A Crime in the Neighborhood Read Online Free PDF Page B

if the force of his longing had begun to waste him away.
    What told my mother everything was not that my father had never looked at her like that. She knew the look, although she hadn’t seen it for some time. She knew where it came from, which was not from a fantasy experience but from the anticipation of a real one.
    Nixon waved from the Great Wall. Uncle Roger drank his beer. My mother rocked in the rocking chair. Finally she glanced at Ada. Ada was not looking at my father. She was examining her smooth fingernails, painted that night the moon color of pearls.
    I imagine my mother got through the rest of that February evening in the living room by paying careful attention to everything said on the news about Nixon’s visit to China. She leaned forward, her eyes fixed on the television screen as TV commentators speculated on how trade with China might alter domestic affairs. It became her passion for the next few weeks: Nixon’s visit to China and how the world had changed.
    The twins and I were also in the living room that evening, lying on the rug with our chins in our hands, watching the TV set, though I doubt we were paying much attention since wethought news happened to other people. In a moment, in a glance, life for us was changed forever, and we never saw a thing.
    â€œThis is history,” my mother said again and again that year as she read aloud articles from the
Post
or reported what she’d heard on the
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
. Governor Wallace shot in Laurel, half an hour from our house; the Watergate break-in; the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Olympic games. I hardly listened. “This is
history
,” she would insist, as though introducing me to someone I should already know.
    One night she tried a recipe for chicken croquettes that turned out to have too much salt. A week later the Chiltons, from next door, told us they were moving to Rhode Island and had sold their house to someone named Green. Julie failed a math test. A gutter fell off the side of the house. These incidents, too, struck my mother as historic. She noted them all with urgency. “What’s next?” she often said. “Could you please tell me what’s next?”
    It was only after my father left and Boyd Ellison was killed that I started to wonder myself what might happen next. Boyd Ellison’s family lived only two streets away, in a ’50s contemporary with a Japanese maple in the front yard. I passed it whenever I rode around the neighborhood on my bike. The Halloween before, I had knocked on his door, shouting “Trick or treat” when the door opened and a dark-haired woman looked out at me. The Halloween before that, Boyd had cometo our door dressed as a television set; he wore a cardboard box with real antennae tied to his head with yarn. I often saw him on the playground, although he went to a different school—a short blond boy with a square head who was always asking for things: a bite of your sandwich, a ride on your bike. He once asked to wear my glasses. He was irritating and pushy, sometimes a bully. He asked for things he knew you’d rather not give.
    Steven, although two years older, had once briefly been in Boyd’s Cub Scout troop. Boyd sat cross-legged in my own basement tying bowline knots and whittling soap cakes when the Scout troop met at our house one Sunday afternoon. He had asked for an extra brownie. He wanted a sip of my mother’s coffee. He cut his thumb with his pocketknife and came out of the bathroom with one of my mother’s fancy hand towels wrapped around his hand, wondering whether he could take the towel home.
    â€œNo,” my mother had said, more gently than I thought appropriate, and gave him a Band-Aid instead.
    Although it seems crazy, I find myself wondering if all that asking had something to do with what happened to him. I suppose I wondered that at the time, too. Somehow Boyd seems to have asked for