For One More Day

Chick and his mother arrive at the house of her first client, Rose, an elderly woman who is hard of hearing. Rose mentions she heard a news report about a terrible car accident, and Chick is overcome with anxiety and guilt: “I scanned my mother’s face, expecting her to turn and demand my confession. Admit what you did, Charley” (60). Chick is almost surprised when he realizes they don’t know about his involvement in the accident.

When Chick was a teenager, his mother was fired from her nursing job because she had been sexually harassed by a doctor and had reported the incident. She later became a hairdresser, which led her to work with homebound women. When she was a nurse, she would often care for her patients’ appearance as much as their health, believing it helped them feel better and sped up the recovery process. His mother had loved being a nurse, and would often talk about her patients at home as if they were close friends.

Chick remembers that at fourteen his mother found out that he had been smoking. Chick had yelled at her for being a hypocrite - she is also a smoker - and criticized the fashionable, somewhat revealing clothing she’d worn to her new job. She slaps him, and he runs out of the house.

Posey and Rose discuss their friendship and their relationships with their children as Posey does Rose’s hair. Chick is filled with remorse for the way he treated his mother when he was a teenager, and notices with some surprise his mother’s pride in her work. Chick thinks of his own daughter, and wonders for the first time if his father’s actions might have indirectly shaped Chick’s relationship with his own child. A phone rings, and when he answers, a man’s voice is screaming Chick’s name, referring to the accident and asking to talk to him. Overwhelmed, Chick hangs up the phone without saying anything.

He remembers an instance, three years after his father left the family, when his sister wakes his mother up in the middle of the night, claiming she has heard a robber. His mother asks Chick for his baseball bat and goes downstairs to investigate. They hear noises and a man’s voice, and then their mother tells them that everything is all right. Chick understands that his father has come to the house and that his mother has forced him to leave. Chick resents her for this.

When Chick returns to the kitchen, where his mother and Rose are, he cannot explain who was on the phone, and quickly falls asleep. As he is drifting off, he remembers his mother teaching him to shave for the first time, a rite of passage that they both understand to be something his father would have done for him if he were there. He then remembers Halloween, when he was 16, when a neighbor woman’s friendly attitude disappears as soon as she finds out that they are Posey Benetto’s children, as the woman believes their mother is attempting to seduce her husband.

Rose shows them to the door after Chick’s mother finishes her hair and makeup. His mother suggests they eat lunch. Rose says that she had her hair and makeup done because it is a special occasion; she is going to see her husband. His mother tells Chick that Rose will die tonight; Posey seems happy and at peace with the fact that she is “helping her get ready” (74). The phrase, “going to see her husband” takes on new meaning for Chick.