The Boy Read Online Free PDF Page A

of a good confession, someone from her yoga studio eager to discuss her back bends. It was going to take a lifetime just getting to the checkout line. Sighing, Anna went in.
    She charged head down through the aisles, making it to the refrigerated food section without a hitch. She descended like a bird of prey on the milk, pressed a carton of eggs to her chest, turned, mentally homed in on the shortest line to the nearest register, and there—doll-like, beautiful, eyes like fields of cannabis swaying gently in the wind—was Ree.
    “What are you doing here?” Ree asked.
    “I’m buying food.”
    “It’s a food store, Anna. What else would you be buying?”
    “I agree. What else would I be buying?”
    “I mean now, this early in the morning.”
    “I’m always in here this early in the morning.”
    “You are? How come I never see you?”
    “Because you’re always stoned.”
    “I’m stoned now and you’re in perfect focus.”
    “I don’t know, it’s a good question. You want to talk about it?”
    “Not really. Just tell me how you are.”
    A woman was advancing down the aisle with two children like ripe plums, like sweet candy in her cart, and Anna could not help a smile. Increasingly, children were becoming the only thing worth looking at. Like the silver veins of rivers and oceans, the raw flanks of mountains, they had the power to leave her mute.
    “How am I? Let’s see. I had this kid, this child, come on to me last night.”
    Behind a fog of dope, Ree’s eyes remained perfectly motionless.
    “Age of consent?”
    “Jesus, Ree.”
    “What do you mean, Jesus? You never know with these things, they creep up on you. Anyway. What was I saying?”
    “Age of consent.”
    “Right. How did you meet?”
    Her eyes on the children, Anna shook her head. “I don’t remember,” she said. “I don’t remember how we met.”
      
    It could only have been years before, when the boy had been too young to make an impression. She had a fairly sturdy recollection of the boy’s entirely unexpected acceptance into an Ivy League school because Richard wouldn’t shut up about the money.
    “I could buy a house, I could own real estate in Florida.”
    “Don’t send him.”
    “The room deposit? A thousand bucks.”
    “He doesn’t need to go.”
    “The textbooks? Two grand.”
    “Keep him home. Have him polish your shoes. It’s a dying art.”
    “Tuition? Don’t get me started on tuition.”
    “He could set up a stand at Grand Central Station.”
    “People live on that kind of money. They live on it.”
    “Or Penn Station. There’s always Penn Station.”
    He’d pushed her out the door with the excuse that his youngest son, Mickey, had tripped and hit his head. “I know, bud,” she heard him say as the door closed shut. “It’s that table. How about we get rid of that table? You and me, huh?”
    But that was all. That was all she could remember.
      
    Anna parked, crossed S. Street, feeling, as she did, the hard mineral aggregate of the high desert on her tongue and wondering for the millionth time why she, who loved water so much, had settled on such badly broken ground. There was a town in the state called No Agua. It wasn’t that far away.
    She inspected the row of names on the buzzer, pushed the one that said Dr. Roemer, climbed one flight of stairs to the waiting room, picked up a magazine, beheld a woman’s naked buttocks for a split second, then let her eyes drift to the window—to a tree shooting up like a tongue of silver fire against the unfiltered blue of the New Mexican sky. “Relax,” the boy had said with the authority conferred by zero obligations, zero deadlines, a handful of bonds—and then only of the lightest fabric.
    “I slept like shit,” she told Dr. Roemer before even sitting down. The doctor’s face was like a slab of stone.
    “You always sleep like shit.”
    “Which is my curse, my cross to bear, but last night was worse.”
    “Why was it worse?”
    “I met a