The Silver Glove Read Online Free PDF

kinds of conversations we’d been having. They went like this:
    Mom: “I wish you wouldn’t spend so much time with this boy Lennie. You’re too young to be dating.”
    Me: “Who’s dating? We were just hanging out together, that’s all. What have you got against Lennie, anyway?”
    Mom: “He just seems a little, um, I don’t know, flaky to me. Dopey, even. You know. Slow .”
    Me: “He’s not. Anyway, it’s not exactly a heavy romance, Mom. We just happen to know each other from first grade, that’s all.”
    Mom: “First grade was a long time ago. I know all your friends are starting to be interested in boys, Valli, but I hate to see you get too involved with any one person so early.”
    Some of my friends were way past “starting,” but that wasn’t the kind of comment that helped.
    Me: “I thought you were worried about me being a ‘late bloomer.’ ” That was Mom’s approach whenever she thought I was spending too much time by myself, reading. “I thought you wanted me to learn ‘social skills.’ ”
    Mom: “‘Social’ means with lots of other people, not just this one boy.”
    Me: “What’s wrong with Lennie?”
    Mom: “For one thing, he’s got one continuous eyebrow. Don’t you find it hard to trust a person who has one continuous eyebrow?”
    This referred to the fact that Lennie’s eyebrows almost met over his nose. I happened to think that the slightly loopy, werewolfish look this gave him was one of Lennie’s more interesting features.
    Me, counterattacking: “That’s nothing compared to some people. Speaking of hair, what about that client of yours who wrote the book on horned toads? You could shave the backs of his hands and stuff a sofa with the cuttings.”
    My mom, being divorced and pretty and terrific, did some dating. Her glamorous though shaky new career as a literary agent had somehow led to an increase in this activity. “If this doesn’t work, I’d better have somebody on hand to marry,” she’d told me at least twice, only partly joking.
    It also led to her being more watchful and nervous about me. I had begun to wonder whether I was going to have to wait until I got divorced to do any real dating of my own.
    Mom: “Valli, don’t get offensive, please.”
    Me: “Well, what’s wrong with one continuous eyebrow?”
    Mom (after a brief pause): “When I was much younger and lived in Greenwich Village, there was a Turkish painter who was madly in love with me. He spent one evening chasing me around the kitchen table with a carving knife. And he had one eyebrow.”
    And so on.
    Now, compare and contrast the foregoing with what took place when my mom came home on the evening of the attack of The Killer Claw.
    â€œHi, sweetie,” she said. “Have you had dinner already?”
    â€œNope,” I said. “What about you?”
    She said vaguely, “Oh, I was talking  . . . walking  . . . window-shopping  . . . I forgot about food, to tell the truth.”
    She opened the fridge door and stood there casing the shelves and humming. You would never think that this person had a missing Gran on her mind, which was very weird. I began to feel anxious.
    â€œWindow-shopping?” I said. “I thought you were having a conference with, uh, with somebody from my school.” I could not, so help me, say his name.
    â€œThat’s right, darling,” she said.
    Trouble, trouble, trouble. When she calls me “darling,” she’s on some other plane of existence where men are gallant and kids are darlings and life’s a dream. This is kind of endearing in a grown person, but it’s also a pain in the neck as long as it lasts, which usually isn’t beyond the third date.
    â€œAs a matter of fact,” she said,