How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet

figurine.
    He was struck by the sight of this—how the statuette, which he had previously viewed as ridiculous, did not appear so the way she held it, how the fluidity of her gestures seemed to steady and ground its frivolity. In her hand it was almost acceptable.
    “No,” he said softly. “I don’t think so.”
    “Are you sure? It doesn’t remind me of you,” she said, and put it down on a shelf as they walked together through his front hall, keeping pace, both their key chains jangling.
    “She bought it for me,” he said, and pulled the door closed behind them. “She believed in guest soap.”

    •

    He never found out whether the overdose had been an accident. Angela was changed, shifted sideways from her previous self; it was not quite that she was absent, merely that she seemed dislocated. The patterns of her speech had altered and frequently her sentences wasted into nothing; but then some days she seemed to rise from the fog, sharp-tongued and beady-eyed, and would lecture her son on his selfishness or his lack of religion.
    Her time in the coma had persuaded her into an angle of devotion more stringent and bizarre than her old way of worship. She had always assumed that when she died the Blessed Mother would shelter her; instead she had been
    relegated to a dingy House of Pancakes, and the shock was considerable. Whether her banishment had been to hell, purgatory, or as she first implied a disappointing version of heaven remained unclear to him. But she seemed to be certain of what the experience signified; she had found herself in a place of disillusionment where fluorescents had threatened to bring on a migraine and the other patrons, fat, pasty-faced, and dressed in loud prints, had studied her resentfully. None of them were Catholics.
    It had been a stern warning, and one she would heed— for the House of Pancakes outcome could be averted, she told T., by renewed attention to matters of the spirit. She had fallen away from attention to faith in recent months, she said, with her self-absorption and her self-pity. Of course the divorce itself, being a violation of doctrine, might also have brought on her punishment despite the fact that she had not had a hand in it personally: it was no coincidence that she ended up in the Pancake House the very day she was notified of the legal severing of her conjugal bond. Starting now she would devote more of her time to charity, attend church daily and curb her language.
    But her concern that he might end up in an IHOP was greater than her worry for herself. Her admonitions to him were constant, and on her sharper days he sometimes caught himself wishing she would return to dimness. If an elderly lady with a walker was preparing to cross the road a half a block away, she would wave wildly with both arms to stun her into halting her progress; then grab T. firmly, pinching, to hustle him over to the woman’s side so he could support her for the brief traverse. And as he and his current ward made their way through the crosswalk she would often leap around wildly beside them, fending off cars with a fierce and mobile series of facial expressions despite the fact that all of them
    were already at a standstill. Recipients of her largesse were not always grateful for the interruption but she ignored this; and several times, hands flapping on T.’s back to hurry him along, she pressed him into the service of perfectly hale and hearty men in their early forties.
    She also urged him toward charitable contributions— here five thousand dollars for a local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, there five hundred for the Roman Catholic Anti-Defamation League of Newfoundland. When
    T. resisted her tithing demands she would finger-wag and remind him of the flicker of long tubes over his head, the blue-white light, and the laminated menus with close-up pictures of heavy foods.
    Behind the wheel of her car she carefully avoided not only the various Los Angeles locations of