The Best Thing for You Read Online Free PDF Page B

doesn’t smile. “I was thinking, why don’t we all watch a movie together tonight? So he knows he’s not alone and we love him.”
    “He knows,” Liam turns back to his notebook.
    I touch his shoulder but he shrugs away.
    Ty’s waiting in the car. At first he doesn’t want to talk, but after a while he pops back into his old self, maybe a little speeded up. He tells me funny stories about people in other cars and on the sidewalk, what their names are and where they’re going and how they decided what they were going to wear today. It’s a game he’s learned from Liam, who talked just like this – nervous, compulsively funny, painfully afraid of silence – on our first date. “That’s Edgar,” Ty says, nodding at the man in the Lexus next to us at the intersection. “Edgar is eagerly awaiting his mailorder salad spinner to distract him from his marriage.”
    “What’s wrong with his marriage?” I zip closed all the windows and put on the air conditioning as a dump truck pulls in front of us.
    “Ass,” Ty says to the dump truck. I give him a look. “Ass means donkey. It was in
Julius Caesar.
”
    “What’s wrong with his marriage?”
    “His wife is Isis, who is, like, goddess of cats. She’s right over there.” But I’m taking the dump truck and can’t look. “Way to kill us, Mom,” he says, as I scoop around three cars to catch a left on yellow. Someone honks.
    “It was yellow!” I say.
    “Park close to the doors, like Dad does.” We’re in the mall parking lot now and I join the cruisers. It’s packed. Suddenly Ty wrestles out of his seat belt. “You can let me out here and meet me inside.” I power-lock the doors. “Dictator,” he says. I park in the back lot behind the food court and delivery bays, the mall’s rear end, where the air smells of french fries and garbage, and seagulls pick along the curb. Ty groans.
    “You have leg problems?”
    “Dad always parks by the doors.”
    “That’s part of what makes Dad, Dad,” I say. “I’m Mom.”
    Clearview Mall tries for festive. At the entrance, a girl on Rollerblades hands us coupons. From the height of her blades she is haughty, freckled. “Hi,” Ty says reflexively, stuffing the coupon in his pocket. When she ignores him, he blushes. Inside are streamers and roaming clowns with whistles. There’s a lineup at the frozen yogurt place.
    “Just a minute,” I tell him, but he ignores me. “Ty, what flavour?” I have to raise my voice, he’s moved away.
    “Not for me,” he calls over his shoulder.
    “Strawberry,” I tell the girl.
    “Cone or cup?”
    I’ve lost Ty. One hand on the counter to keep my place in line, I’m on my toes trying to see his head amongst the heads. What’s he doing? “Cup, cup, cup,” I say.
    After that, she’s slow on purpose. Looking at her, I can’t imagine having a daughter like her, sly-smart to Ty’s dumb-smart,cat to his dog. Her hair is French-braided and clipped with little glitter butterflies, but she’s done her eyes with fuck-me black eyeliner and her mouth looks delicately cruel. Still, paying for my cup of pink, when I inadvertently touch her hand she flinches and I think: there’s someone trapped in there.
    “Enjoy your yogurt,” she says.
    Following Ty, I pass a toy store, a joke underwear store, a Gap, and a Dream Jeans. The Gap slows me down – they’re doing those fall harvest colours I like, they’re playing the Clash – but then I see my son standing with some other boys, up between Sam’s and the Nike store, so I take my yogurt to a bench to wait him out. I cozy up to the fake palm so I can watch through the fronds without embarrassing him in front of his peers. Every now and then I glance into Dream Jeans like into a tropical fish tank – blond Asian kids in platforms and stripy Wicked Witch of the East socks with skateboards and Tweetie Bird knapsacks – and then back to Ty. The boys with him are tall strangers to me, in enormous jeans with loops of