ean tossed his garment bag on the floor of his old bedroom and sat down on the end of the bed.

Everything was exactly as he'd left it. Dusty baseball and soccer trophies cluttered the bureau's top; posters covered the cream-colored walls, their edges yellowed and curled. If he opened the toy chest, he’d find all the mementos of his past, G.I. Joe with the kung-fu grip, Rock 'Em-Sock 'Em Robots, maybe even his old Erector set. An autographed GO SEAHAWKS pennant hung above the desk, a reminder of the year Jim Zorn had visited the grade school.

Dean hadn't taken anything with him when he left here, not even a photograph of Ruby. Especially not a picture of her. He got to his feet and crossed the room. At the bureau, he bent down and pulled at the bottom drawer; it screeched and wobbled, then slid open.

And there they were, still stacked and scattered exactly as he'd left them: reminders of Ruby. There framed pictures and unframed ones, shells they'd collected together on the beach, and a couple of dried boutonnieres. He reached randomly inside, drawing out a small strip of black-and-white pictures-a series that had been taken in one of those booths at the Island County Fair. In them, she was sitting on Dean's lap, with her arms curled tightly around him and her head angled against his. She was smiling, then frowning, then sticking her tongue out at the unseen camera. In the last frame, they were kissing.

It was bad enough to remember Ruby in the abstract; to follow this photographic trail of their childhood would be like swallowing glass bits. They'd started together as kids, he and Ruby, kindergarten best friends. Then they'd fallen into the sweet, aching pool of first love, and ultimately washed up on that emotion's rocky, isolated shore. He remembered the ending, and that was enough.

He dropped the photos back into the drawer and kicked it shut.

Someone knocked at the door, and Dean opened it.

Lottie stood there, clutching her big vinyl purse. "I'm off to the store," she said. "The fridge isn't making ice; we need a bag."

"I'll go-"

"Of course you won't. You'll be needing time with Eric." Smiling, she thrust a champagne glass at him. Inside was a thick pink liquid. "This is your brother's medicine. He needs it now. Bye."

She left him standing there, a grown man in a boy's room, holding pain medication in a fluted champagne glass.

He walked slowly to Eric's bedroom. The door was closed.

Dean stared at it for a long time, remembering the days when these doors had never been closed. They'd always come bursting into each other's room whenever they wanted.

He turned the knob and went inside. The room felt stuffy and too warm. The curtains were drawn. Eric was asleep.

Dean moved quietly toward the bedside table and set down the glass, then he started to leave.

"I hope that's my Viagra," Eric said sleepily. In a second, the bed whirred to life, eased him to a near sitting position.

"Actually, it's a double shot of Cuervo Gold. I added the Pepto-Bismol to save you time."

Eric laughed. "You'll never let me forget MaryAnne's going-away party."

"A night that will live in infamy." Dean opened the windows and flung back the curtains. The windows boxed a gray and rainy day and let a little watery light into the room.

"Thanks. Bless Lottie, but she thinks I need peace and quiet. I haven't the nerve to tell her that I'm getting a little scared of the dark. Too damn coffinlike for me." He grinned. "I'll be there soon enough."

Dean turned to him. "Don't talk about that."

"Death? Why not? I am dying, and I'm not afraid of it. Hell, another week like this one and I'll be looking forward to it." He gave Dean a gentle look. "What am I supposed to talk about-the Mariners" next season? The next Olympic Games? Or maybe we could discuss the long-term effects of global warming." Eric eased back into the pillows with a heavy sigh. "We used to be so close," he said quietly.

"I know," Dean answered, moving toward the bed. He saw Eric move, try to turn slightly to look up at him; he saw, too, when the sudden pain sucked the color from his brother's cheeks. "Here," Dean said quickly.

Eric's hands were shaking as he reached for the glass and brought it back to his colorless lips. Wincing, he swallowed the whole amount, then wiped his mouth with the back of his bony wrist.

Eric tried to smile. "I'd kill for a margarita from Ray's Boathouse right about now... and a platter of Penn Cove mussels... "

"Tequila and shellfish-with your tolerance for booze? Sorry, pal, but I'll have to pass on that little fantasy."

"I'm not seventeen anymore," Eric said. "I don't slam alcohol until I puke."

There it was, the sharpened reminder of how they'd drifted apart. They'd known each other as boys; the men were strangers to each other.

"Will that medication help?" Dean asked.

"Sure. In ten minutes I'll be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound." Eric frowned. "What is a single bound, exactly? And why have I never wondered about that before?"

"Whatever it is, it's better than flying. Even first class has gone to hell. My flight up here was godawful."

Eric smiled. "Even first class is bad? You're talking to a high-school English teacher who was disinherited, remember?"

"Sorry. I was just trying to make conversation."

"Don't. I'm dying. I don't need time-filler. Jesus, Dean, you and I have spent our whole adulthood talking around anything that mattered. I know it's genetic, but I don't have time for it anymore."

"If you remind me that you're dying again, I swear to God, I'll kill you myself. It's not like I'm going to forget."

Eric laughed. "Praise Jesus! That's the first hint of my brother I've seen in a decade. I'm glad to know he survived."

Dean relaxed a little. "It's good to hear you laugh It's been a long time." He moved idly to the chest of drawers beside the bed, where a collection of pictures sat clustered together. Most of them were photographs of Dean and Eric as boys.

But there was one-a shot of the brothers and another boy from the football team--all standing with their arms around one another, grinning.

It looked ordinary enough, but when he turned back to Eric, Dean couldn't help wondering. Had it been there all along, the difference between him and his brother? Had Dean simply missed the obvious?

"I wish I'd never told you I was gay," Eric said.

It was as if Eric had read his mind. Slowly, Dean turned. He wasn't ready for this conversation yet, but he had no choice. Eric had thrown him into cold water, now he had to swim. "It's kind of hard to keep a secret like that when you're living with a man."

"People do it all the time, keep that secret, I mean. I was so naive, I to tell you." Eric lifted his head off the pillows and stared at Dean. "I knew our folks wouldn't accept it. But you..." His voice cracked a little. "You, I didn't expect. You broke my heart."

"I never meant to."

"You stopped calling me."

Dean sighed, wondering how to say it all. "You were away at college, so you didn't know what it was like back here. The technicolor meltdown of the Bridge family. It was front-burner news. And then... Ruby and I broke up."

"I always wondered what happened between you two. I thought-"

"It was fucking awful," Dean said quickly, unwilling to delve into that particular heartache. "I called Mother and demanded to be transferred to Choate-where, I might add, I met a bunch of snotty elitist rich kids. I hated it there. I couldn't seem to make friends. But every Sunday night, my brother called, and that one hour made the rest of the week bearable. You weren't just my best friend, you were my only friend. Then one Sunday, you forgot to call." Dean remembered how he'd waited by the phone that day, and the next Sunday and the next. "When you finally did call again, you told me about Charlie."

"You felt abandoned," Eric said softly.

"More than that. I felt like I didn't know you at all, like everything you'd ever said to me was a lie. And then all you wanted to talk about was Charlie." Dean shrugged. "I was seventeen years old and nursing a broken heart. I didn't want to hear about your love life. And yeah, the fact that it was with another man was hard for me to handle."

Eric leaned deeper into the pillows. "When you stopped returning my calls, I assumed it was because you hated me. Then you went to work for the family biz, and I wrote you off. I never thought about what it was like for you. I'm sorry."

"Yeah. I'm sorry, too."

"Where do these apologies take us?"

"Who the hell knows? I'm here. Isn't that enough?"

“No.”

Suddenly Dean understood what Eric wanted. "You want me to remember who we used to be, to remember you, and then... watch you die. It doesn't sound like a real kick-ass plan from where I'm standing."

Eric reached up, placed a cold, trembling hand on top of Dean's. "I want someone in my family to love me while I'm alive. Is that so much to ask?" He closed his eyes, as if the conversation had exhausted him. "Ah, Hell... I'm going too fast. I need time damn it. Just stay here until I fall asleep, can you do that for me?"

Dean's throat felt tight. "Sure." He stayed at his brother's bedside until long after Eric's breathing had become regular and his mouth had slipped open. And still he didn't know what to say.

He would have given his fortune--hell, he'd have given everything he had or owned or could borrow--in exchange for the one thing he'd always taken for granted. The one thing Eric needed.

Time.

By the time Nora hopped to the bathroom and back into the bedroom, she was dizzy and out of breath. She shifted onto the bed and leaned back against the wobbly wooden headboard.

She knew she needed to handle Ruby with kid gloves, to treat her daughter's pain (which Nora never that she had caused) respectfully, to let Ruby make all the first moves toward a reconciliation. No matter how much it hurt, how deeply the ache went, Nora didn't want to bulldoze the situation.

But Ruby had always brought out the worst in her. Even in the good times, her younger daughter had had a way of saying things that rubbed Nora the wrong way. More often than not, they both ended up saying something they regretted.

And Ruby knew that every coldly spoken "Nora" would break her heart just a little. It was, she knew, Ruby's way of reminding Nora that they were strangers.

You have to keep your cool.

And for God's sake, don't tell her what to do... or pretend you know her.

If they'd gone somewhere else, maybe this would have been easier, but nothing new could grow here, not in this soil contaminated by the past.

It was in this house that Nora had made her biggest mistake--and given the life she'd led, that was saying a lot. This was where she'd come when she left Rand. She had meant for it to be temporary. At the time she'd simply thought: Space; if I don't get some space I’ll start screaming and never stop.

All she'd wanted was a little room, some time to herself. She'd been overwhelmed by her life. A twenty-minute ferry ride had seemed perfect. She hadn't known that two miles could stretch into more than a decade.

She remembered that whole summer, and the bad years that had preceded it, in excruciating detail.

She remembered how it had felt and tasted, that slowly descending depression, like a thick glass jar that closed around you, sucking away the air you needed to breathe, creating a barrier between you and the world. The hell of it was that she'd been able to see all that she was missing, but when she'd reached out, all she touched was cold, hard glass.

It had started with a few dark days, a few nightmares, but as the winter had turned into spring, and then into summer, she had simply... fallen. All these years later, she'd never found a better word for it. She'd felt then-as she did now-as brittle as a winter leaf. It had always taken so damned little to break her.

If she hadn't left Rand then, she believed she would have died. Her pain had been that great. Still...

She'd thought she could come home again, that women were granted the same latitude in marriage that men were. How naive she had been.

She reached for the bedside phone and picked it up, thankful to find a dial tone. She wouldn't have expected any less from Caroline.

She dialed Eric's number, but no one answered. He was probably exhausted from the trip. He tired so easily these days.

She didn't want to think about that now, about how the cancer was erasing him. If she thought about that now she'd fall apart, and with Ruby on the other side of that door, Nora didn't dare fall apart.

She dialed another number. Dr. Allbright answered on the second ring. There was a moment of silence at the other end, the sound of a match flaring. "Hello?"

"Hi, Leo. It's me, Nora."

He inhaled, blew the smoke from his cigarette into the phone. It came through in a whooshing sound. "How are you?"

"I'm fine," she said, wondering if he could hear the lies in the same way that he could see them on her face. "You asked me to call when we arrived, so..."

"You don't sound fine."

"Well... Ruby and I are crowded in with a lot of old ghosts." She tried to laugh. "This house...”

"I don't think you should be there. We talked about this. With all that's happening, you should be in the city."

It was nice to have someone care about her--even if she paid him to do so. "And let the vultures pick at me?" She smiled ruefully. "Of course, it appears to be open season on Nora Bridge wherever I go."

"Ruby," he said.

"I knew it wouldn't be easy." That much was true, at least. She'd known how much it would hurt to see her daughter's bitterness in such sharp, close detail; and it did.

"We talked about this, Nora. If she hates you, it's because she was too young to understand."

"I'm fifty, Leo, and I don't understand it all."

"You owe it to yourself-and to Ruby-to tell her the truth."

She sighed wearily. The thought of opening herself like a rotting flower to her beloved daughter was more than she could bear. "I just want to see her smile at me. That's all. Just once and I could carry that image forever. I don't expect her to like me... let alone love me."

"Ah, Nora," he said, and she heard the familiar disappointment in his tone.

"You ask too much of me, Leo."

"And you ask too little, Nora. You're so afraid of your past that-"

"Tell me something useful, Leo. You're a parent, give me some advice."

"Talk to her."

"About what? How do we get past what happened eleven years ago?"

"One step at a time, that's how. Try this: tell her one personal thing about you every day. Just one, and try to find out one thing about her. That would be a start."

"One personal thing." Nora considered it.

Yes, she could do that. She'd just have to find a way to share one honest moment, a day with her daughter. It wasn't much, and it wouldn't change everything, but it felt... possible. For now, that was all she could hope for.

Ruby strode through the house, going from window to window, yanking the gingham cotton curtains open, letting what little sunlight was possible into every room. By now it was nearly three o'clock. Soon there would be no daylight through the clouds at all. She wanted to catch what she could.

She was desperately tired all of a sudden. The middle-of-the-night phone call, the predawn flight, the drive to the islands... suddenly it all caught up with her and sapped her strength. If she wasn't careful, she could lose a fight with her own emotions and start crying at the sight of this old house.

At last, she found herself in the kitchen/dining room. Nothing had changed.

A round maple table sat tucked beneath the kitchen window, its four ladder-back chairs pulled in close. A centerpiece of dirty pink plastic dahlias was flanked by a set of porcelain salt and pepper shakers shaped like tiny lighthouses. A cookbook was in its rack on the kitchen counter, its pages open to a recipe for lemon squares. Four hand-embroidered dishcloths hung in a row across the front of the oven.

She passed beneath the archway that separated the kitchen from the living room, noticing the brass mariners clock that hung in the center of the arch's plaster curl. That clock was silent now, its chimes-two quick ding-dings every half hour-had been a constant punctuation to their family's noisy soundtrack. But it had probably been years since anyone had remembered to change the batteries.

In the living room, an overstuffed sofa and two leather chairs faced a big, river-rock fireplace. On the back wall were bookcases filled with two generations' worth of Reader's Digest editions, and an RCA stereo. A red plastic milk box held all of the family's favorite albums. From here, Ruby could see the upper half of the top album: "Venus" by Bananarama.

That one was hers.

Next, the photographs on the mantel caught her eye. They were different frames than she remembered. Frowning, she walked toward the fireplace.

All the pictures were of Caroline's children.

There was not a single shot of Ruby. Not even one of Ruby and Caroline.

"Nice, Caro," she said, turning away. She headed for the stairs, but as she walked up the creaking narrow steps to the second floor she felt... forgotten

Her fingers trailed through the dust on the oak banister, leaving two squiggly lines. The second floor was small, barely big enough for a full-size bedroom. The bathroom-added by Grandpa Bridge in the early 1970"s--had once been a closet. It was barely big to bend over at the sink to brush your teeth. Ugly, avocado-green shag carpeting covered every inch of the floor.

She pushed the door open to her parents' old bedroom and flicked the light switch.

A big brass bed filled the room, flanked by two French Provincial end tables. The bedside lamps were yellow, their green shades draped in golden plastic beads.

i her grandmother had often said, and with that unexpected memory, Ruby remembered her grandma, sitting in that corner rocker, her veiny hands making knitting needles work like pistons. You can never have too many afghans, she'd said every time she started a new one. There had always been an Elvis album playing on the turntable when Grandma knitted...

It had been a long time since she'd had so clear a memory of her Nana.

Maybe all she'd needed to remember the good times was to see this place again. The room was exactly as Nana had made it; Nora had never bothered to redecorate. When Nana and Pop had died, Dad had moved their family into the bigger house on Lopez Island, and left this house for summer use.

Ruby crossed the room and went to the French doors, opening them wide. Sweet, rain-scented air made the lacy curtains tremble and dance. The bloated gray sky and steel-blue water were perfectly framed by twin Douglas firs, as thin and straight as pipe cleaners.

She stepped out onto the tiny second-floor balcony. A pair of white deck chairs sat on either side of her, their slatted backs beaded with rain.

For a split second, she couldn't imagine that she'd ever lived in a valley so hot and airless that boiling water sometimes squirted out of ordinary green garden hoses.

She backed off the balcony and turned into the room. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the new photographs on the bedside table.

"God damn it," she muttered, looking through them.

Caroline had done it again. They were all pictures of Caroline's new life. It was as if her sister were trying to exorcise Ruby from the family.

Frowning, she marched back downstairs and went outside. She grabbed their two suitcases from the car and carried them inside, dropping her mother's in front of the closed bedroom door.

Upstairs, she opened the closet's louvered doors, then yanked down on the beaded light chain. A bare light bulb in the ceiling came on in the empty closet.

She tossed her suitcase inside. It hit a cardboard box, rattling it.

She knelt onto the dusty shag carpet and pulled the box toward her. In bold, black marker pen, someone had written BEFORE across the top flap.

Ruby opened the box... and found herself.

Photographs. Dozens of them. These were the pictures that used to sit on every flat surface in house--tables, mantels, windowsills.

Pictures of two little girls in matching pink dresses... of Dean and Eric in Little League uniforms... of Dad waving from the stern of the Captain Hook. And one of Nora.

She slowly withdrew that one.

This was the mother she'd forgotten, the woman she'd grieved for. A tall, thin woman, with auburn hair cut in the layered Farrah Fawcett style, wearing crisp white walking shorts and a celery-green T-shirt. The photograph was old and creased, but even the maplike fissures couldn't dim her mother's smile. In the background was the peaked white tip of the Matterhorn.

Their trip to Disneyland.

In a bittersweet rush, Ruby remembered all of that day; the screams of older kids on scarier rides, the sudden, plunging darkness of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, the rollicking music of Country Bear Jamboree, the sugary residue of cheerios, eaten while you walked, the magic of the Electrical Light Parade. Ruby had watched it from the best seat in the house--on her daddy's shoulders.

And she understood what Caroline had done. Caro, who couldn't stand conflict or confrontation... Caro, who just wanted everything to be normal.

It had hurt her sister to look back on these years.

Better to simply... go on. Start over. Pretend that there had never been happy summers spent on these shores, in these rooms.

Ruby released her breath in a heavy sigh and boxed the photographs back up. Her sister was right. It was too damned hard to see the past in Kodachrome.

God... she'd already lost her equilibrium in this house, and it had only been a day. Suddenly she was wound tightly, full of nervous energy. She had to get back on track. Remember why she was here.

The magazine article. That would keep her focused.

She unzipped the side pocket of her suitcase and withdrew a yellow legal pad and a blue pen. Then she crawled up onto the dusty bed, drew her knees in...... and stared down at all those blue lines.

We want your thoughts, your memories, what kind Of mother you thought she was.

"Okay, Ruby," she said aloud. "Just start. You can always change the beginning later."

It was the first rule of comedy writing; it should work here, too.

She took a deep breath, released it slowly, and wrote the first thing that came to mind.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must tell you (she decided to talk directly to the Cache' readers) that I was paid to write this article. Paid handsomely, as they say in the kind of restaurants where a person like me can't afford to order a dinner salad. Enough so that I could trade in my beat-up Volkswagen Bug for a slightly less beat-up Porsche.

I should also tell you that I dislike my mother. 132 No, that's not true. I dislike the snotty salesclerk who works the night shift at my local video store.

I hate my mother.

That seems like a pretty harsh statement, I know. We're taught in childhood not to use the word "hate" because it represents a blight on our own soul, perhaps even a karmic misalignment. But silencing a word doesn't eliminate its meaning.

It's not like I hate her for no reason, or even for a stupid, petty reason. She's earned my contempt. To explain, I have to open the door to my mother's and my life, and welcome you in as friends.

The story of us starts eleven years ago, in a place few of you have ever seen: the San Juan Islands up in Washington State. I grew up in a small farmhouse on a patch of land that had been homesteaded by my great-grandfather. The island.. the to.... my house... they all belong on Hallmark cards. I went to school with the same kids for thirteen years; the only crime I can recall happened in 1979, when Jimmy Smithson broke into the local pharmacy, ripped open all the condom packages, and wrote "Peggy Jean likes sex" in Dial soap on the front window.

And then there was my family.

My dad was-is-a commercial fisherman who repairs boat engines in the winter months to make ends meet. He was born and raised on Lopez Island; he is as fixed in that place as one of the ancient trees that line the main road.

Although my mother was born off-island, she was a local by the time I came along. She volunteered for every town charity event and was a fixture around school.

In other words, we were a perfect family in a quiet little town where nothing ever happened. In all my growing-up years, I never heard my parents argue.

Then, in the summer before my seventeenth birthday, everything changed.

My mother left us. Walked out the door, got into her car and drove away. She didn't call or write all that summer, she just... vanished.

I can't remember now how long I waited for her to return, but I know that somewhere along the way, in the pool of a thousand tears, she became my Mother, and then, finally, Nora. My mom was gone. I accepted the fact that whatever she wanted out of life, it wasn't me.

I could describe what it was like, the waiting, but I won't. Not even for the money. The worst of it was my father. For my last two years of high school,

I watched him... disintegrate. He drank, he sat in his darkened bedroom, he wept.

And so, when Cache came to me, asking for my story, I said yes. Hell yes.

I figured it was time that America knew who they were listening to, who was giving them moral advice.

Like the rest of you, I heard her message stream over the airwaves: Commit to your family and make it work. Be honest. Hold fast to the vows you made before God.

This from a woman who walked out on her marriage and abandoned her children, and –

"Ruby!"

She tossed down the pen and paper and went to the doorway, poking her head out. "Yeah?"

"Can you breathe okay, with all this dust?" Ruby rolled her eyes. As always, her mother was as subtle as an exclamation mark. "I see you found enough air in your lungs to scream at me," she muttered, hurrying downstairs.

As she passed her mother's bedroom, she heard a sneeze.

Ruby smiled; she couldn't help it.

In the kitchen, she knelt in front of the cabinet beneath the sink and opened the doors. Everything she needed to clean the house, and in quantities large enough to clean any house, stood in four straight rows. When she realized that the supplies were organized in alphabetical order, she burst out laughing.

"Poor Caro," she whispered, realizing how badly her sister wanted everything to be tidy. "You were definitely born into the wrong family."

Then, as tired as she was, she started to clean.