For One More Day

Chick stops the storm of exploding glass by squeezing his eyes shut. He notices that the sun is setting, and he begins to feel physically as well as emotionally uneasy: “shards of glass poked in my skin and I tried to brush them free, but even that seemed to require great effort. I was weakening, withering. This day with my mother was losing its light” (109). He is anxious to find out if he will die, or if he is already dead and has passed on to another world.

Now that he knows that his mother can visit those who think about her, they visit a series of other people in quick succession. Many of them are his mother’s former admirers, and he asks her why she didn’t get married again. She brushes away the question, saying she had her children, grandchildren, and friends to keep her happy.

They return to the family home, and she feeds him supper while he asks her about her family history. He is increasingly desperate to keep her around, as he begins to feel that she is fading from his life with the day: “unlike the stunned sensation I’d felt earlier in this room, now I was agitated, unnerved, as if I knew something bad was coming” (111).