City of Boys Read Online Free PDF Page A

eyes, but waits a beat before she turns to look at him.
    —Who’s your friend? he asks, and I realize I have not told her my name. She stares at me for a moment.
    —Anne, she says. —This is Anne.
    —Well, Anne, the man says, and he leans over the table to hold out his hand. —It’s very nice to meet you. His skin is cool and dry, and I let go of his hand quickly.
    Annie mashes her ice cream into soup and her father stands back. He watches us for a few moments, looping and unlooping the ties of his robe as Annie brings her spoon to her mouth and sucks in her ice cream.
    —That ice cream looks pretty good, he says; he watches her eat a moment longer, then turns and leaves.
    Annie glances at my ice cream, takes her bowl to the sink, and pours out what’s left. Then she goes to the front door and stands by it, not looking at me, but not looking at anything else. I’m not finished with my ice cream, but I rise with my bowl.
    —Oh, she says, —you can leave that. Tommy will eat it. She closes the screen door behind me, and when I turn to look back from the street, she’s still standing there, her face and neck and head outlined by the dark room behind her.
    The Pepsi is warm when I get home, but by now my mother’s hangover is gone and she is bent over the crossword puzzle. When she rattles the ice in her empty glass, my father rises to take it from her. Tomato juice runs unevenly down the sides.
    —Sally, my mother says, —we were worried about you.
    —Here’s your Pepsi, I say, and hold it out to her.
    —You drink it, honey, she says. —I don’t need it anymore. She touches the tip of her pen to her lip and leaves a tiny black dot when she takes it away. —What’s a five-letter word for horse race? she asks my father, and he stops putting ice in her glass and stands still to think. Smoke from the freezer drifts past him and his face is perfectly blank. Finally he shakes his head and drops the ice into her glass, then pours in tomato juice, which turns pale pink as he adds vodka.
    I pop open my mother’s Pepsi and sit at the table with my parents. My mother stares at the puzzle, occasionally writing in a word, and my father rattles through the paper, scanning each page for important stories. He sets each section of the paper onto one of two piles: those with important stories he will have to go back and read, and those without. He looks up and down each page with a kind of desperation, hoping that nothing will require a closer look, so that this part of his day will be over. The Pepsi is too warm and too sweet, but I drink it from the can and watch my mother take an ice cube from her glass and hold it to her forehead.
    —Christ, she says. —They
would
send you someplace hot. My father looks up from his paper and watches ice melt ont my mother’s puzzle.
    —Damn, she says, and blots up a drop that has fallen onto the paper, blurring the word she’s just written in.
    —It’s got a good paper, though, my father says. —You have to give it that.
    She says nothing and runs the ice cube down over her face and throat. My father watches the drops of water slip down the fine bones of her chest into her shirt; then he looks away and rises to make another drink.
    —Honey, my mother says, —aren’t you bored? Why don’t you watch some television?
    Like our neighbors and our houses, our streets and our trees, television changes hardly at all from place to place, and the same shows and songs and faces accompany us around the country. I watch a movie I have seen in two other states, and through the window I can see Annie’s house. I imagine her going back to the room she shares with her brother and sitting on the edge of the bed, watching him read his comics. I can’t think what else she might do in that house, unless she sits on the big stiff couch in the shadows of the living room.
    In the kitchen, my father finishes sorting the paper, sighs, and turns to the large pile full of articles he must now read;