An Unmarried Father by Floyd Dell

WHEN Norman's mother had been there less than a week, he had settled down to a somewhat fretful but unprotesting acceptance of her presence. She had got him an efficient cleaning woman; she had sewed buttons on his shirts, and bought him a needed supply of socks and handkerchiefs. She waked him in the morning to the kind of breakfast he had always had at home. It was no use trying to regard her as a guest. She slipped easily into the familiar, authoritative, useful and neglected rôle of mother. When Charlie Beckett, at the office, suggested to Norman one day, as one bachelor to another, that they have dinner and go to a musical comedy together that evening, he called up his mother and said he wouldn't be home till late -- leaving her alone with no more thought than if he had been at home in Vickley.

(One incident may be lightly touched upon. Norman was not much of a drinking man, but in Charlie Beckett's genial company, at the place where Charlie took him to get some real old-fashioned beer after the show, he drank enough to become rather tearily and beerily confidential; though even then he presented his troubles in a somewhat fictional disguise. "M' wife ran away. Lef' me with a baby. Nice little kid, too! " -- something like that, and so unlike Norman in his sober senses that he preferred to forget it.)