A Crime in the Neighborhood Read Online Free PDF Page A

lower belly, ending in a grim bristle of hair.
    Was this what my father saw when he looked at her at night in their bedroom? I imagined my mother demanding that he touch it, touch her scar. He would be afraid; he would curl his fingers back at the last moment. And I guessed that this scar must be the root of their trouble, their fighting, their silence, that my mother’s body should have been perfect, as mine wasperfect. She put one hand on her hip, one on the doorjamb, and waited.
    â€œWhy look at you,” cried Aunt Fran. “Venus on the half shell.”
    My mother smiled blankly. The lenses of my glasses fogged up. I closed my eyes and counted twice to one hundred by tens. When I stopped counting, my mother had gone back into the bathroom.
    The very next night I was sitting on my mother’s bed with her and Aunt Claire, when my mother abruptly got up and flung open the bedroom closet where my father’s suits hung neatly on the rod. “I guess we should think about giving these old clothes away,” she said. Perhaps I imagined it, but the creak on the stairs seemed to be my father, shifting back down to the kitchen.
    â€œLo,” said Aunt Claire. “This isn’t the way to handle it.”
    â€œTell me another way,” said my mother, tightening her lips.
    By then she was already referring to my father in the past tense. “Larry used to like that show,” she might say if we were all in the living room trying to watch television.
    He would look up and lightly shudder.
    â€œLarry always ate his grapefruit after he finished his coffee,” she might tell my aunts at the breakfast table, “because if he had them together he said they left a moldy aftertaste.” Andthere my father would be, holding his coffee cup, his grapefruit untouched in front of him.
    Once she got going, she couldn’t stop. The fast put-down. The cruel, humorous revenge. Having the Mayhew Girls in the house inspired her.
    â€œIt can’t be sex she wants him for,” she said loudly to Aunt Fran on the last morning of my aunts’ visit, just as my father was leaving for his office. “That thing hasn’t had batteries for years.”
    The twins smirked nervously at each other.
    â€œLois.” Aunt Fran pointed her big chin at me over the cereal boxes.
    â€œOh, they don’t even know what sex is,” said my mother.
    â€œ
Lois
,” said Aunt Claire.
    But my mother had already added: “They’re his kids, after all.”
    And then from the doorway, my father said, “That’s
enough.
”
    We all looked up. He was standing in his dark blue overcoat, his hat in his hand lifted halfway to his head so that it looked as though he were doffing his hat to my mother. My note must still have been in the pocket of that coat; as soon as he put his hand in his pocket, he would feel it rustle against his fingers, slender as a fortune from a fortune cookie.
    As I recall that moment now, the pause thickens, grows greenish and dense; a shadow blows across the kitchen windows,darkening the room. From a street away, a dog begins to bark. In the flat chill of that morning, sound carries acutely; the dog could be barking in our own kitchen. Someone yells at the dog to shut up. The dog barks louder. My father continues to stand in the doorway, still in his attitude either of leave-taking or congratulation, or perhaps supplication, his hat cradled in his hand.
    The shadow blows past; sunlight washes back through the windows; the dog stops barking. My father stares at my mother, and she stares back.
    â€œThat’s enough,” he says.
    And in a reasonable, almost pleasant voice my mother says, “I agree.”

Three
    My father and Aunt Ada betrayed themselves with the sort of small, deliberate indiscretion people always seem to make when they have done something they’re ashamed of. My father had a birthmark the size of a plum on his right hip, just above his