As the only one of the three Tischler brothers still in Kansas City, Martin naturally saw much more of their mother than Lewis or Jack did, and so he heard more about her happiness, more about her dinners at the city’s trendiest restaurants, her frequent excursions to Europe and Hong Kong, to Chicago and San Francisco and New York, her memberships at the Nelson Art Gallery and the Missouri Rep and the Symphony Guild than he really wanted to. She was his mother, and he wanted her to be happy (he’d watched some women his mother’s age who became professional widows after their husbands died, sitting shiva the rest of their lives), but he would have preferred her to be a bit less noisy about it all. His mother had been a quiet woman when her boys were young, at least that’s how he remembered her; she’d given way to her opinionated husband and her clamorous sons in the conversation department; but now, as she flitted about through her widowed eighties, cruising toward ninety, she’d begun to chatter incessantly, had taken up talking the way some women her age took up jogging or yoga, and in the process had become a crashing bore. She talked desperately, it seemed to Martin, as though silence might be the equivalent of death–as if she might croak the minute she shut up.
His younger brothers Lewis and Jack had fled Kansas City years ago, Lewis to New York to go to law school, Jack to Tucson, and from...
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