After a while, Stern arose and said, "I can't listen to anybody any more. I've come home today with an ulcer." Stern's mother said, "I don't believe it." Stern said, "I've got one, all right. With a large crater. In two days I have to go to a rest place for it. It hurts right now." "That's what I needed," Stern's mother said, puffing at a cigarette. "I don't have enough. That's the perfect extra thing I need to carry." Stern's father, standing small and round-shouldered, shook his head gravely and said, "You've got to take care of yourself. That's what happens. I've told you that and I've told you that." Uncle Babe leaned forward, staring widely, and said, "I like a piece of fish on a night like this, but I don't like the way it smells." "I'm going to have a drink," said Stern's mother. "And I don't need any comments either. Do you know where I'd be if I wasn't able to take a little drink?" She swallowed some Scotch from a shot glass and said, "I don't have any reason to drink, do I? No reason in the world." "Maybe I'll just go upstairs and lie down," Stern said. "It hurts plenty inside me." "I'm not going to worry about it," Stern's mother said. "I can't kill myself. I've had disappointments in my life, too. Plenty of them. I could tell you plenty." "I am not interested in people's disappointments," Stern said. "My stomach hurts me." "All right, so I said something wrong," she said. "Look, darling, stay downstairs awhile. Maybe it'll make you feel better. Talk to your Uncle Babe. You love him. You know his head." "Maybe we could all use a little music in our systems," she said, instructing Stern's father to bring in a small accordion he carried in the trunk of his car. As a boy, Stern had sung at home to his father's accordion playing. His voice was not bad, and his mother had once taken him to a talent agent, who'd had Stern sing into his ear and then rejected him for poor head tones. But Stern's mother was rhapsodic over his voice, and now, as Stern's father played some warm-up trills, she sank into a chair and said, "Sing for me, darling. It'll make us all feel better." "I'm not singing anything," Stern said. "All right, don't sing for me, sing for your Uncle Babe," she said. "He's never heard your voice, and he's come all the way out here. He'll faint when he hears you." "Jesus," Stern said. "I'm thirty-four." But when his father played an old ballad, he began to come in with the words. "That voice," his mother said. "The same voice. I could die." When he reached the bridge of the song, Stern said, "I'm not doing any more of this. I told you about my stomach. Doesn't anybody realize my stomach hurts? I've got a goddamned ulcer. I have to go away to a home."