Summer of Night by Dan Simmons Page A

confusion in the household as the old woman ceased to be the verbal presence in the kitchen and suddenly became the dying woman in the parlor. Memo was his mother's mother, and while Mike did not know the word matriarch, he remembered the functional definition: the old woman in the dotted apron, always in the kitchen or sewing in her parlor, the problem-solver and decision-maker, the thickly accented Irish voice of Mary Margaret Houlihan lilting up through the heating grille in Mike's floor as she jollied his mother out of one of her cynical depressions, or scolded his father out of another evening of drinking with his friends. It had been Memo who had saved the family financially when John O'Rourke had been laid off from Pabst for a year when Mike was six-he remembered overhearing the long conversations at the kitchen table as his father protested, it was her life's savings, and Memo insisted-and it was Memo who saved Mike and Kathleen physically when he was eight, Kath-leen four, and the mad dog had come down Depot Street. Mike had noticed something strange about the animal and had hung back, calling to Kathleen not to go closer. But his sister loved dogs and could not comprehend that one could hurt her; she had rushed toward the growling, foaming animal. Kathleen was within an arm's length, the dog was focusing its caked eyes and preparing to charge, and all Mike could do was cry in a high, shrill voice that didn't sound like his own even to him.
    Then Memo had appeared, her polka-dotted apron flying, broom in her right hand, and her graying red hair loose from her kerchief. She had swept up Kathleen with one arm and swung the broom so hard that it had lifted the dog off all four feet and deposited it in the middle of the street. Memo had thrust Kathleen at Mike, ordered him to take her inside with a voice that was calm but incapable of being defied, and then turned just as the dog got to its feet and lunged again. Mike had looked over his shoulder as he ran, and he would never forget the sight of Memo standing there, legs apart, kerchief around her neck… waiting, waiting… Later, Constable Barney said that he'd never seen a dog killed by a broom-especially a mad dog-but that Mrs. Houlihan had almost taken the monster's head off.
    That was the word Barney had used-monster. After that, Mike had known in his heart that whatever monsters might prowl the night, Memo was more than an equal match for them.
    But then, less than a year later, Memo had been laid low. The first stroke had been massive-paralyzing her, cutting the cables to the muscles of that ever-animated face. Dr. Viskes said that it was a matter of weeks, perhaps days. But Memo survived that summer. Mike remembered how strange it had been to have the parlor-the center of Memo's inexhaustible activity-converted to a sick room for her. With the rest of the family, he had waited for the end.
    She had survived that summer. By autumn, she was communicating her wants through a system of coded blinks. By Christmas, she was able to speak, although only the family understood the words. By Easter, she had somehow won enough of the battle with her body that she could use her right hand and was beginning to sit up in the living room. Three days after Easter, the second stroke hit her. A month later, the third.
    For the past year and a half, Memo had been little more than a breathing corpse in the parlor, her face yellowed and slack, her wrists bent like the claws of a dead bird. She could not move, could not control her bodily functions, and had no way to communicate with the world except the blinks. But she lived on.
    Mike went into the parlor just as it was getting dark outside in earnest. He lighted the kerosene lamp-their house had electricity but Memo had always preferred oil lamps in her room upstairs and they had continued the tradition-and went over to the high bed where she lay.
    She was on her right side, facing him, just as she always was except when they turned