was like a nine- or ten-year-old’s in his eagerness to make his point. She saw that yes, he was right. But wasn’t she right too?
    She has finished the area within her reach. There’s just a little bare patch beyond it at the upper edge of the window frame, and then she can lower the ladder. She yanks the ladder away
from the house, leaning slightly to the right, to walk it over a few feet at the top. Ryan has showed her this trick, this way of saving trips up and down when you want only a little more reach.
Under her hands the ladder slides; and then goes on sliding. Lottie squawks, her body convulses, she jerks the ladder back violently, and it stops, it stops almost as soon as it started. She stands
clinging to its side rails. The bucket swings wildly on its hook below her, the yard blurs to a green shadow down there.
Not me!
she thinks. She rests her head along the side rail. Her heart
drums irregularly as she shoves the picture of herself, the fall, the damage, out of her mind.
Not me
. And with the cold metal on her cheek, she closes her eyes and suddenly sees Jessica
stepping forward into the headlights, so young, so sure the car must stop for her, of course, for her.
    Then slowly, carefully, her foot blindly caressing each rung before she shifts her weight lower, she climbs down the ladder to the squalor of her parents’ teeming, overgrown garden.

CHAPTER IV
    It was late in May, almost two months before the accident that killed Jessica, when Cameron had called Lottie to ask if she could come and help with the house. He was
apologetic about his request, and it might well have seemed to him that the timing was bad: Lottie had been married for only five months. As it happened, though, she was grateful, glad for the
possibility of getting away. And Jack, who knew her by then very well, seemed to hear that in her voice. At any rate, his eyes never left her face as she told him she was going; he looked as though
he was trying to read through her words.
    They were still in the kitchen at his house – their house together now: Lottie had given up her apartment the previous December, a few weeks before the wedding. Megan, Jack’s
daughter, and the only one of either of their children still at home, had gone to her room after dinner, in all likelihood to talk to some friend on the telephone about how stupid her stepmother
was and what she had done or said tonight that proved it. Jack had cleared the table, and they were sitting over cups of decaffeinated coffee. ‘Well, of course,’ he said when
she’d finished talking. ‘If Cameron needs you.’
    She blew on her coffee. ‘It’s not so much even that. It’s just I feel I owe it to him. After all he’s done.’
    ‘Is that it?’ He was smiling slightly now. His eyes were a strange color, a light brown that was almost gold, and to Lottie they made his face, which was deeply lined, seem always
youthful too. There was nothing about the way he looked, in fact, that wasn’t a source of deep satisfaction to her, and even in these difficult months since they’d gotten married, she
often found herself watching him – even while he did something as ordinary as clearing the table or lowering the shades