Two weeks after I graduated from college, my ma had another stroke just a little one. She tried to quit smoking again when the doctor scolded her, then put on fifty pounds and went back to the tobacco. As a dog returneth to its vomit, the Bible says; I’ve always liked that one. I got a pretty good job in Portland on my first try lucky, I guess, and started the work of convincing her to quit her own job. It was a tough sled at first.
I might have given up in disgust, but I had a certain memory that kept me digging away at her Yankee defenses.
You ought to be saving for your own life, not taking care of me, she said. You’ll want to get married someday, Al, and what you spend on me you won’t have for that. For your real life.
You’re my real life, I said, and kissed her. You can like it or lump it, but that’s just the way it is.
And finally she threw in the towel. We had some pretty good years after that seven of them in all. I didn’t live with her, but I visited her almost every day. We played a lot of gin rummy and watched a lot of movies on the video recorder I bought her. Had a bucketload of laughs, as she liked to say. I don’t know if I owe those years to George Staub or not, but they were good years. And my memory of the night I met Staub never faded and grew dreamlike, as I always expected it would; every incident, from the old man telling me to wish on the harvest moon to the fingers fumbling at my shirt as Staub passed his button on to me remained perfectly clear. And there came a day when I could no longer find that button. I knew I’d had it when I moved into my little apartment in Falmouth I kept it in the top drawer of my bedside table, along with a couple of combs, my two sets of cuff links, and an old political button that said
bill clinton, the safe sax president but then it came up missing. And when the telephone rang a day or two later, I knew why Mrs. McCurdy was crying. It was the bad news I’d never quite stopped expecting; fun is fun and done is done.
When the funeral was over, and the wake, and the seemingly endless line of mourners had finally come to its end, I went back to the little house in Harlow where my mother had spent her final few years, smoking and eating powdered doughnuts. It had been Jean and Alan Parker against the world; now it was just me.
I went through her personal effects, putting aside the few papers that would have to be dealt with later, boxing up the things I’d want to keep on one side of the room and the things I’d want to give away to the Goodwill on the other. Near the end of the job I got down on my knees and looked under her bed and there it was, what I’d been looking for all along without quite admitting it to myself: a dusty button reading
i rode the bullet at thrill village, laconia. I curled my fist tight around it. The pin dug into my flesh and I squeezed my hand even tighter, taking a bitter pleasure in the pain. When I rolled my fingers open again, my eyes had filled with tears and the words on the button had doubled, overlaying each other in a shimmer. It was like looking at a 3- D movie without the glasses. Are you satisfied? I asked the silent room. Is it enough? There was no answer, of course. Why did you even bother? What was the goddamn point?
Still no answer, and why would there be? You wait in line, that’s all. You wait in line beneath the moon and make your wishes by its infected light. You wait in line and listen to them screaming they pay to be terrified, and on the Bullet they always get their money’s worth. Maybe when it’s your turn you ride; maybe you run. Either way it comes to the same, I think. There ought to be more to it, but there’s really not fun is fun and done is done.
Take your button and get out of here.
Stephen King is the author of more than thirty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. Among his most recent are Hearts in Atlantis, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Green Mile, and the audioonly release, Blood and Smoke. In August, Pocket Books will release the paperback edition of Hearts in Atlantis, followed by the October publication from Scribner of On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
Information about Stephen King and his writing can be found at the official King website: http://www.StephenKing.com