Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall Read Online Free PDF Page B

that revealing. I don’t think it could have been a revelation at all. More of a confirmation maybe. Like when you see a documentary on TV and you find out kangaroos have no backbones or something. That sort of thing.
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    When the kid came home for the first time, the grandparents said, “Is he warm enough? What are those spots on his face?” The grandfather put his face very close to the baby’s face and looked at the spots.
    Pretty soon the mother and the father got in their car and took the baby home. The father mentioned that the baby had no eyebrows. The mother said she thought the baby was an elf, because he had soft fuzz all over his ears. At night, they put rubbing alcohol on the baby’s navel. All of this happened in June, and the summer was another hot one.
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    Tutti went downstairs and put some clothes in the dryer. I was in the kitchen. I could see a guy in a white shirt standing out in the road, looking at various units in the condominium complex. He walked up and down the street, looking at various units in the complex. He stopped in front of our unit and looked at our unit for a while. Someone, somewhere, had their stereo going and I could hear the bass and drums. I was thinking it would be nice, for once, to be able to buy the ten-pound bag of apples and not have half of them shrivel up and rot before we got a chance to eat them.

I THINK we have reached a turning point with Sammy. He is starting to hear the sadness in everything that happens. Last night he had a tantrum because I brought him a Kleenex. This was deep into the night. I was tired. I couldn’t see what the big deal was. It scared me.
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    Do you know what it’s like to sleep with another boy? With Rita, that’s what I thought. I thought, This is my chance to sleep with a boy without actually having to sleep with a boy , and all the kinds of things you have to listen to people say when you’re sleeping with boys.
    What I am saying is, now that she’s gone, this is when I start thinking this thing about boys, about sleeping with boys.
    I’ll tell you something, though. If you could have heard her talk. If you could have heard her talk through her cigarette that way. She would point her eyes down at the cigarette just long enough to get the thing lit. Then she would point her eyes up at me, and she would talk to me through her cigarette.
    When she talked, her cigarette bounced.
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    The guy from the Neighborhood Watch comes to the community center and we all go over there and sit in the meeting room and listen to him talk about how to prevent crime. He shows us some things you can only get from a locksmith. Long striker plates, with silver screws designed to be driven deep into your door frame. He tells us if we don’t put the right type of deadbolt on our doors, we might as well leave our doors unlocked.
    The meeting room has the smell of a classroom. The smell of years of children being frightened into submission.
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    I had the book in my hand. I took it across the darkness of the bar. Twice I almost dropped it. The second time I thought, Why am I living this way?
    I took the book and handed it to an old man and said, “Maybe you want to read this.”
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    You couldn’t put a quarter into a video game in Athens. You would have to use some form of Greek currency. After that, the differences stop, and you encounter things that give us a common existence on this planet. Most involve frightening premonitions of sudden death.
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    Sometimes I can’t tell my wife, my mother-in-law, and my sister-in-law apart. They all have the same eyes.
    I sit in that chair my in-laws had reupholstered a couple of years ago, because the cat had ripped the stuffing out. Now, whenever the cat goes to scratch the chair, my mother-in-law runs over and tries to hit it.
    My father-in-law, Jack, mutters, “Goddam cat.”
    It was my sister-in-law, Coco, who brought the cat home, about seven years ago. Jack said he didn’t want a goddam